Urgency mounts as regions lurch toward Quebec's COVID orange zone

This is how a virus spreads: in Thetford Mines a procession of hair salon clients return to theirseniors' residences. Unbeknownst to anyone, theirstylistis carrying the novel coronavirus.

In Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, a group meetsfor a barbecue. Five infections.

Elsewhere in the Montrgie, 17 people gatherin a restaurant leading to 31 positive tests and 330 additional case files for contact tracers to run down.

In Quebec City, a mass testing campaign is launched in a school overfears one or morestaff members unwittingly spread coronavirus from classroom to classroom.

Exponential curves start small and grow quickly.

The difficulty lies in establishing precisely where Quebec is on the slope. But the province seems to be somewhere on it, andpublic health directorDr. Horacio Arrudais plainly worried.

"It's clearsome areas will be in orange soon," he told a news conference Tuesday, referring to the government's new colour-coded alert system.

If that happens which Health Minister Christian Dub allowed is a real possibility in the coming days given eight regions are currently at the pre-alert yellow stage it will likely be in one of the province's outlying areas.

Since Sept. 1, three have set new records for daily number of positive tests.

The numbers aren't huge, cautioned infectious disease specialist Dr. Raymond Tellier, and that,coupled with the lag associated with the comparatively longincubation period of COVID-19, makes statistical projectionstricky.

"But there's a very disturbing trend here," said Tellier, an associate professor ofmedicineatMcGill University.

"I don't know that it's cause for great panic just now, butit certainly shows the need for caution and vigilance ... exponentials always start very low, very low, and then they shoot up."

During the first COVID wave, Montreal, with its densely populated neighbourhoods, was hit particularly hard, while outlying regions with their sparse populations were generally spared.

But that does not mean asecond wave wouldbe similar.

"The real question you have to ask is not so much the density of the population, but how many people are interacting and what's the network of connections," Tellier said.

The regional challenge

Tellier offered a hypothetical. Takea large area where few people live, and houses are all separated by several kilometres.

If they know each other or are related, and have a habit of meeting up, you "create a network of interaction that will facilitate the spread of the virus across the network."

To prevent the spread, he said,"you have to disconnect the network."

That's what public health officials in the Lower Saint-Lawrencescrambled to do in the wake of outbreaks at a CEGEP and an agricultural college.

The province dealt with a Quebec City outbreak by cracking down on karaoke clubs, and Sherbrooke has tried likewise in stopping the spread in Ascot, a neighbourhood just south of downtown.

But how does one do that at scale, in small communities and tightly-knit rural areas?

What happens when community spread sets in?

The North Shoreregion is in the midst of answering those questions and several more; it is currently investigating six cases that have no known origin.

They're not alone.

Liliana Romero, the public health director for the Chaudire-Appalaches region, which includes Thetford Mines, called the situation "very worrying ... we've seen outbreaks in seniors' residences, schools and workplaces, which tells us community transmission has taken root."

'The health system is fragile'

Testing capacity, public health resources and front-line care for those people who get desperately ill from COVID are less plentiful in the regions than they are in big cities.

That's not typically a problem, in that fighting the pandemic isn't entirely reliant on local resources. But as cases multiply, and the more serious ones are sent to urban centres, it piles the pressure on the health system.

It's not a coincidenceDubbuttressed his government's pleas for a heightened culture of personal responsibility with the argument that the system is "fragile".

"The issue, the area where we are most vulnerable, is personnel," he said in Quebec City on Tuesday.

The summer months provided some breathing room to bolster the ranks in long-term care facilities, but there still shortages, notablyof nurses and nurses' aides.

Though the province is slowly tightening the screw, and will give it a couple more turns should a region start flashing orange or red by closing bars and banning groupings of more than six people public health officials are doubling down on appeals to civic responsibilityand common sense.

It looks like anincreasingly tough ask for a province where, in the words of Premier Franois Legaulton Tuesday, "people are tired of hearing about it after six months," particularly those in areas where, until this month, the virus has seemed very far away.

"When you don't have any cases for weeks and months maybe it can lead to people letting down their guard," said Thetford Mines Mayor Marc-Alexandre Brousseau. "This is a pretty striking demonstration the virus is still around us."

Legault urges Quebec solidarity to fight COVID-19

4 years ago

Duration 1:43

Quebec Premier Franois Legault expressed fear over the jump in coronavirus cases and called on residents to limit gatherings to curb the virus's spread.