WHY DIDN'T DR. HENRY ACT DURING ELECTION?
Virus surge could have embarrassed Horgan had campaign been longer
For the first COVID-19 briefing after the provincial election, the news was discouraging, even for the usually upbeat provincial health officer.
“This is a bit of a sobering weekend for us,” Dr. Bonnie Henry told reporters Monday. “This is the largest number of cases that we've had in a three-day period.”
There were a record 817 cases from Friday to Monday. Over one 24-hour period, the count topped 300 for the first time. The province now has more than 2,300 active cases and another 5,000 people are being monitored by public health.
The weekend tally capped a surge in cases that overlapped with the election campaign.
When Premier John Horgan called the early vote Sept. 21, the province had recorded 8,208 cases of COVID-19 since the outbreak began. As of Monday, the running total had soared to 13,371, an increase of more than 5,000 or 63 per cent. To put it another way, almost 40 per cent of B.C.'s total number of cases were reported over the five-week election campaign.
More than 90 per cent of the new cases appeared in and around Metro Vancouver. Almost two-thirds were in the Fraser Health region and most of those were concentrated in Surrey and other communities south of the river. Henry had warned in earlier briefings about the rise in cases in the region, attributable to “social gatherings, weddings and family celebrations in people's homes.”
Now she was taking action via an order issued under her authority as provincial health officer.
“This order limits gatherings in private homes to no more than your immediate household and six additional others,” Dr. Henry announced. “I know that for many people this will be a significant challenge — that large community celebrations are part of their culture and their community. If you come from a large family that's living in a home together, six additional guests may be too many and you may need to consider to focus on your own immediate family.”
Nor did she leave any doubt about the region she had targeted with the order.
“The immediate focus will be on the Fraser Health region because the increase in cases related to this type of celebration is more notable here. Orders, as we know, are our last resort, but it does reflect how serious we need to take this now.”
She had signalled her intentions as cases surged past the 200 mark after Thanksgiving, with social gatherings in Fraser Health said to be overly responsible for the increase.
“Additional measures can and will be put in place if they're needed,” she warned the Thursday before election day.
“Measures that we know will be effective in trying to break these large transmission events.”
It raised the question of why the delay in acting. The authority was hers alone. But at the outset of the election she pledged to continue consulting Health Minister Adrian Dix even though it would no longer be “appropriate” for him to share a platform with her at the regular media briefings while campaigning for office.
“But he will be very much involved in ensuring the ongoing management of the crisis, along with minister (Carole) James who is the caretaker minister during this period,” Henry told reporters Sept. 21.
“The deputy minister of health Stephen Brown and myself will be meeting with minister Dix and minister James, to make sure that everybody is up to date on what is happening on a daily basis with the pandemic, and is able to ensure that we have active, ongoing management of any issues that arise as we move through this pandemic together.”
Dix didn't return for the briefing Monday, though the election is over and he remains minister of health, at least until a new cabinet is sworn in. (Hard to imagine that the premier would shuffle his best minister mid-pandemic.)
I'm guessing Dix stayed away because he knew what was coming and thus could avoid awkward questions about whether they had held off the crackdown until the election was over.
His absence left Henry to account for the timing on her own.
“No,” she said, when asked — she didn't hold off because the election was underway. “My focus has been entirely on managing with the team what is going on with this pandemic.
“We have taken additional measures as we've moved through these last few weeks. Prior to Thanksgiving, I made a lot of appeals to people about the need to keep family gatherings small. Unfortunately, there was a number of events that have happened that have led to quite dramatic increases over the past week.”
Still, there was that increase of 5,000 cases in just five weeks. Had she acted sooner could it have bent the curve downward before now?
“I think we did, actually, decrease our curve,” she replied. “Now we're seeing it increase more in a focal area.”
Notwithstanding her earlier vow to keep Dix in the loop, she also told reporters that “there was no consultation with the cabinet or the political side of things.”
Still, it must have come as a relief to the “political side” that the New Democrats made it all the way through the campaign before the high number of cases reported Monday. Had the campaign gone on for another week, the surge in cases could have become a major embarrassment.
I'm guessing Dix stayed away because he knew what was coming and thus could avoid awkward questions about whether they had held off the crackdown until the election was over.