■ DR. HENRY HAS WORKED TIRELESSLY: PALMER,
A cast of hundreds contributes to all those decisions about COVID-19
B.C. was in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak when a flash of emotion from Dr. Bonnie Henry signalled the stresses to come.
“We know that elderly people are more likely to have more severe disease,” the provincial health officer told reporters. “I am asking people to consider not coming together, particularly if you have people in your gathering, who are more …”
Then she choked up. “Excuse me,” she said, tears filling her eyes. Whereupon Health Minister Adrian Dix gently intervened: “Just take a minute. It's OK.”
Regaining her composure, Henry resumed her plea on behalf of the elderly and other “people who are more susceptible to having severe illness from this disease.”
She was drawing on her experience with earlier outbreaks — SARS, Ebola, H1N1.
“I just know how stressful it is for our health care system, for my colleagues and their families … for the people dealing with this right now,” she explained.
Plus there was a personal element. “I am hoping you won't play the emotional part of me too much,” she asked reporters. “My parents will be very upset: My mother already tells me I look very tired.”
In retrospect, that moment where Henry briefly lost it conveyed the seriousness of the outbreak in personal terms that transcended the data.
“It is not just numbers on a page, not just a case count,” as Dix put it afterward.
The date was Saturday March 7. B.C. was reporting just 27 cases of COVID-19, about half of them traced to travel from Iran at a time when China was regarded as the main source point.
On the very day Henry choked up, B.C. was getting another raft of international cases, courtesy of a global dentistry conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
“I was not aware of the dental conference,” she would tell reporters 10 days later. “I was advising that medical conferences in particular should not be held and I'm very disappointed.”
Dozens of cases would eventually be contact traced back to the dentists.
As of that first weekend in March 2020, B.C. had yet to record any deaths from COVID-19, but that was about to change.
On Monday the 9th, Henry announced the death of a man in his 80s who had been a resident at the Lynn Valley Care Centre in North Vancouver.
His would be the first of 20 deaths in one of the worst outbreaks in a long-term care facility.
Two days later, the World Health Organization made it official: the outbreak was a global pandemic. Thereafter the Dix/Henry briefings dominated the news cycle, crowding out everything else.
Throughout spring and into the summer, the story arc was mostly positive — worst-case scenarios avoided, curves flattened, surgeries renewed and the economy reopening.
But through it all, Henry warned that with every pandemic there's a second wave, sometimes worst than the first.
“I need everyone to pay attention,” she cautioned as August gave way to September. B.C. was at a “precipice.” There could be no slackening of effort to contain the case count.
Nevertheless, in a calculated act of brinksmanship, Premier John Horgan called an election and put the government into caretaker mode just as the second wave was building.
Henry did not announce any decisive action to contain the wave until after the votes were cast. Later, she confessed to being “surprised” at how quickly the second wave had surged while the politicians were out serving their political interests.
But it has not been her style to voice reservations about decisions once made.
“I am not prepared to start second guessing what we did,” she said when asked last March if she would do anything different in the first few weeks if she were to do it all over again.
She has pretty much kept to that approach. She is not inclined to acknowledge taking second looks even when she changes position — on masks, rapid testing, reporting local case counts — in light of changing evidence and circumstances.
Still, from time to time one glimpses the pressures she must be under with every decision she makes.
“I want to be clear this is not a random process — this is not me making a decision out of the blue,” she said last week, defending the strategy for rolling out vaccines.
She then outlined a deliberative process including the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, and the provincial immunization committee and vaccine evaluation centre.
She's the one on the front line, doing the talking. But behind her stands an army of researchers, scientists and health care workers.
One is reminded, too, that the long, hard slog toward community, or herd, immunity is not over.
The vaccination strategy is just getting underway. The case count is higher than when she pleaded “I need your help. … I need you to do more” six weeks ago. Variants of concern remain an unknown.
When it comes to fairly assessing Henry's performance, it should be noted that Monday's COVID-19 briefing was number 250 since January 2020. Most ran 45 minutes to an hour. She delivered virtually all of them. I can't think of another B.C. premier, cabinet minister or public official who has presided over as many media briefings on one complicated subject in such a compressed time frame.
In my four decades covering B.C. politics, there really is nothing like it.
It should be noted that Monday's COVID-19 briefing was number 250 since January 2020. ... (Dr. Henry) delivered virtually all of them.