Just how many cases of COVID-19 are there in the Tri-Cities?
That’s the question on many residents' mind of late, especially after revelations that a handful of community exposures this week triggered closures at such popular restaurants as Earl’s in Port Coquitlam (at least three cases), Brown’s Socialhouse in Port Moody (at least one case) and yesterday, at the retail shop Aritzia in Coquitlam Centre (cases not revealed).
But it’s a question that has proved impossible to answer with any certainty. Throughout the course of the pandemic here in B.C., provincial health authorities have never released data on current or cumulative caseloads at the municipal level.
They will declare outbreaks to the public when the virus gets into a poultry plant or prison, a health care facility like a hospital or long-term care home, or sometimes when there are people they can’t track down through contact tracing.
There have been calls for increased transparency, with some local politicians looking for neighbourhood level data and others calling on health authorities to collect important information on how race or poverty plays a factor in the spread of the disease.
“Over the last few months, particularly due to the pandemic period, a lot of things have come forward, and we see that marginalized citizens of our city have been disproportionately suffering from many things, and that’s not evident just in our city, but across the country,” Burnaby Coun. Sav Dhaliwal told council earlier this week, in which council voted unanimously in favour of endorsing the collection of race-based COVID-19 data.
Tri-City politicians have been largely silent on the issue, despite a major outbreak at Superior Processing Poultry Ltd. where over 60 employees fell ill with the coronavirus, many of whom were newly arrived immigrants. Through reporting by the Tri-City News, it was found many of those 60-plus workers who fell ill did not live in the same municipality where they worked, again complicating how we tally the pathogen's path as it moves through and across communities.
Still, what information health authorities share continues to shift.
Just yesterday, Fraser Health launched an online portal to update the public in those cases where their contact tracers fail to get a hold of everyone in an exposure event. It's a similar system that the B.C. Centre for Disease Control uses to flag inbound flights where at least one passenger has tested positive for COVID-19. Yet, as of Friday afternoon, all live contact tracing now occurring in Fraser Health does not meet that threshold and nothing has been posted on the site.
“We walk a balance between protecting the privacy of the individuals involved and avoiding creating stigma but still trying to keep the public safe,” said Fraser Health interim chief medical health officer Dr. Elizabeth Brodkin.
It’s a tough balance, leaving Tri-City residents, researchers and reporters to parse out the numbers.
With over 1,000 people from every health region in the province (including Fraser Health) falling ill due to a Canada Day weekend exposure in Kelowna, many secondary contacts have yet to show symptoms and Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has said cases are almost certain to climb as the incubation period wears on.
Here’s what the latest numbers from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control tell us about our corner of the province. Broken down by health care delivery area — where the Tri-Cities gets lumped in with Burnaby, Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows and New Westminster — Fraser North has registered 36 cases of COVID-19 over the last 14 days.
That’s quite a few less than the 107 reported in the Okanagan, but more than the four reported on the North Shore and Richmond.
How many of those cases are in the Tri-Cities remains unclear.
— with files from Dustin Godfrey
