Thread by @WilsonKM2

Today in the #AtlanticBubble

There were 5 new cases reported in the Bubble today: 3 in Nova Scotia, 1 in New Brunswick, and 1 in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The source of all of these new cases remains under investigation.

All 3 of the new cases in NS are in the Halifax area and show up in the context of a large number of very public exposure alerts and cases of unknown origin.

The NB case is in the Fredericton area, after 3 other cases were listed in recent days. All still being investigated.

Lastly the 1 new case in NFLD is in the Western Zone and is likewise under investigation (I believe this is the first one of that kind for the province in awhile).

In the last week, the situation in the region (but especially Halifax) has seriously deteriorated. Not so much in terms of case numbers, which have barely budged, but quite a lot in terms of our perception of how under control things are.

As a region, we went the better part of 5 months mostly limited to travel-related cases, and no evidence of transmission in the community.

The increase in cases outside of the Bubble is presenting a lot of challenges vs how things were in the summer.

With more cases entering the Bubble, we face a much higher risk that one will either not isolate or will fall in to a category of workers/travelers that are not required to isolate and start a chain of infections locally.

A lot of people think that there are simple solutions to this problem, but none of them are actually simple and some of them probably won't work (as at least not as well as people hope).

There probably isn't the testing capacity to test every traveler and their close contacts multiple times. Maybe with some kind of pooled testing scheme could work here, but in general 'just test everyone all the time' is actually a pretty heavy lift

Likewise, completely removing exemptions for rotational/similar workers and their close contacts is really hard. If you make compliance with policy miserable enough, we'll start to see compliance fall off.

'Just fine them, then"

We will never have the resource to enforce this.

I say this not to say that there's nothing we can do, but that a lot of the "just fix it" simple solutions people pitch are not viable. If they were, we would already be doing them.

What's more likely (and workable) is combining protective measures to lower risk, without either straining resources or making life miserable for the people trying to comply.

So, (eg) instead of a full exemption, have a shortened isolation + testing requirements.

Not enough test capacity? Explore pool testing for families/close contacts. Or rapid tests

There are things we can do, but they're all imperfect. They're inconvenient or logistically challenging. Otherwise we would already be doing the perfect, easy thing.

Anyways. With that, there are now 53 known, active cases inside the Bubble. A non-trivial number of them are still under investigation and several exposure events have occurred in highly public areas.

So maybe consider dialing back your exposure risk and avoiding indoor, unmasked settings for the next few weeks.

Thanks to everyone for all the hard work they're putting in to keep the community safe!