Hard to explain why COVID-19 cases higher in East End

The health and social services agency that serves many of the Montreal neighbourhoods that were identified by Premier François Legault on Tuesday as having the highest rates of COVID -19 infection in the province says it's at a loss to explain what has made communities such as Stléonard and Rivière-des-prairies the hot spots of Quebec.

“There isn't one reason,” said Julie Provencher, director of the youth program and public health activities for the CIUSSS de l'estde-l'île-de-montréal.

“We have large high schools in St-léonard. We have people who might work in industries outside of the neighbourhood, but in precarious jobs . ... in factories or places where it's difficult to take time off or respect safety measures. These people work elsewhere, and then come home and contamination happens within the family unit. But there's no one reason.”

The east-end CIUSSS also says it has the most vulnerable clientele of any health and social services agency in the province. The population it serves is older, has more chronic illnesses and lives in neighbourhoods with high rates of poverty.

The CIUSSS de l'est-de-l'île-demontréal has had several meetings with local municipal officials and community organizations that have their own crisis units to try to understand why the numbers keep rising, Provencher said.

The agency already tests more people for COVID-19 than any other CIUSSS on the island, having just surpassed 15,000 weekly tests, she said. On Monday, the agency opened an additional testing site in the Martin-brodeur Arena in St-léonard.

The east-end CIUSSS is also ahead of other agencies in deploying rapid tests using the ID NOW kit that provides a result in 15 minutes as a way to expand testing capacity, Provencher said.

Next up, the CIUSSS is looking to deploy teams to do “preventive testing ” with rapid tests at schools and other places, she said.

“Before waiting for people to be sick and need to come to get tested, there's a lot of work in progress in the community,” Provencher said.

The agency has a multilingual COVID brigade of 40 employees who go door-to-door to distribute information pamphlets and answer questions. It turns out some people are afraid to get tested because they're afraid of losing their job, Provencher said.

The CIUSSS also has projects with community organizations and the Red Cross to support people who test positive for COVID.

“It's not that people don't want to remain isolated at home for 10 days,” Provencher said. “They might be a lot of people living in the same household. They might be afraid of not going to work. They might not have any social network to help them walk the dog or get groceries or pay a bill.”

There is some good news, she said. The rate of positive COVID results in St-léonard fell to 14.9 per cent last week, from 18.1 per cent the previous week. It's high compared to the island, but the rate topped 20 per cent in St-léonard in late December, she said.

“We're still in a difficult situation,” Provencher said. “On Monday, we were happy to see the numbers go down a little bit. At the same time, we're all conscious of the fact that schools were closed for a month. So the next weeks will be significant.”