Seaton House flu outbreak spreads
Three on one floor of shelter showing symptoms, 2 in hospital
Inside the city’s largest homeless shelter, an influenza outbreak that killed a man this week and hospitalized nine men has spread.
The outbreak was initially contained to the fourth floor of Seaton House, near Jarvis and Gerrard Sts. It’s now on the third floor as well.
“We now have three individuals on the third floor who have come down with flu-like illness,” Dr. Allison Chris, an Associate Medical Officer of Health for Toronto Public Health, confirmed to the Star on Friday evening.
“We’re treating this as influenza at this point.”
Two of those people have been taken to hospital, while two from the initial nine who were hospitalized have since been discharged. One person who was in intensive care has been moved to a unit for those in less severe condition.
“I don’t have more information at this point,” Chris said when she was asked about the condition of the others.
“It would be expected that we would have seen some spread based on how influenza and respiratory outbreaks progress. We do our best to put our outbreak control measures in place.”
Those measures include keeping movement around the shelter to a minimum, teaching residents how to avoid spreading flu and prohibiting those on the af- fected floor from dining in the same areas as the others.
The fourth floor, where the outbreak began, usually serves men age 55 or older. “They are typically very vulnerable, especially because they’re aged and many of them have serious mentalhealth concerns and many of them require nursing support,” local Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam told the Star when the outbreak began this week.
The third floor is the harm-reduction floor, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) organizer A.J. Withers said Friday.
“It’s, like, chronic alcohol users, so again, a lot of compromised immune systems,” Withers said.
Both Withers and Chris spoke to the issue of crowding in the city’s shelters helping spread illnesses such as influenza.
“One of the risks for being in a situation where there could be crowding is that, with any type of disease, there is an increased risk of transmission,” Chris told the Star. “Seaton House is full, as is pretty much every shelter in the city.”
“It’s a powder keg,” Withers added. “It’s basically impossible to contain an outbreak like this.”
Public Health feels their measures for controlling the outbreak are working, Chris said.
Their process of tracking the outbreak and spread of infectious diseases is complex.
It integrates methods such as keep-
“We’re especially concerned if what’s going on in Seaton House ends up in someplace like All Saints . . . or Moss Park Armoury.” A.J. WITHERS ONTARIO COALITION AGAINST POVERTY ORGANIZER
ing track of those with symptoms, and using epidemiological “curves” to “make a picture” of how a disease spreads.
OCAP is concerned about this happening in other shelters in the city.
“We’re especially concerned if what’s going on in Seaton House ends up in someplace like All Saints,” Withers said. She added that the temperature at the shelter had dropped down to around 14 C at some points. One man there had contracted pneumonia, she believes. “Or Moss Park Armoury, that had 122 people in it one night,” she said.
“And it’s just a giant open space.”