After rapid response paramedics were sent to Fort St. James last week to deal with a spike of COVID-related ambulance calls, the mayor of the community is requesting case data be broken down on a local scale.
B.C. Emergency Health Services made the announcement last Wednesday night, reporting local paramedics in the area had responded to 33 ambulance calls in six days.
Mayor Bob Motion says there have been some conflicting reports on case numbers in his district; BCEHS reported 60 active cases of the virus on Wednesday, while Northern Health counted ‘approximately 40’ active cases in the area the following day.
Then on Thursday, Provincial Health Officer Doctor Bonnie Henry told media there were 39 active cases in the community during her daily briefing.
Mayor Motion says the community and the North are feeling confused as a result.
“We’re having a bit of a problem on our numbers here,” said Motion, “The bottom line on all of this is the health authorities won’t release or are unwilling to release, localized data. Data is one of these things where if you don’t give information to people then it is a void that will fill up with misinformation.”
Motion says a breakdown of cases by community would set minds at ease.
The nearby Indigenous community of Nak’azdli Whut’en recently issued a two-week shutdown due to the COVID-19 case spike in the region.
Doctors and COVID-19 patients in the district have also spoken out, worried about what an influx in patients could do to their hospital.
“If we knew in our community what the running numbers were, it would be very, very helpful. In a place like this, we know who has been affected, you just don’t know how many of them,” Motion said.
The mayor is not the only politician in the area who shares this opinion; Nechako Lakes Liberal MLA John Rustad condemned the lack of transparency.
“The real challenge with Fort St. James is the lack of information getting to the community, and that is very disturbing,” Rustad told MyPGNow.
“They don’t know what is actually happening. They don’t know exactly how many cases, how it’s spread out through the communities, if they are in specific clusters, or how they are being addressed.”
As of Friday (Dec 11), there are 1,240 cases in the Northern Health region, with 421 considered active.