For about 10 days and counting, hundreds of people in the Tantramar area have been in a perpetual version of self isolation, because they work across the provincial border in Nova Scotia. And despite concerns raised by local political representatives like MLA Megan Mitton, Sackville deputy mayor Ron Aiken, and Amherst mayor David Kogon, the situation remains.
At Tuesday’s COVID-19 update from the province, Chief Medical Officer of Health Jennifer Russell said the new isolation requirement was necessary, despite the stress, strain and hardship it places on people. “We are in a very precarious position with respect to our proximity to Nova Scotia at the moment,” said Russell. “And so it is very important that we put whatever measures in place that are going to protect the population at this time.”
The state of the COVID-19 pandemic in Nova Scotia is dire. On Tuesday, 153 new cases were announced. By far the lion’s share of those cases are in the province’s central zone, concentrated in the population centres of Halifax, Dartmouth, Bedford and Sackville. In Amherst, and the rest of Cumberland County, there have been no new cases announced recently. As of Tuesday, the Cumberland Community Health Network has zero active cases, and has had a total of 8 cases since the beginning of the pandemic.
UPDATE: As of May 5, there is one active case of COVID-19 in the Cumberland health network. An employee with the town of Amherst tested positive for the disease. For more details, click here.
And yet, on April 23, the province of New Brunswick announced new rules to require any New Brunswick resident travelling to Nova Scotia daily for work, to self-isolate upon their return, putting them in what some have called, “house arrest.”
Sackville deputy mayor Ron Aiken says hearing from frustrated citizens is what prompted he and Amherst Mayor David Kogon to write to health minister Dorothy Shephard and ask her to reconsider the policy.
“We heard several complaints from people about this notion of the workers who went back and forth across the border having to self-isolate when they were in New Brunswick,” says Aiken. “And we know that workers from Nova Scotia that went into New Brunswick going back didn’t have to do the same thing, and this was causing considerable stress and upset to the people in our community that worked in Amherst.”
And so Aiken called up Amherst Mayor David Kogon asking him to co-sign a letter, “saying we thought this was a bad decision, and there could be better ways of dealing with it.”
Aiken and Kogon’s letter to the health minister, which was sent on April 26, points out the low numbers in both the Sackville and Amherst areas, and ask that the rules be nuanced to reflect the fact that “cross-border workers are travelling back and forth between areas with no infections.”
“There’s always some risk,” says Aiken. “Risk is never zero. But it’s so small… We’re going from an area of zero cases to an area of zero cases. It’s not like Edmundston. And so I just can’t see what they’re all that worried about.”
Aiken points out that Amherst Mayor David Kogon is a cross-border commuter himself, but not subject to perpetual isolation, because Nova Scotia does not require its cross border workers to remain isolated upon their return home. Both Nova Scotians and New Brunswickers who travel across the border to work are limited to only work activities once they cross the border.
“You’re going to work, you get to work, you don’t go anywhere else, you come straight back,” says Aiken. “That’s the rule that the Kogon has been working on for over a year and a half now.”
“To sum it all up, there could have been a far better way of doing it that wouldn’t have inconvenienced so many people.”
HOW MANY CROSS BORDER COMMUTERS ARE THERE?
The question of how many people are affected is still up in the air. On Friday, CHMA asked New Brunswick Public Safety for the number of people registered for regular daily travel across the Nova Scotia border, and a spokesperson says they are working on getting that number.
“There’s a considerable number of them,” says Aiken. “It’s not just a few.” MLA Megan Mitton has estimated the number is in the hundreds, but says she has not been able to get an actual number from the province.
EVIDENCE OF CROSS BORDER SPREAD?
CHMA also reached out to the province to find out how many cases of COVID-19 can be traced back to travel across the Nova Scotia border, but department of health spokesperson Bruce MacFarlane replied to say that the number is not being tracked.
On Tuesday, CHMA asked Dr. Russell to explain the reasoning behind keeping commuters in isolation when they return home, despite the lack of cases in Cumberland County. Russell pointed to the current outbreak in the Halifax area.
“What Nova Scotia is experiencing right now is really, really challenging. And it’s not something that we take lightly in terms of risks,” said Russell on Tuesday. “So we know that right now the hotspot is Halifax. However, as you know, the incubation period is 14 days, and we don’t know who’s traveling where and when, throughout the province. And so the risks are everywhere, all the time.”
Since April 23, Nova Scotia has had additional restrictions in place and called for no non-essential travel to and form locations in Halifax, Hants, Lunenburg and Guysborough counties. On April 28, the restrictions expanded to include the entire province, and people have been told not to leave their communities except for essential reasons, such as work or school.
Testing levels in Nova Scotia have also skyrocketed since around April 20. Before that, the province was doing about 2000 tests per day, about double the New Brunswick average at that time. But since then, testing has surged in Nova Scotia, with over 19,000 tests conducted on May 3. (New Brunswick reported 1600 tests conducted the same day.)
But despite the measures in place in Nova Scotia to battle the current outbreak in its central health zone, Russell says the possibility that infected people who have not yet tested positive have travelled to other parts of Nova Scotia presents the risk.
“We don’t have a crystal ball, knowing who’s incubating in those different areas outside of Halifax,” says Russell. “So we have to be taking a very cautious approach because we don’t want to fall into the same situation that Nova Scotia is dealing with right now… We just are not taking any chances.”
At other points in the pandemic, Russell has focussed more about the need to balance the risk of spread with risks to mental health and well being, but since the arrival of variants of concern in the province, that language has been absent. Back in January, when being asked about the decision to keep schools open during the revised red phase of restrictions, Russell talked about the need to balance measures against their side-effects.
“The public health approach has always been to make sure that whatever risks you’re trying to mitigate, that they’re targeted,” said Russell on January 19, 2021. “And that they’re measured, and that they’re balanced against whatever hardships are going to come from those measures.”
MLA Megan Mitton said last week that she is advocating for better design of the rules as they apply to maritime borders. “My sense is that a lot of these rules have been sort of blanket restrictions,” Mitton told CHMA. “The geographic area needs to be targeted, like what’s happening in Edmundston.”
“It’s hard because we’re still in a pandemic,” said Mitton. “We need to take the variants of concern seriously. We need to have strong public health measures. We also need to have the rules make sense for the people who live near this border. And unfortunately, we’ve seen that hasn’t been the case many times over the past year.”
