New Brunswick’s top doctor says some people just aren’t listening to public health guidance.
Seventeen more confirmed cases of the coronavirus were announced in the province Monday – after another 17 were announced Saturday and Sunday.
This spike is likely the start of a trend after the holiday season.
“We were seeing gatherings happening where people had symptoms and hadn’t been tested,” says Dr. Jennifer Russell, chief medical officer of health.
“We’ve also seen people going to work who have symptoms and haven’t been tested.”
She says these numbers are just the beginning, with cases resulting from New Year’s Eve celebrations not yet showing up.
Russell says efforts to track and contain the spread by public health staff is made more difficult when residents provide inaccurate information through the contact tracing process – either intentionally or unintentionally.
“If inaccurate information is given to public health we can not do our job, we can not protect the public,” she says.
Russell says she expects the wave of cases to get worse before it gets better.
She also notes the province saw a drop in the number of residents getting tested over the holidays.
“That is very concerning because, in terms of assessing the risk of the province, it really is dependent on the number of people that get tested who have symptoms,” she says.
She says all of these factors put the province in a less-than-favourable position.
“We’re not in a good place right now.”
With a vaccination rollout happening and residents approaching the one-year mark of pandemic protocol, Russell says some cut corners on COVID-19 guidelines could be a symptom of “COVID fatigue” – but says that’s no excuse in New Brunswick.
“It’s hard to be sympathetic to that COVID fatigue when you’re looking at provinces and jurisdictions in the rest of Canada and the rest of the world where the health-care systems are overwhelmed,” she says.
“If people are COVID-fatigued from just dealing with what we’re dealing with in New Brunswick, I cannot imagine the COVID fatigue that people are experiencing in jurisdictions where the case counts are going up exponentially,” says Russell.
As of Monday evening, all public health zones in the province were in the yellow recovery level.
With numbers expected to continue trending upwards, Russell says she’s ready to trigger a regression to orange when needed.
“We’ve done this many times in many different zones already,” she says, “so we are having those conversations and, again, we haven’t even seen the spike in cases as a result of new year’s gatherings – which we expect to see over the next several days.”
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