HALIFAX -- There were no new deaths reported in Nova Scotia on Wednesday and only seven new cases of COVID-19 -- a welcome respite following 13 deaths at the Northwood long-term care home in Halifax over a three-to-four-day period.
Dr. Robert Strang, Nova Scotia’s chief public health officer, is defending the measures taken to keep the virus out of Northwood.
“This is a large building with hundreds of workers coming in every day from across the HRM community. Once the virus got introduced, an unfortunate circumstance, it spread widely before it was even recognized,” Strang told CTV News.
“Within the limitations of the physical infrastructure of the building, appropriate outbreak control steps have been put in place, but it is the nature of the virus that it had already spread and, unfortunately, (Northwood has) a very frail, elderly population. We’ve seen it around the world, once it gets in, the ability to eliminate it in a large facility like this, there are challenges. Unfortunately, we had a number of deaths and it’s entirely likely that we are going to see more deaths.”
Data compiled by Dr. Samir Sinha at Sinai Health Network suggests Nova Scotia was days behind other provinces in requiring surgical masks for workers in long-term care homes. According to Strang, the provinces that made masks a requirement prior to Nova Scotia were further into their virus outbreak.
“We actually know that the national guidance on masks was released on April 8. Northwood had implemented masks two days prior to that. By April 11, the decision had been made and we were distributing masks as a directive at all long-term care facilities for their front-line workers, as well as people in hospitals wearing masks,” says Strang.
“There was about a three-day delay there, but even before the national guidance we knew this was likely coming and, as I’ve said on a number of occasions, we needed to do the work to make sure we had a sufficient supply of masks. There is no point in giving a directive when you actually can’t back it up with masks. I think we acted in a very timely way.”
Strang says public officers of health have been working closely with the staff at Northwood.
“Supporting them in appropriate assessment of the epidemiology in their facility, as well as the appropriate outbreak control measures,” says Strang.
“We’ve had a few new staff who have tested positive recently. We’re doing an in-depth look at all of those cases to understand where they could have been exposed and if there is anything additional we need to be thinking of. So we continue to do that active work in supporting Northwood.”
The province is actively looking at building a recovery plan, which Strang says he will bring forward in the near future.
“We’re also developing a broad consultation strategy that, whether it is business sectors, cultural sectors, (looks at how) they may reopen. This is going to be a slow incremental process,” says Strang.
“I think we need to look at this through a provincial perspective. A zone-by-zone or regional perspective has too many risks, in terms of, if you open up one area more than another area, then the movement of people could greatly increase the risk of transmitting the virus from one zone to another. We’re going to do this from a provincial perspective on a sector-by-sector basis, as opposed to a geographical or regional basis.”
The province loosened the restrictions on the public’s use of the outdoors over the weekend. Strang says it will be a few weeks until the impact of that step is clear.
“We opened the outdoors in a modest way on the weekend. We’ve said all along that the incubation period for this virus is 14 days. Ideally, we’d wait for 28 days between every step we make to make sure we can see the impact of whatever we are opening up,” says Strang.
