British Columbia’s overstretched team of contact tracers may be soon be overwhelmed, warned the province’s top doctor, if the spread of COVID-19 continues on its current trajectory.
Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix announced new public health restrictions on Friday amidst a surge in the highly-transmissible Omicron variant.
If British Columbians don’t flatten the curve, contact tracers “will not withstand this, in my estimates,” Henry said in the news conference.
Contact tracers will be forced to prioritize, she said, starting with positive cases identified in vulnerable settings, such as long-term care homes, congregate living situations, and hospitals.
Some people may have to do their own contact tracing, she added.
“(That means) for people who are having milder illness — vaccinated, younger people — being able to self-manage and notify their own contacts, and we’ll be supporting them in doing that,” she said.
“We’ve had to do that in some ways in the north, in the Interior, over periods of surges, so we are focusing on how we do that in a systematic way should we get to that point in the next little while.”
The team that notifies the close contacts of positive cases in B.C. is the same team that leads immunization clinics, collects data and performs COVID-19 tests, said Henry.
“It’s not like we teams that are able to do many, many things.”
Compounding the challenge, she explained, is the demographic of new cases. The virus is being spread rapidly among young people, who have larger social circles that create more work for contact tracers.
The province announced 735 new cases of COVID-19, including 135 cases of the Omicron variant, on Thursday. That’s double the number of new cases reported just one week earlier.
B.C.’s contact tracers may be top-notch, said Dix, but as cases grow, “we’re going to have to adjust our strategies.”
The new restrictions announced Friday come into effect on Monday and will be in place until at least the end of January.
They include indoor gathering limits of one household plus 10 other individuals, or one additional household if everyone is vaccinated, a cap on attendance for large-venue events, and complete enforcement of BC Vaccine Card scanning.