Through a combination of luck and smart public policies, B.C. avoided some of the problems faced in other jurisdictions in containing the number of COVID-19 cases.
By Craig Takeuchi
Cover illustration by Paige Stampatori
During her daily B.C. COVID-19 briefings, B.C. provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has often credited British Columbians with helping to avert a major health disaster. Our ability to wrangle the pandemic under control has been admired by many, including the New York Times.
Yet the recent resurgence in Australia and news of American states reentering lockdowns demonstrate that mismanagement, complacency, or reopening too fast and too soon can undermine progress.
To help counter the troubling news of the past few months, here’s a look at what B.C. got right in the fight against COVID-19— with an eye on what needs to be done to sustain this effort over the long term.
PACIFIC RIM PROXIMITY
With our trans-Pacific travel routes, population demographics, and nearness to Asia and Washington state, many experts anticipated the pandemic would hit B.C. hard.
University of Ottawa health sciences associate professor Raywat Deonandan was among those who believed so, based on those reasons plus the opioid epidemic and what B.C. physicians had told him.
What happened in B.C. defied many expectations, however.
“The rate at which it got under control was a little shocking to me,” Deonandan said by phone from Ottawa.
Likewise, some of the earliest-hit locations close to China—including Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand—responded more effectively than some farther-flung places: Iran, Italy, Spain, Ontario and Quebec in Canada, and
New York and Florida in the U.S.
On the line with the Georgia Straight,
B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix said that within our province, the places closest to the I-5 transportation corridor and Metro Vancouver struggled the most. Consequently, being early advocates for the closure of the Canada–U.S. border, he said, proved crucial.
While the great mask debate rages stateside, Metro Vancouver citizens are well acquainted with seeing Asian people customarily wearing them and stores selling them. In addition, Chinese Canadians, monitoring China’s situation, became an advance-warning system by taking precautions like avoiding restaurants and malls, hinting at what was to come.
TIMING AND TESTING
Many experts, including Henry, have partly credited B.C.’s success to timing and luck.
B.C.’s school spring break, from March 15 to 26, occurred later or lasted longer than those of Quebec (March 2 to 9) and Ontario (March 16 to 20). Dix said that infected travellers returning to Quebec prompted their warning not to travel during the break.
Deonandan credits B.C. with testing quickly, with effective data-sharing (B.C. used its own test, whereas other provinces had to await federal confirmation), and, after health-care workers at multiple facilities were found to be virus transmitters, with faster implementation of a single-site strategy than Ontario and Quebec.
However, Deonandan feels that all regions failed in hunting cases down as they arose, and that B.C. was slow to start that process.
“Given that it’s an asymptomatic pan
demic, you can’t just rely upon symptomatic people to present themselves—you’ve got to go out and find the asymptomatic ones,” he said.
However, Dix said the early testing in B.C. was “essential” in breaking transmission chains and slowing virus spread, such as identifying the so-called Case 6 from Iran and those from Washington state, which recognized new sources of incoming cases not from China.
POPULATION AND PUBLIC MESSAGING
Dix previously stated at a briefing that he thinks B.C.’s health authorities—five regional health authorities, the First Nations Health Authority, and the Provincial Health Services Authority—worked effectively together on a coordinated response, whereas Ontario has a much greater number of health jurisdictions.
In addition, B.C.’s population (5.1 million) is smaller than those of Ontario (14.7 million) and Quebec (8.6 million) and distributed differently. Also, B.C. only has one major city compared to a few in Ontario, as Deonandan pointed out.
Although Dix acknowledged that B.C. didn’t always get everything right, he said he believes that the province’s willingness to adapt is a strength. Both Henry and Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, previously didn’t recommend masks, but they changed their advice after increased understanding of the virus. And Henry remained consistent in advising that masks protect others, not the wearer, which Deonandan said is accurate, whereas in the U.S. mask-wearing is portrayed as protecting oneself.
Dix also credits the leadership of Henry, deputy health minister Stephen Brown, and “outstanding [regional] medical health officers” such as Vancouver Coastal Health’s Patricia Daly, as well as Premier Horgan for not intervening as much as other premiers.
Needless to say, Henry’s communication abilities have been widely lauded.
“Enough can’t be said around the singularity of the vision and consistency in messaging and the sobriety of that messaging,” Deonandan said of Henry. “She answers questions quickly and always in a consistent voice and a nonpolitical voice at the same time.”
Dix explained that Henry led daily briefings from the outset because he thought medical announcements should come from medical professionals.
“I personally felt it was important to not have…too many spokespeople,” he said, “that we had to give clear messages, that they always had to come from the same place at the same time.”
In contrast, Deonandan pointed out how Ontario made things unnecessarily complicated, had inconsistent messaging, were unclear about who was in charge, and focused on message management more than message transparency.
“We made so many mistakes that we’ll be rewriting the textbook on how to manage this in the future,” he said of Ontario, “but it looks like the B.C. playbook will be one of the positive ones that we will look to rewrite that textbook.”
Nevertheless, he believes that all of public health can learn how to improve messaging and conduct it in a more nuanced and strategic manner.
Meanwhile, Dix expressed gratitude for the collective effort by British Columbians.
“It’s one thing to provide public-health information, as Dr. Henry did—it’s another thing when people follow it and you can see the action in terms of flattening the curve from what people did,” Dix said. “It’s beyond moving.”