National Post (National Edition)
`COME MAY, THE TALK IS THAT WE MIGHT BE AT HERD IMMUNITY'
A SUCCESSFUL VACCINATION CAMPAIGN SEES THE NORTH PREPARE FOR A FREER WORLD
From behind the bar at Woodcutter's Blanket in Whitehorse, owner James Maltby can see what restaurants in many parts of the country can only hope for: paying customers.
Maltby still has some health restrictions restraining his business. His bar in the Yukon capital can be only 50 per cent full to keep social distancing in place, but he hasn't had to close since last summer and most of his customers now have a vaccine in their arm.
Yukon and all of Canada's northern territories have tight travel restrictions, including mandatory 14-day quarantines. But they don't have the lockdowns that have become all too standard elsewhere and for much of the pandemic businesses in the north have been at least partially open.
By contrast, as a third wave continues to hit, restaurants in much of the country outside Atlantic Canada are shuttered to indoor dining, and in Ontario even patios are off the menu. Even in Atlantic Canada, which has weathered COVID-19 well, there are some regional restrictions keeping restaurants closed.
People can gather indoors in groups of as many as 25 and outdoors in groups of 50 in Yukon and they can have broader social bubbles. In most of the rest of Canada, people are being told to stay home as much as possible.
Maltby said he is hopeful that soon there will be no restrictions at all on his business.
“Come May, the talk is that we might be at herd immunity, so we're hoping that results in some kind of change for us leading into the summer,” he said. “People definitely aren't as worried as they were before; I think having the travel restrictions has eased a lot of people.”
Canada's three northern territories — Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut — made a pitch late last year, when vaccines were just beginning to arrive, to have more doses come to their communities than they would be allocated on a strictly per-capita basis.
Dr. Howard Njoo, Canada's deputy chief public health officer, said the territories have many fly-in or remote communities and have more people living in intergenerational housing and that made a standard vaccine rollout impractical.
“It just makes a whole bunch of sense for a whole bunch of reasons to vaccinate all of that household and all the members of that community rather than just going strictly by these various criteria,” he said.
Njoo said the experience in the north with vaccines is being studied now, but he said that's not the only place where the territories have succeeded.
“It's not just the vaccination alone. Some of the other good implementations of public health measures, both at an individual level and also I think at a population level, have contributed to that.”
Combined the three territories have a population of about 120,000, but they have been shipped nearly 140,000 doses of Moderna's vaccine.
According to data from the Public Health Agency of Canada, as of the start of April, Yukon has given a first shot to 68.4 per cent of its eligible population. The Northwest Territories is at 68.9 and Nunavut is at 52.8 per cent. While supplies are increasing rapidly, none of the provinces in the country have reached even 20 per cent of the population with a first shot so far.
Those high numbers put the territories ahead of leading countries like Israel, the United Kingdom. and the United States in getting a first shot to their populations and they're also advancing quickly through second doses.
A few blocks away from Maltby, Chris Corner, owner of Wood Street Ramen, said for him the pandemic hasn't changed his business that much, even before the vaccines were widespread.
“Since about September, at least for myself, personally, it's felt pretty normal.”
He said the pandemic forced him to prioritize a long planned takeout and delivery business, but otherwise little has changed for his restaurant. Corner, who is 24, said he hasn't got his shot yet but plans to soon. He said there are signs all the time that the pandemic is coming to an end in the north.
“We can check out live music and there's been more and more kinds of little shows popping up over the last two or three months.”
Maltby said he hopes the government will soon be able to end the capacity limit and possibly end the mask mandate. He said as more people get vaccinated people are a little more resistant to wearing them.
“More people are definitely super lenient with it, and it's getting harder and harder to enforce,” he said.
Yukon's chief public health officer, Dr. Brendan Hanley, said the territories needed to vaccinate quickly, because they simply don't have the resources to handle a major outbreak.
“We would exhaust our human resources fairly easily, let alone some of the tertiary care facilities that we just don't have in the north,” he said.
Yukon has just four intensive-care unit beds, but Hanley said the health system doesn't offer the same level of care as a big-city hospital and most severely sick people are sent south, straining hospitals in provinces.
“If patients need more than two or three days of ventilation, they are almost uniformly transferred out.”
The Northwest Territories has six ICU beds. Nunavut has none in its lone hospital.
Neither Nunavut nor Yukon currently has any COVID cases and the Northwest Territories has three. In total the three territories have had just over 500 cases and just five deaths since the pandemic began.
The three cases of COVID in the Northwest Territories cropped up in the past few weeks, two of them at a remote diamond mine — and all are the faster-spreading U.K. variant. After the cases emerged health authorities swooped in and vaccinated all of the mine's 200 other employees in a bid to limit further spread.
Dr. Kami Kandola, the medical officer of health for the N.W.T., said it was a reminder that while the situation is good they could lose control quickly.
“There's less room for error in how we implement and follow public health measures. We need more and more people to do the right thing,” she said. “Widespread infection would be devastating to our health care system and our communities.”
Kandola said they're watching the third wave, fuelled by new variants, closely and are hoping to continue to avoid what's happening in the rest of Canada.
“We don't want that to happen in the Northwest Territories. We don't want terms like circuit breaker and lockdowns to become commonplace in our territory.”
Hanley said the vaccine rollout has been a success, but there are still risks, and young people in particular haven't been vaccinated at high enough rates yet.
“I worry about the younger age groups where we have as low as 52 per cent uptake,” he said. “That's definitely enough of a susceptible population to have significant transmission, especially with rare variants.”
To roll out the vaccine, all three territories set up main clinics in their major cities Whitehorse, Yellowknife and Iqaluit, and then spread out to smaller communities, including some that were remote or fly-in only.