Oxford House turns corner on COVID-19 outbreak

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/12/2020 (1914 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The chief of a northern First Nation that’s starting to bounce back from a COVID-19 outbreak says officials from outside the reserve took a few days to get a contact-tracing process underway as the virus began to spread.

The experience of Bunibonibee Cree Nation, also called Oxford House, illustrates the strain First Nations officials face when outbreaks hit multiple reserves.

“We can see the light at the end of the tunnel — and it’s not a train coming,” Chief Richard Hart said Wednesday, hours after a third elder died from the coronavirus.

Hart’s fly-in community of about 2,500 people, 950 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, had 86 active cases and 108 recoveries as of Tuesday night.

The first COVID-19 case emerged Dec. 4, and spread rapidly due to overcrowded homes and limited access to clean water, factors that plague many remote reserves.

Hart said the community believes someone who returned from medical treatment in Winnipeg unrelated to COVID-19 brought the virus into the community, a pattern federal officials noticed during H1N1 outbreaks in 2009.

Since then, 21 of 24 residents at the local personal care home have tested positive for COVID-19, as well as nine of the 43 staff members. The 21 residents travelled by charter flight to Winnipeg to stay at a special wing of the Holy Family Home on Main Street, to be closer to a hospital, should they need it.

“When an elder passes, there’s a lot of history that goes with them; they’re the keepers of the oral history of the community,” Hart said. “That’s our worst fear, and it’s come alive.”

Hart said homes with as many as 15 residents have had everyone test positive.

Some households have water and sewer connections, but most get water and waste service from specialized trucks. If there is a breakdown, it can take three to four days to reach a home.

That makes it hard to wash one’s hands when the water runs low, Hart said.

“If you let up your vigilance on this virus, it can slip in and wreak devastation on families and communities,” he said.

The chief said he texted federal officials as soon as he learned about the first COVID-19 case, at 6 a.m. on Dec. 4. Within three hours, he said Indigenous Services Canada arranged “a full-blown, all-resources teleconference.”

The community informally traced the infected person’s contacts, before officials got the process underway.

The First Nations Pandemic Response Co-ordination Team sent representatives to the reserve about five days later, Hart said, to help with contact tracing and testing.

“It was a bit of a frustration at first, because we did know about certain cases and we did know who the contacts were, but the testing didn’t occur until a little bit later,” Hart said.

“There were a number of people, and it took a while to catch up on the contact tracing.”

Hart said the community tried to isolate those people and keep homes locked down as they waited for testing to start. Yet he stressed that the response team has been extremely helpful, and has workers staying for three full rotations. “I really have no complaint about the response,” he said.

Hart said there simply might not be enough people in Manitoba to keep up with the multiple outbreaks on reserves.

“If you have adequate staffing to do the contact tracing right off the bat, then you can do testing almost immediately,” he said, worrying that the lag allows cases to spread.

The chief of another remote northern reserve, Shamattawa, has complained the response team pulled out while the virus was spreading, making it difficult to trace contacts of sick people. Soldiers were sent to the reserve earlier this month to help with the COVID outbreak.

On Wednesday, the response team was not available for an interview, but told other media its representatives had stayed longer in Shamattawa than originally planned, and had tried to balance multiple demands.

Melanie MacKinnon, one of the senior members of the team who runs Ongomiizwin Health Services, stressed earlier this month that gatherings involving people from different households on First Nations and at funerals must be cut out.

“We do not have the health human resources locally in your nursing stations or health centres. We are thin on the ground with rapid response teams,” MacKinnon said during a Dec. 11 virtual briefing.

“The idea of a lot of people, or additional supports, or the health system, or even the military coming in to help us — and we’re not changing our behaviour — needs to really be reconsidered, because that’s not going to be our reality,” she said.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca