‘Get vaccinated’: Northern B.C. doctor warns local ER could close amid rampant COVID

A family physician in Vanderhoof, B.C., is pleading with community residents to get vaccinated amid surging COVID-19 cases that have put the local hospital’s operations at risk.

Dr. Rebecca Janssen works at St. John Hospital, where she said staff were barely able to cover shifts this weekend when a key doctor fell ill with COVID-19.

“His shifts looked to be very difficult to cover with the resources we had in the community. It was only with a lot of effort and scrambling yesterday we managed to cover those shifts,” she said.

The doctor, she said, was fully vaccinated, but still contracted the virus in the community where COVID-19 remains rampant. According to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, the active daily case rate for the Nechako local health area is 61 per 100,000 people, the third-highest in B.C.

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“It’s left the local physician group feeling quite uncertain about our ability to continue to provide care with the numbers we are seeing, the volume of patients and also compromised physician resources as we ourselves become ill with COVID,” Janssen said.

In an open letter published in the local Vanderhoof Omineca Express, Janssen warned that the situation had become so dire that it was possible the hospital’s emergency room could be closed to all but life-threatening cases, with other patients diverted to nearby communities — a situation she described as “very worrisome.”

Janssen said lagging vaccination rates in the region continued to underpin the growing COVID-19 case count.

She said the region had been largely spared during the first three waves of the pandemic, potentially giving locals a false sense of security.

But with the fourth wave now swamping the region, vaccination was necessary to protect the health-care system, she said.

The Nechako local heath area has just 71 per cent of the eligible population with one dose and 62 per cent fully immunized, the fourth and third lowest rates in the Northern Health region respectively.

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By comparison, the provincial average is 88.6 per cent with one dose and 82.2 per cent with two doses.

Health-care facilities across northern B.C., where vaccination has lagged outside of the northwest coast, face similar pressures.

The province has transferred dozens of COVID-19 patients, most of whom were not fully vaccinated, out of the region’s overtaxed intensive care units.

In September, Northern Health said staff at the Fort St. John Hospital, where just six nurses were covering 20 positions in the Emergency Room, were facing “brutal criticism from the public and insults on their shifts.”

Janssen said health-care workers in her own region were also facing skepticism from the community, something she described as painful given that they live, work and send their kids to school in the same community.

“It feels like public mistrust, and people’s refusal to take simple steps to protect themselves is exhausting and it is taking a toll,” she said.

“It’s also very difficult to know that locally we haven’t reached our peak. Cases continue to climb and this is going to get worse before it gets better.”