In the line of fire, at war with an invisible enemy Senior health leaders who became the public faces of Manitoba’s COVID response look back to When Everything Changed five years ago By: Kevin Rollason Posted: 7:33 PM CDT Thursday, Mar. 13, 2025 Last Modified: 9:16 AM CDT Friday, Mar. 14, 2025 Updates

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/03/2025 (577 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A beaded necklace with the letters spelling “Stay Strong.” A knitted teddy bear used as a Christmas-tree ornament. Cards and letters of thanks.

Five years after Manitoba experienced its first positive case of COVID-19 — before vaccine mandates, lockdowns and border restrictions — the gifts are among the few positive memories held by some of the public faces of the province’s pandemic response.

But Dr. Brent Roussin, the province’s chief public health officer, Lanette Siragusa, then-chief nursing officer for Shared Health and now the vice-dean of education at the University of Manitoba’s Rady Faculty of Health Services, and Dr. Jazz Atwal, a family doctor who has served as the province’s deputy chief provincial public health officer since 2021, all endured much darker experiences.

“I never had a security detail… But there certainly were a number of threats, some concerning ones.”–Dr. Brent Roussin

The health system leaders received threatening emails and phone calls, tried to counter growing misinformation about restrictions and vaccination mandates and witnessed the unrelenting physical and mental toll on health-care workers.

But while Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s public health chief, reportedly maintains a security detail because of lingering COVID-based threats, that’s not the case for Manitoba’s senior health officials.

“No, I never had a security detail,” Roussin said. “But there certainly were a number of threats — some concerning ones. I received a lot of support from (provincial) security services… they made sure the house was secure.

“Almost all of the threats came in the form of letters or emails or a posting online… for the most part, the in-person interactions are positive. There have only been a couple, in all those years, of face-to-face threats taking place.”

Atwal said he also received threats, but his had an additional nastiness.

“(Mine) wasn’t only just about the response,” he said. “There were items related to race, as well. There was a lot of that, another layer of complexity…. But I don’t think I got as many threats as Dr. Roussin.”

Five years ago this week, the province announced that three people who already were exhibiting symptoms while returning from travelling abroad had been confirmed as Manitoba’s first cases of COVID-19. They were placed in quarantine at home. Only health-care workers were allowed to enter.

Six days later, Premier Brian Pallister declared a state of emergency, accompanied by the first set of public-gathering restrictions.

Then, on March 27, Margaret Sader, a woman in her 60s who worked at a local dental-supply company, became the first Manitoban to die from the novel coronavirus.

Since then, more than 2,000 Manitobans’ names were added to the list. But the total number of COVID deaths is difficult to peg accurately, because the province now lumps together all respiratory virus reporting.

The last report that separately tracked COVID-19, for the week of Oct. 30-Nov. 5, 2022, showed a total of 2,256 Manitobans had died since the beginning of the pandemic. There had also been 152,072 cases of the virus, 13,336 hospital admissions, and 1,844 patients who needed intensive care.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, which also combines all respiratory outbreaks in health-care facilities, this week reported outbreaks at 18 personal-care homes, four hospital units and in single wards at Riverview Health Centre and Misericordia Health Centre.

“I’ve kept them all… The cards, the letters, the little gift… When I see them I remember how they just really gave me strength.”–Lanette Siragusa

Siragusa’s overall memory is of “the toll it took.”

“It was our health-care workers, our children, our elderly,” she said. “It was just everyone, right? And it was so long. It wasn’t just one and done, it was years.”

She’s grateful to everyone who reached out at the time.

“I’ve kept them all,” she said. “The cards, the letters, the little gift — I put them all away and I’ve looked at them since.

“When I see them I remember how they just really gave me strength and motivated me and reminded me of the reason we were doing what we were doing.”

Siragusa said students at one school sent necklaces with messages spelled out in letter beads.

“It was ‘Stay Strong’ and another one saying ‘Thank You.’” she said. “It was really sweet. There was also a poem written and a song written. It was all very sweet and very thoughtful.

“They were an inspiration, for sure.”

Atwal said he received a Christmas ornament from one person and a knitted teddy bear from another.

“My children are now almost 17 and 14 now, so they were a bit old for a teddy bear, so we put it on our tree as a Christmas decoration,” he said.

“There were a lot of emails with, ‘thank you for what you are doing,’ recognizing that these are challenging times… there was more positivity than negativity.”

Atwal said he was struck by the proliferation of misinformation generated by some Manitobans.

“There were a lot of emails with, ‘thank you for what you are doing,’ recognizing that these are challenging times… there was more positivity than negativity.”–Dr. Jazz Atwal

“The greater rise of social media, how potentially one person or one tweet could impact how maybe hundreds or thousands of people think,” he said.

“In the future, that will be the greatest challenge, the communication side, and having people really understand the objective evidence and not the singular narrative about something.”

Roussin said even though the societal divide was something he could have predicted — history shows it happened during previous pandemics — it was, nevertheless, among the worst things he experienced overall.

He lost a close friend — not to the virus, but because they didn’t agree on the restrictions.

“There were the direct impacts from the virus, which were tragic. The loss of life and the morbidity that came from it,” he said.

“But you can also look at those indirect effects, the effects of our response, the division which the pandemic caused…. Today we still see those fault lines as a result of the pandemic, so I think there is still a lot of healing to be done.

“I think the pandemic has had far-reaching effects and was much further reaching than any virus itself could cause.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca