Province's top public health doctor looks back on a year with COVID

One year after COVID-19 arrived in New Brunswick, the province's chief medical officer of health has learned a lot about the disease and about being the public face of Public Health.

Dr. Jennifer Russell stands behind the decision to be Public Health'sonly voice. Speaking to Harry Forestell, the host of CBC's New Brunswick at 6, about the one-year anniversary, Russell defended it.

She was asked about her "tight grip on the message" and why none of New Brunswick's microbiologists, epidemiologists and vaccine specialists are available to the media.

Russell said it was important to have "unity of message" and to establish trust.

She said "confusion sows doubt and doubt then does erode the ability for the population to hear messages in a way that will be meaningful for them and that will translate into the things that are going to protect them in a public health crisis."

Russell also stands behind the decision to release nothing about positive casesbeyond the health region and whether they were travel-related.

She said there's a stigma attached to getting COVID-19 and she heard directly from people who tested positive and then suffered the added pain of negative comments from others.

"Stigma was a huge problem," she said.

"I received emails and information from people who were on the receiving end of the negative impact of that stigma."

She said she always tried to balance the public's desire to know with the patient's right to privacy,

When asked about the continually changing message on masks, for example Russell said she tried to make it clear from the beginning that "it was an evolving situation, that the information would continually change, and that we had to be able to change with it."

Russell said it was important to work in the flexibility "to continue to change our positions, change our recommendations based on that new information."

In the end, Russell said the decisions rested with government.

"At the end of the day, my job is as a civil servant, so my job is to give the best recommendations to the government, and according to the democratic process, they have the power to make the laws and change them as they see fit because they are the elected officials."

Awaiting the pandemic

Early last year, Russell said she knew it was only a matter of time before New Brunswick would see its first confirmed case. She said she had been bracing herself since January 2020, when she was watching the situation evolve across the country and around the world.

Russell started her public health career after outbreaks of H1N1, Ebola and Zika, so she was aware of the importance of mitigating risks and planning in advance. In fact, she said the Public Health Agency of Canada was planning a mock exercise "at the national level" last spring.

"So obviously, when you're dealing with a real pandemic, the mock exercise became moot," she said.

No border regret

As for criticism that the government didn't shut the borders securely enough, Russell said it wouldn't have been possible to completely shut the gates.

She said "the necessities of life come through those borders. So there's no way we could ever close those borders completely. We're not a self-sufficient province to be able to provide all the services and goods that we would need to sustain ourselves through an extended period of time."

Russell said she worried throughout the entire pandemic even when case counts were low or non-existent because she knew that numbers could rise virtually overnight.

"So I would never breathe easy when the numbers were low, knowing that, well, it just takes 24 to 48 hours for things to blow up in any setting."

But she became particularly concerned after case counts started to climb following the holidays.

"The surge after the Christmas holidays was very challenging. Those case numbers went up to a level that was quite uncomfortable for this province as a whole on many different levels."

She said the number of cases stretched the province's health-care resources to a concerning level.

Vaccine rollout

For now, Russell said the province is sticking to its decision to wait until the very end to vaccinate those between 25 and 69. After those over 70 are vaccinated, the province will skip to those between 16 and 24, rather than going down through the 60s, 50s, and so on as most other jurisdictions are doing.

She said they've listened to the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

"It's evolving. I mean, at one point we weren't going to use AstraZeneca for people over the age of 65. Now Quebec is going to do that," said Russell.

"It'll keep changing. So I can tell you today that this is the plan. And next week and two weeks from now and a month from now, it could change again."

The theory is that the younger demographic has a higher risk of transmitting "in terms of congregating and socializing, etc.," she said.

Although we can "breathe easier" knowing that vulnerable populations have been vaccinated, Russell said it's too early to say what percentage of the population needs to be vaccinated in order to start loosening restrictions. That's why shestopped short of trying to predict the end of the pandemic.

"I think the only thing that's predictable is that it's unpredictable, so I could tell you one thing today and next thing you know, we're hit with new variants and changes will happen at that point."

However, once everyone has two doses of the vaccine, Russell said the province should be able to lessen some of the restrictions.

"But again, time will tell. We don't know what's going to happen globally. There are some countries who aren't vaccinating their population. So I think COVID is going to be with us for a while and how we manage it as a province and as a country will be determined in some ways by how it's being managed globally."