After a summer marked by open borders and low COVID-19 cases across Atlantic Canada, the pandemic fortunes of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have diverged in the first part of 2021.
New Brunswick reported 657 new cases in the month of January. In all of 2020, New Brunswick recorded 599 cases of the virus.
Just across the border from Aulac, N.B., Nova Scotia reported just 94 cases of the coronavirus over that same period.
Montreal-based epidemiologist Dr. Christopher Labos says it’s difficult to tell why the provinces have fared so differently in the first part of this year.
“It’s very hard to know why one province does better than another. There are certain general trends that are probably true,” Labos said.
“But the problem is it doesn’t take very much for things to get out of control.”
Both provinces saw fall outbreaks that led to the Atlantic bubble being popped.
On Nov. 23, 2020, both Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador pulled out of the Atlantic bubble, with New Brunswick leaving on Nov. 26.
“Across this country, across Canada, things seemed relatively OK over the summer and then in the fall things began to take off,” Labos said.
“What made the biggest difference was really how different governments reacted and how quickly they shut things down.”
A scan of restrictions in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick does show somewhat different approaches to managing the fall outbreaks but they appeared to yield similar results.
On Nov. 26 there were 114 active cases in Nova Scotia and 105 in New Brunswick.
On that day, the Fredericton region joined the Saint John and Moncton regions in the orange phase of New Brunswick’s COVID-19 recovery plan, which had been recently modified to allow bars and restaurants to stay open for in-person dining.
That same day Nova Scotia ordered all restaurants in the Halifax Regional Municipality to stop dine-in service for two weeks. That order was later extended until Jan. 4.
Nova Scotia has also offered pop-up asymptomatic testing regularly since the fall.
By the end of 2020, both provinces appeared to have weathered the worst of the fall outbreaks, with 28 active cases in New Brunswick and 22 active cases in Nova Scotia.
But the fortunes of both provinces have diverged radically since the calendar flipped to 2021.
New Brunswick reported double-digit case increases every day from Jan. 4 to Jan. 31 and the entire province was put into the orange alert level.
On Jan. 17, the Edmundston region was moved to the red phase, joined shortly afterwards by the Moncton, Saint John and Fredericton zones.
Edmundston was put into a full lockdown on Jan. 23.
At a COVID-19 update on Jan. 11, New Brunswick’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Jennifer Russell was asked why the province fared so differently from other Atlantic Canadian provinces over the first part of this year.
“We are kind of the gatekeepers for the rest of the Maritime provinces, at least anyway in terms of people coming across the Quebec border, anywhere from the rest of Canada and also the border with Maine,” Russell said.
Russell said the province saw a large uptick in non-essential travel over the holiday season.
In New Brunswick, there are normally about 5,000 people self-isolating as a result of travel. But that number jumped to about 8,000 during the holidays.
Public health has said that gatherings appear to have been a primary driver of infection, which then allowed the virus to infiltrate workplaces across the province in the new year.
“The nature of that time frame is that there were people that were going to gather,” Russell said.
“We ended up having people going to gatherings as well as workplace settings that were symptomatic.”
New Brunswick had OK’ed gatherings of up to 20 people over the holidays but asked people to keep their contacts to the same 20 people.
Nova Scotia only allowed gatherings half that size.
“It’s impossible to know what would have happened in an alternate universe where you did A instead of B,” Labos said.
“But I think you can see multiple examples throughout the world and throughout this pandemic, that if you act early, you can prevent things from getting a lot, lot worse.”
Russell said New Brunswick is evaluating what it can learn from the outbreak that has defined the start of the year. But many of the risk factors remain the same as they’ve been for the past year.
“I don’t think there’s any one thing that contributed to our outbreaks in the holiday season,” she said.
“However, if you think about the swiss cheese approach, our border measures are very important, travel restrictions, self-isolation pieces, testing pieces, wearing masks, the six-feet distancing, washing your hands, distancing, keeping your close contacts low. All of those things combined, even if they’re done extremely well, there still are chances for the virus to get through those layers of protection.”
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