Manitoba’s top health official has said the increased number of COVID-19 cases in the province is beginning to strain the province’s health care system.
The often stoic Manitoba chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin sounded exasperated during the province’s Oct. 26 briefing, detailing how cases have built up in Manitoba in recent weeks, often through social gatherings.
The province announced another 100 cases of COVID-19 OCt. 26, 73 of which were in Winnipeg. Restrictions are now in effect for Winnipeg and for northern Manitoba. Manitoba now has the most per-capita cases of any Canadian province.
One more person, a woman in her 80s, has died from COVID-19. The woman was tied to the ongoing outbreak at Winnipeg-area seniors’ facility Parkview Place. Eighty people are hospitalized with COVID-19 province-wide, with 15 people in intensive care due to COVID-19.
Out of every 100 COVID-19 tests in Manitoba over the past five days, 7.1 per cent of them have came back positive. Since the pandemic began, 4,329 Manitobans have tested positive for COVID-19 - 2,117 of those people are still sick.
Roussin said COVID-19 has reached a point where it is beginning to take a toll on the province’s health care system.
“We let the virus off the hook. We know exactly how this virus is spread. We’re in a pandemic. We have to expect to see cases. We can’t avoid that. We’re going to see cases.”
“What we shouldn’t expect or shouldn’t accept is people with 50 contacts, people going to work when they’re ill or people who aren’t forthcoming with health care providers - this is what leads to the numbers we’re seeing now… We definitely need to, as a population, change how we’re acting right now.”
Roussin added that people needed to reduce the number of contacts people have outside the household.
“Our big message to Manitobans is that we need to reduce the number of contacts we have outside of our household. All these restrictions are really out there to change the way people are socializing. We need to keep the number of cases low and that keeps our ability for people to go to work, go to school, it protects our most vulnerable citizens. It also reduces the impact on our health care systems,” he said.
“We look at, from last Sunday, Oct.18 to this Sunday, we announced 14 deaths. Fourteen Manitobans. We also announced 831 cases - 831 cases in a single week. On this trajectory, we expect to have more than 5,000 cases at the end of this week. Many of these cases are linked to social gatherings.”
Cases have been linked to different contacts and groups, including gatherings from Thanksgiving, funerals, worship services and others.
“We’re seeing people who are socializing with many different contacts and many different large groups. We’ve seen many of these cases linked to Thanksgiving. Case investigations are showing multiple people from one gathering. We’ve seen funerals with many people attending, leading to a large number of close contacts and cases. We know it’s a hard time for people. Not being able to grieve in the way we normally do is challenging, but these restrictions are in place because we know how this virus is transmitted. Gathering large amounts of people indoors for prolonged periods of time puts us at risk of transmission and we see that risk now,” Roussin said.
The doctor said some cases have included people behaving recklessly despite either testing positive for or being exposed to COVID-19.
“We’ve had people attend medical procedures without disclosing that they’ve been in contact with a close case. This has left dozens of health care providers off work, needing to self-isolate. We have an entire surgical team at home for two weeks because of this non-disclosure. This puts significant strain on our health care system,” he said.
“We have an individual who very likely acquired their COVID-19 case at a faith-based organization, a large gathering, then later was a visitor a personal care home. That led to the beginnings of an outbreak at that centre. We see as we increase the number of people we’re in contact with, we increase our risk and that risk can be transferred to people in very vulnerable settings.”
Other cases have been connected to people who have shown COVID-19 symptoms but did not stay home.
“We’ve had people go to work while they’re experiencing symptoms. That’s one of the things we’ve said we needed to change in order to be successful. We had an individual attend work for an entire week while symptomatic before being tested. We’ve had individuals who had symptoms for a week, got tested but did not self-isolate. They went to a large social gathering. They had a gathering at their own house - many contacts, including cases,” he said.
“We’ve had specific examples of an individual who left work because they were ill, but then went shopping and exposed people at different events. A known positive case had a gathering at their home, exposing many people.
The doctor added, “We’ve had many people who went home or stayed home because they were ill, only to feel better a little bit better the next day and go back to school or work, only for the symptoms to return, exposing many people to the virus.”
Roussin urged the public to limit their number of contacts outside of homes
“We need to decrease our contacts outside the household. We need to change how we’re doing things right now. Everyone can think of it like this - if public health contacted you, would you be able to tell them who your contacts have been over the last week, or over the weekend? If that would be difficult you, you’ve probably had way too many contacts over that time,” Roussin said.
“We have largely went back to our normal ways of gathering with a large amount of people. These numbers show what happens when we do that.”
