Montreal public health scrambles to stop spread of coronavirus

Montreal’s chief public health officer acknowledged on Monday that authorities are in a race against time to prevent local transmission of the coronavirus, as the number of COVID-19 cases in the city jumped from 11 on Sunday to 18 on Monday.

Among the cases in Montreal, two are in critical condition, Dr. Mylène Drouin told reporters. On Saturday, Ste-justine Hospital reported a child tested positive for the coronavirus and has returned home in satisfactory condition.

Meanwhile, Montreal’s first person to fall ill from COVID-19 has recovered from the pandemic respiratory illness and is no longer in self-isolation, Drouin noted. That individual contracted the novel SARS-COV-2 virus in February.

“It’s difficult to talk about predictions,” Drouin explained to reporters.

“What we’ve observed in certain countries is there has been a doubling of cases every two to three days. Does that mean things will go at this speed here? What we are expecting is an increase in cases linked to the return from travels coming back (from the March school break).”

On Sunday, Drouin’s counterpart in Ottawa, Dr. Vera Etches, warned in a statement that “there could now be hundreds to even a thousand cases in the community now.”

For her part, Drouin ruled out any community transmission for the moment, based on the fact that all Montreal cases can be traced back to travels from abroad.

To date, Ontario has reported a total of 177 COVID -19 cases, compared with 50 in Quebec.

“What we really want to avoid is the second and third chains of transmission,” Drouin explained.

The coronavirus’s reproductive rate — that is, the number of secondary infections generated from one infected individual — is understood to be between 2 and 2.5, higher than for seasonal influenza, according to the World Health Organization.

To “put the brakes on second and third chains of transmission,” the public health department has implemented a three-pronged strategy. The first prong involves rapidly detecting cases, retracing an infected individual’s contacts and isolating anyone who has been exposed to that individual.

“Within that strategy, we’re finding contacts resulting from people who have travelled abroad. We haven’t finished that part of the strategy.”

The second prong is protecting Montreal’s vulnerable populations, chiefly the elderly living in long-term care centres. To that end, the government has prohibited visits to nursing homes.

The third prong is preparing Montreal’s hospitals to absorb a wave of cases. Hospitals are already carrying out inventories on the number of ventilator machines they might need in the event that many patients develop pneumonia — one of the severe complications from the disease.

(COVID-19 is considered far more lethal than the flu, which typically has a mortality rate of 0.1 per cent. In contrast, COVID -19’s mortality rate is as high as 5.7 per cent, according to a new study by the Lancet medical journal.

“It’s (using this) combination of strategies for the cases that we’re going to succeed ... in flattening the epidemiological curve” of COVID-19 in Montreal, Drouin suggested.

For that reason, she strongly recommended that people stay at home and otherwise engage in social distancing.