Brooks fights ‘frightening’ outbreak

Mayor weighs delaying reopening with 7% of city’s residents infected

Brooks, a southeast Alberta city with fewer than 15,000 residents, has now eclipsed 1,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases.

The widespread outbreak in Brooks, home to the JBS meat-processing plant where 566 employees and contractors have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, is the biggest challenge the community has ever faced, according to Mayor Barry Morishita.

“Why it’s so challenging is the speed and the fluidity of the situation. We had no cases for so long and then we had an outbreak that was as significant as any that we know of,” Morishita told Postmedia on Wednesday.

“The numbers are frightening and bring a fear to people.”

As of Wednesday, four Brooks residents have died of COVID-19 and 1,020 have tested positive for the virus — seven per cent of the city’s population. Twenty-two per cent of JBS’S 2,600 employees have tested positive for the virus, and 434 of the plant’s workers have now recovered. One worker from the plant has died. The outbreak at the JBS plant is the second-largest in Alberta, behind the Cargill meat-packing plant in High River, where 946 employees have tested positive for COVID-19 and one has died. Occupational Health and Safety investigations are ongoing at each facility.

But Alberta Health has also disclosed three other outbreaks in the city, at the Agecare Sunrise Gardens and Orchard Manor continuing-care centres, and the local Mcdonald’s restaurant. The province reports on outbreaks publicly when there are five or more cases.

The outbreaks have Morishita questioning whether it will be reasonable for some businesses in the city to reopen with the first phase of Alberta’s relaunch strategy, which is tentatively scheduled for May 14.

Last week, when Premier Jason Kenney announced the province’s reopening plan, he said problem areas like Brooks, High River and parts of Calgary could see a specialized strategy.

“If the numbers and health and safety considerations say that the city of Brooks should open some things up later or should be staggered, we’re going to support that, because we always support the science,” Morishita said.

He added Brooks would be willing to use its local state of emergency to delay reopening if the municipality felt issues around the virus aren’t resolved, even if the province allows it to reopen.

Alberta chief medical officer of health Dr. Deena Hinshaw said Wednesday officials are currently working on a framework for making decisions about reopenings at a regional level.

“There are certain locations in the province where there are more cases than others, but there have been no final decisions about what kind of a process we would use to determine whether or not, in a particular region, we would need to be slower at reopening than others,” Hinshaw said.

Morishita said one factor pushing up the number of confirmed cases in Brooks is extensive testing, including that of asymptomatic people.

He says 3,500 residents were tested at an asymptomatic clinic last week, a quarter of the city’s population. About 10 per cent of those asymptomatic residents tested positive, Morishita said.

The asymptomatic testing is the right approach because most JBS employees were infected in the community, not at their workplace, according to Morishita.

“This is happening in the community and there’s some issues there that aren’t anybody’s fault,” he said. “Workers tend to be from multi-generational families and larger homes.”

Hinshaw said the province’s approach to outbreaks is containing spread within communities, saying that focusing on individual work sites “will not stop an outbreak.”