B.C. says it’s well-prepared after first case of coronavirus

Vancouver becomes second Canadian city to confirm illness as Toronto sets up help hotline

VANCOUVER— British Columbia and Ontario are both on “high alert” to identify more cases of the novel coronavirus that has claimed more than 100 lives and infected more than 4,000 people, now that the first positive cases have been found in each province.

B.C.’s provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry announced Tuesday that a resident of the Vancouver Coastal Health region is the first person in her province to be found sick with the virus — and Henry said she’d be surprised if more cases aren’t found.

News of the B.C. case follows two cases of the virus being identified in Toronto earlier this week — a husband and wife who had also recently returned from China.

Airport screening, awareness and safety procedures for hospital staff, and a stockpile of protective equipment have B.C. well prepared to identify more coronavirus cases as they come, and to contain them, Henry said.

“This first case is not unexpected to us. We know we have quite a lot of travel between China and Vancouver,” Henry said. “We have been on high alert for a number of weeks now and we have established our emergency response structure so we can maintain that.”

Toronto’s chief medical officer has set up a telephone hotline to handle persistent questions about the illness. It’s aimed at concerned passengers of the China Southern Airlines flight that brought the husband and wife, who developed the virus in recent days, to Pearson airport last Wednesday.

Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health, told the Star that most of the approximately 30 passengers sitting beside or within three rows of the couple have been contacted by her department or public health staff in other cities where the travellers live.

“To my knowledge, all is well with them,” she said Tuesday.

The sick B.C. man is in his 40s and frequently travels to China. He recently returned to B.C. from Wuhan, where he stayed home until he developed symptoms. He called a clinic ahead and tested positive for the coronavirus, Henry told a news conference.

A sample was being sent to a lab in Winnipeg for secondary confirmation that the virus is the same coronavirus that was first found in Wuhan, a city of about 11 million people in China.

He is “currently doing well,” Henry said, and does not require hospitalization. He had “a small number of family contacts” while in isolation at home.

The Toronto couple, meanwhile, tested positive for the virus at Ontario’s public health laboratory. The husband’s symptoms became severe enough to require medical care. Both were wearing face masks on their flight home to Toronto after travelling in the affected area, officials say.

That means cases of the virus have now been found in two of the three Canadian cities the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) identified as priorities to screen for the virus, because they each have direct flights from China. The third is Montreal.

Though the cases did not come as a surprise to public health authorities in either Ontario or B.C., the precautions set out to contain the virus in each province will now be put to the test.

The Ontario government reported the number of potential cases dropped to 11 from the 19 announced on Monday as tests for the coronavirus came back negative from patients in hospital isolation rooms or isolated at home. One of the cases ruled out was at the Niagara Health system hospital in St. Catharines.

B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix voiced confidence in B.C.’s public health capacity Tuesday, praising the B.C. Centre for Disease Control (CDC) for quickly testing the coronavirus patient.

Dix called B.C. a national leader in pandemic response, referring to B.C.’s pandemic planning prior to 2003, which made the province more prepared for the introduction of SARS than Ontario. The Ontario SARS Commission, tasked with getting to the bottom of what went wrong during the outbreak, released its final report in 2007.

It concluded that part of the reason SARS never exploded in Vancouver the way it did in Ontario involved an element of luck that the first patient went directly from the airport to his doctor, limiting how many others were exposed to the virus.