Front Burner - The growing threat of variants in Canada

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

An unprecedented outbreak in Newfoundland of the coronavirus variant originally found in the UK holds lessons for the rest of Canada. CBC St-John’s reporter Peter Cowan on what those lessons are.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Pussall. Music Late last Friday, a somber announcement from Newfoundland and Labrador's Chief Medical Officer. We've called this emergency briefing tonight to inform you that we have received confirmation that the outbreak in the metro area is indeed due to a

COVID-19 variant of concern, specifically the B.1.1.7 variant, which was first recognized in the UK. That was Dr. Janice Fitzgerald explaining why the province, which had seen record numbers of COVID cases in recent days, was headed back into a full lockdown. A scheduled election went to mail-in ballots only just 12 hours before people were supposed to go to the polls. Today, my colleague Peter Cowan joins me to talk about what's been happening in St. John's and the lessons for the rest of us. best. Hi, Peter. Thanks so much for joining me today. My pleasure, Jamie. Happy to be here. So I have to say, here in Ontario, we've been a bit jealous of you guys, if that's the right word.

You barely had any cases. And I remember in the summer, had this 42 day stretch with zero cases of COVID. And can you tell me what life has been like for you over the last many months? I think a lot of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have been really proud of the record that we've had. It's kind of become a point of pride here that it was like, you know, we were the ones who were able to kind of keep COVID under control. And even as you saw other provinces hitting the second wave, it was like, nope, no second wave here. And it really did lead to kind of complacency. People here had kind of thought that, you know, our measures were working because the strategy had kind of been we'd have really tough border controls. So, in fact, you know, there's been a travel ban. You can't come into the province unless you're either a resident here or you're granted an exemption for a number of reasons. And when you do come, you have to isolate for 14 days. That's been in place since early on in the pandemic. And so people here were kind of like,

we've got those tight border controls, you know, that's going to give us more freedom. So up until last week, you could go out to a restaurant and eat with friends. You know, a bunch of us, me and my friends would go and have a dinner party together, you know, even over the holidays when everyone was like, okay, don't see people, don't see people. Here the rule was don't see more than 20 people over the holidays. You know, can we just keep it under 20? Wow, 20. Yeah. So, and even then people were kind of afraid. It was like, okay, this is the holidays. People are traveling in and out. You know, people might not do the isolation. Are we, is this going to be an outbreak? And then once we made it through there and there was no outbreak, everyone was like, okay, we got this. This is going to be fine. And so, you know, we can resume

sports activities. Do we need to really be wearing, you know, the mask all the time? People have been pretty compliant, but as we've now learned, they've also become pretty complacent. Right, right. And so then talk to me about when things really started to change at the beginning of last week. Tell me about how you started to see the numbers really rise. We're used to when there are new cases of COVID here, everyone wants to know, okay, where's this coming from? So to all of a sudden, once you then kind of went to 10 cases and then 20 cases and, you know, one day we had 100 cases of COVID that was setting new records. It is evident that COVID has been circulating undetected in our province for some time. For most people in our province, positive COVID cases were just a daily statistic. Now they are real and present.

They are your family, friends, and co-workers. That's when everyone realized, uh-oh, something has gone horribly wrong here. You know, this is not the COVID that we're used to. That's when they started saying, look, we're going to need to bring in new measures in place. We're going to have to start, you know, first it was just the St. John's area. Because these cases have been focused around Mount Pearl, which is a suburb of St. John's. And particularly the high school. Because this is where they were starting to see these new cases was young people.

So, you know, the majority of the cases early on were all under the age of 20. And what they were realizing is that a good number of people centered around Mount Pearl Senior High were testing positive. So, in fact, they put everyone from that school into isolation as they started to figure out, you know, what's going on here. And it was kind of the perfect storm that because these were young people, they were getting very mild symptoms. So we've heard Dr. Janice Fitzgerald say, the chief medical officer of health, that, you know, people weren't getting tested because they were like, I haven't traveled. I haven't been in contact with someone who has COVID. We had been doing so well. We didn't have any. We didn't have to worry about it. So if you had sniffles, it couldn't have been COVID because we don't have COVID, right?

I'm not faulting people for thinking that way. I just think it's what got us to where we are. And so allowing the disease to then kind of spread, they think likely for a couple of weeks before we started seeing people test positive, meant by the time we did see people testing positive, we were dealing with a lot of cases. Right. And so do we know a little bit more about how this was spreading amongst high school students? You know, I was hearing stuff about a volleyball tournament. Sports tournaments is definitely one of the things they zeroed in on, because in fact, they said, you know, even before the lockdown, if you were in grade 7 to 12 and you were involved in any sort of sports gathering uh over the weekend of the 5th to the 7th like immediately isolate right now away from your families the other thing they were

thinking about is parties uh that you know young people they want to get together they want to socialize and you know if there's not a lot of covid here then why try and stop it, you know, if there's not a lot of COVID here, then why try and stop it? So, you know, the gathering limits were, you know, for informal gatherings were set at 20 people. So you could still have a pretty decent party and still be following at least the rules that were in place at the time. So you mentioned before this sort of ballooning of cases, right? I know last Monday there was sort of 11 cases centered on this high school, and then by Wednesday, 53 cases. Thursday, as you mentioned, we've got 100 cases. And at what point does the province realize that they're dealing with the variant here,

the B.1.1.7, more contagious variant? The public found that out on Friday night. They had had an afternoon briefing and they'd said, look, we've sent off some samples to the lab. We're still waiting to get those back. They've got to go all the way to Winnipeg. And it had kind of been a week and we were still waiting to hear from them. We have taken appropriate steps with closures and we'll bring it in more restrictions if necessary. So when all of a sudden, you know, I had gone home for the day and all of a sudden an email comes in saying, boom, there's a second COVID-19 briefing and it's going to be at 8.30 in the evening.

That was the first indication that something clearly was wrong here because, you know, we had never had two briefings in one day. Thank you all for joining us here tonight with such short notice. Know that we would not be doing an urgent briefing like this unless it was necessary and critically important. So then we came in and they made that announcement that, yes, it was the new variant. And because of that, it was like immediately the lockdown. I mean, this is concerning. There's no doubt about it.

You know, if we look at our epi curve, it's almost a straight line up right now. And I can't really sugarcoat this for anybody. But what we have to remember is that we have the means to control it. We know that these public health measures will work against this variant. You know, the measures in place now are the same ones they brought in back at the end of March. When you're dealing with like, don't see anyone outside of your household, only go out for essentials. You know, they've tweaked a few things because the science has changed a lot since last March. But that's when they kind of brought in the lockdown. And I think that was kind of the climax of a week. And what they're looking for now is basically time

do this lockdown to give the contact tracing, the testers time. Because this is a province where normally we'd been testing about maybe 400 people a day. Over the last couple of days, they've been doing almost 2,000 tests a day. So they've really ramped up testing in order to try and find as many people as possible. They've even lowered the symptoms. So now if you just have a runny nose, you can get a test. They want you to get a test because they're just trying to figure out just how far does this spread so they can try and contain it.

And how is that going on the ground? Because I have been reading reports of people frustrated, sort of long lineups. Oh, yeah. And I've had all sorts of people messaging me. There was one person I was chatting with who spent four hours in the lineup over the weekend just waiting to get. And they had a booked appointment like these are, you know, it's supposed to be scheduled testing. This is not just sort of a free for all. They said one of the cars around them actually ran out of fuel and in the middle of this lineup because they weren't expecting to be there for four hours.

Other people just left because they were frustrated with how long it was taking. So they've opened up new testing centers now in order to try and increase the volume. They're also increasing the volume at the labs as they're trying to leave some of these bottlenecks in order to make sure that the testing that we are able to do is kind of matching the concern that we have right now about the disease. Is there a sense here that the province was caught off guard somewhat? Even Dr. Janice Fitzgerald says they were caught complacent. This is something that they've been worried about. They've had these measures in place, but how seriously do people take them? I think we weren't wearing our masks as much as we should have. I

mean, we saw that in our own department. It's just, it's human nature. I think people just felt that, you know, those travel restrictions, the isolation requirements when people came in made us immune and it doesn't. Interesting question, you know, does it, does the responsibility rest with the people who are making the rules or the people who are following the rules? And I'm not sure that, you know, obviously hindsight is 20-20. If we'd known that this virus was here and circulating, the lockdown would have happened a whole lot earlier. But at the same time, it's pretty hard to try and convince people, oh, yeah, you need to lock down, you need to not see people that are important to you in your life, even though we have no COVID, because we might get COVID at any time and things might get out of control.

Right. Are there any concerns now, looking back on this, about the environments at the school, for example, about precautions that have been put in place that you think people are starting to talk about? The teachers' union was raising concerns about the sort of conditions in schools right from day one. Top officials at the Newfoundland and Labrador Teachers Association say health officials should consider further restrictions.

Mount Pearl Senior High, the school in question, has 930 students, over 50 staff members. All of those have families. All of those have connections that bring the regular conduct of others, including students and staff from other schools. The interconnectedness of metro high school communities, that's a reality. And to be fair right now, I don't think we have a good understanding of, is it the school that was spreading it? Or was it the students who were

doing extracurricular sports and hanging around having parties in the evening? They haven't been really clear on exactly how this was able to spread. And they may never know, you know, was it in the classroom? or was it the party when everyone was getting together after hours. Students were wearing masks for older grades, but younger grades weren't, something the teachers were concerned about. And the reality is physical distancing was not always possible. You've got older school buildings where you've got 30 kids in a class. You can space out the desks as best you can,

but there was no way that you were going to get two meters between every student. Caitlin Healy, a grade 10 student at Gonzaga. On the right, her sister Sarah. I don't feel safe going into a classroom with like 30 to 40 other children and about 20 to 30 of the kids aren't wearing their mask properly. Only place where like their social distancing markers is to the entrances to the washrooms. Yeah. It says stand here if there's a line.

They have been used once. I've never seen them used once. So that's certainly, right now schools are online, at least for the next week and a half or so. That's going to be re-evaluated. And when they do re-evaluate that, I'm sure there'll be lots of questions about what extra measures they're going to bring in place to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

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I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. And what about the time that it took them to identify the variant? So, you know, as we mentioned, we start seeing clusters on the Monday, and then they haven't identified the more contagious variant until the Friday. Have there been any criticisms or questions raised around that? We've really been at the mercy of the national lab, which we're not the only province who's sending a lot of samples their way to try and get this variant testing.

The province, interestingly, recognized that they were going to need this capacity to do it on their own even before all of this started. The local provincial lab here has been spooling up to be able to run their own, even before all of this started. The local provincial lab here has been spooling up to be able to run their own genetic sequencing tests. So they'd be able to tell for themselves whether or not we're dealing with variants of COVID. But so, yeah, it would have been a whole lot better to have known this earlier in the week. But with when you've got to fly something all the way from St. John's to Winnipeg and wait in the lineup with all the other provinces who are also concerned about variants, that was the reality of what they were having to deal with. So I think people aren't kind of looking back at that right now.

They're going, OK, now that we got the variant, what are we going to do about it? OK, that's really interesting. I actually did not know that this was happening in a central location for many provinces. happening in a central location for many provinces. What do we know about how the variant got into the province in the first place, if anything? You know, as you mentioned earlier, Newfoundland and Labrador have some of the strictest border controls in the country. And that is still the mystery here. We don't know how it got in.

And Dr. Janice Fitzgerald said in her latest briefing, you know, they're going to keep looking at it. But, you know, it may take a little while to figure out exactly who was patient zero. We know it has to be somehow travel related. There was no COVID spreading in the province here. But right now, they just don't know exactly how it got in here. Okay. And on that note, what is happening with contact tracing in the province right now? I know that there was offers of support from the federal government.

They are, I think, taking the federal government up on some of the help when it comes to contact tracing. That's one area where they've said they could use a little bit of extra help. This is a province that has boasted about how good our contact tracing is. Our health minister said, look, we've got the best record in the province, sorry, in the country before all of this happened that, you know, we were able to identify 95 percent of contacts and get them tested within 48 hours. We're not meeting that high benchmark now, but it does help that this is a small province. People know each other. But it does help that this is a small province. People know each other. If you had to try and identify like, OK, who did you see in the grocery store?

This is a place where a lot of people can, you know, they can name names about who they saw or, you know, they'll know who that checkout clerk was. So there are some things that are kind of breaking in their favor when it comes to trying to identify the contacts. But one thing they realized was as they were going through each of these people, they were having a lot of contacts. This wasn't the 20 people that you were supposed to kind of only be seeing. Some of these people had way more contacts than that by the time you have the sports team. And, you know, they work at a fast food restaurant and they see their friends at school. To see the effects of this latest outbreak, look no further than this restaurant here in Mount Pearl. One member of the staff has tested positive for COVID-19. And all 15 people on that person's shift are now in isolation awaiting testing.

And most of the people who work here are also students. Those contacts were quickly growing. And that's one of the things that put a big strain on the system. And I think it's one of the lessons learned was we got to keep our contacts low. Right, right. And, you know, you and I are talking late Monday afternoon, and there were seven confirmed cases today, 21 presumptive cases that have come from rapid tests. Do you have the sense that this is getting under control here now? I mean, it's certainly a ways off from the 100 cases that you had last Thursday, right? Dr. Fitzgerald is warning, like, don't read a lot into the numbers. In public health, it is not the cases we know of that are concerning, but the cases that we don't know about.

So a case identified is a case contained. You know, the 100 cases that we were seeing was because you were testing students in this school where the virus had been circulating. No one's ready to sort of unfurl the mission accomplished banner just yet, especially when like dealing with almost 30 cases, you know, a week and a half ago, that would have been unthinkable in this province. So we're certainly not down to the numbers that we have been. So they're expecting it's going to be another at least probably a week before they have a good sense of, do we have this under control? And they are still seeing cases where they can't link these to other cases. So they're seeing these cases pop up and they're going, okay, this isn't tied

directly to these kids at school or, you know, an outbreak at this business. Where are these cases coming from? So as long as we're seeing those cases, that's going to be a concern and that's likely going to keep the lockdown continuing. And Peter, you know, not to retread too much of what we've already talked about here, but I wonder, there is this real increasing concern about variants. Some worry that it there is this real increasing concern about variants. Some worry that it may trigger a third wave in this pandemic. And the B.1.1.7 variant

has now been found in all 10 provinces in this country. And, you know, having gone through this over the last week or so, what's happened in Newfoundland. What lessons do you think there are for the rest of the country here? I think there's a couple of lessons here. One is around the importance of testing, contact tracing, making sure that anyone with symptoms is getting a test, because that's one area where we kind of slipped and we're now playing catch up from that. And we heard from Dr. Janice Fitzgerald today that, you know, what she's sort of screaming from the rafters to anyone who will listen is the importance of, you know, making sure that people keep their contacts low, that they do follow all these public health measures, that it works for regular COVID and it works for the variants as well. Sure, these variants are more contagious, but, you know, the mask wearing, the physical distancing, the hand washing, those are all things that are still important today.

You can never let your guard down with this virus. And I would send out that message to anyone who is within hearing range of me right now. You really cannot. It does not matter how low your case count is today, because tomorrow could be a very different story. We had six active cases Friday before last. And I just want to mention before we go, there is now one person in the hospital. So there are, you know, very real consequences to this as well. Peter, thank you so much for this conversation and best of luck to you all out there. Please keep us posted.

Absolutely. I can't wait till our numbers are back down to zero cases a day and I'm trying to come up with questions for the briefing. I would be happy to be back in those days. Back to when we all feel very jealous of you guys. So I hope that you get back there too. All right, so like we mentioned, the B.1.1.7 coronavirus variant has now been found in every province in Canada. Due to rising concern about this, Quebec Premier Francois Legault announced a delay on lifting more restrictions until after spring break in early March. As of Monday night, much of Ontario is still slated to loosen pandemic restrictions, allowing non-essential businesses to open back up. In Manitoba, the variant is expected to have found its way to a remote First Nation. Seven probable cases were discovered in Punggasi, First Nation, home to about

500 people. The community has been under a strict lockdown since early February, and it's not yet known how the variant might have gotten in. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner. Talk to you tomorrow.