More than 2,000 people who have returned to Canada since the federal government imposed mandatory hotel quarantine have tested positive for COVID-19, and more than a quarter of them have been infected with a variant of concern.
Data provided to The Canadian Press through the Public Health Agency of Canada shows that between Feb. 22 and April 22, 557 foreign air travellers were tested for a variant of concern.
Most of them (518 cases) were infected with the B. 1. 1. 7 variant first known in the UK, which is the dominant variant in Canada. Another 27 passengers tested positive for the B. 1. 351 variant first known in South Africa, while 12 tested positive for the P. 1 variant known in Brazil.
Virus mutations are “variants of concern” when they are shown to spread more easily, cause more severe disease, or are resistant to known remedies or vaccines.
It’s not known if those passengers would have irritated anyone after their arrival, but at some point, all of these variants came to Canada via travellers and then spread.
There are currently about 95,000 reported cases of B. 1. 1. 7, as well as 578 cases of B. 1. 351 and more than 2,000 cases of P. 1.
These numbers are prompting opposition parties and provincial governments to implore Ottawa to take even more action to prevent travellers from bringing COVID-19 with them to Canada.
“I implore the federal government to stop everything non-essential to Canada before new variants completely overwhelm our intensive care units,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford wrote on Twitter on April 24.
Last week, Canada banned flights from India and Pakistan for a month after too many planes dressed with other inflamed people landed. But they come from the only source.
Between April 7 and April 24, the public fitness company recorded 165 flights from 19 countries, with at least one passenger subsequently testing positive for COVID-19.
Forty-three of those flights came from India, 29 from the United States, 30 from Europe and 17 from the United Arab Emirates. Only one flight from Pakistan.
Epidemiologists agree that border measures need to be tightened, but say that preventing the spread of COVID-19 requires more than simply closing borders.
“I think border restrictions and tracking are just the beginning, it’s just a cure,” said Nazeem Muhajarine, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan.
“This needs to be complemented by a whole series of measures. Possibly, actually, it wouldn’t be enough to put something on the table. “
He said immediate testing and contact tracing are imperative, as is swift action to detect outbreaks when they are identified.
Ottawa has required a two-week quarantine for foreign arrivals since March 2020, but since Feb. 22 air passengers must spend three days in a quarantine hotel.
As variants emerged, Canada also began requiring negative COVID-19 checks before boarding a plane, as well as air and ground border travelers upon arrival. Now another check is required on the 8th. From the 10th to the 23rd of April.
Health Canada is unable to provide information on how many passengers tested positive after exiting hotel quarantine. It also can’t provide verification results for any of the other 297 people who paid a $3,000 fine for not staying at the quarantine hotel.
Susanne Gulliver, an epidemiologist at NewLab Clinical Research in St. Louis. John’s, N. L. , said part of this is that all ground travelers and for most of the quarantine era of air passengers must fend for themselves.
Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea, all of which have much lower COVID-19 rates than Canada, require travelers to quarantine for a full two weeks after arrival.
Gulliver said 3 days of supervised quarantine is enough.
“This needs to be monitored in its entirety, whether it’s for your coverage or for coverage of the public,” he said, stressing that if someone falls ill in quarantine, they can be monitored to make sure they get medical assistance if they want to.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defends the government’s policies as one of the most powerful in the world and says most travelers are Canadians who are denied entry.
He also said that less than 2 per cent of all confirmed COVID-19 cases in Canada come from travellers or others who have been in contact with a traveller.
Muhajarine said, however, that a single case of an RS can infect many other people in Canada, triggering a cascade of network-spreading cases that are not classified as cases once they are transmitted more than once.
Both Muhajarine and Gulliver point out that the Atlantic bubble is a situation in which access restrictions, even for Canadians from other provinces, worked because they were accompanied by swift government action to block things down when outbreaks occurred.
Gulliver noted that swift action ended an outbreak of the B. 1. 1. 7 variant in Newfoundland in February. Nova Scotia implemented a province-wide lockdown on Wednesday, a day after a record case was reported in the province.
Australia is similar. Perth and a nearby area recently dropped the hammer for three days after only two cases were reported. Similar lockdowns have occurred in Australia, which has shown fewer than 30,000 total COVID-19 cases, a rate of 117 per 100,000 people.
Canada, meanwhile, has 1. 2 million cases, a rate of 3,200 per 100,000 people.
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