On Tuesday, September 6th, two cases of Coronavirus were found inside the Manoir Notre Dame in Moncton. The New Brunswick Government has rapidly taken steps to test and trace contacts. However, the government has been very hesitant to recommend any other action.
I’m from New Brunswick, and I hear many New Brunswick friends and relatives saying “Well, this is worrying, but they did clean up that outbreak in Campbleton”. This is true. The New Brunswick government cleaned up the outbreak in Campbleton with rapid test and travel restrictions and restrictions on social and business activities in the Cambleton region.
You can’t do different things and expect the same results. Hope is not a strategy. Every day the government delays advising people to avoid social contacts is a day the virus gets to spread. And worse than Campbleton, Moncton is the hub city of the Maritimes, at the juncture of three provinces. Worse, this is the week before Thanksgiving. I need not remind you that the virus spread from Wuhan during the Chinese New Year, when infected people spread from the epicentre all over China. Much the same could happen with Moncton.
Small Things Grow Large
You might say “but it’s only 19 cases, this is small”. We surely have learned in this crisis that a small outbreak quickly becomes a big outbreak if left unchecked. And social life in the Maritimes is fairly close to normal at the moment. Especially in New Brunswick where masks are not required. Let’s consider the current outbreak: how long has the virus been spreading? We can work backwards.
- The virus takes 5-7 days to produce symptoms
- It takes 3-5 days for someone to become infectious.
- It takes a day for test results to come back.
- The virus was first detected in two symptomatic nursing home patients, who did not personally travel outside New Brunswick.
- A nursing home patient was symptomatic “early last week” according to the daily gleaner. That puts their symptoms at roughly Tuesday, September 29th.
- Given the 5-7 day symptom period, that means infection happened on September 24th or earlier.
September 24th is 15 days ago. So that’s 15 days the virus could have been circulating undetected in the Moncton area.
There are high odds of undetected community spread. Government needs to contain it and find it
We know that most transmission happens between asymptomatic or presymptomatic people. The New Brunswick government does not appear to be acting on this principle: they are asking people to come for a test only if they have symptoms. If the virus has spread elsewhere in the 15 days, then this approach will likely miss cases.
When Coronavirus re-emerged in Auckland, the New Zealand government did two things:
- The very next day they moved Auckland to level 3 alert and restricted travel from the local area. They didn’t wait for a cluster, they moved as soon as they identified a case of unknown origin.
- They started mass testing of the local population, including asymptomatic people. The goal was to identify other clusters.
The Atlantic bubble is a great policy for keeping Coronavirus out of the maritimes. But once it is already in, you need some kind of local reaction. At a minimum the New Brunswick government should advise people against travelling in and out of Moncton, and to limit their contacts and excursions.
This is a very hard thing to recommend right before the Thanksgiving holiday. But even harder would be letting Covid spread as winter approaches and while the school season is on. The further it spreads, the harder the response to contain it will be. Better to nip it in the bud now while things are small. We’ve seen how quickly Quebec has gone from 40 cases per day to 1200-1300.