Thread by @NeejaB

In less than 10 hours today, I've had to counsel and guide 10 people who are either positive or close contacts to positive people. All in healthcare.

As someone who has been intimate with all things COVID since 2020, I'm no longer surprised when people come to me asking "should I test? Should I isolate? When do I go back to work?" The problem is none of our rules make sense anymore.

Both instinct and experience tell me that a close contact of a HIGHLY transmissible virus should stay at home. As @CMOH_Alberta said today, 1 in 3 people in #yeg and #yyc getting tested have COVID, and with testing access cut off we have no idea how many others have COVID.

But our rules say vaccinated close contacts do not need to isolate. Until and unless they become symptomatic. By which time they've been in contact with countless other patients and healthcare workers.

And so we can certainly be fatalistic and say that the horse is out of the barn, and that there's no point in containing it. That we are all going to get this.

Maybe. But I'll be damned if we allow vulnerable populations to suffer because we gave up or if we allow long COVID to be an inevitable outcome for tens of thousands of Albertans.

This is not the time to stop testing, tracing and isolating. If we let this rip through healthcare workers, who is going to be around to perform those surgeries? To manage ventilator settings? To support all of the chronic disease fall out in the community?

We know the right things to do. Choosing not to do them is just that—a choice. And it's a political one, not a public health one.

The right things are sometimes hard to do. We're all so exhausted. But the long term repercussions of the path we're setting out on are so much worse.
@PopAlberta #TestTraceIsolate