Health
Second wave anxiety and concerns on Manitoba's front line – CTV News Winnipeg
WINNIPEG —
With Manitoba recording dozens of new COVID cases each day recently – anxiety has been building among healthcare workers on the front lines.
Labour leaders in the province say they are hearing of rising concerns about staffing levels, time off, and flex in the system.
“As the numbers increase, the anxiety levels increase,” said Debbie Boissonneault. She is the president of CUPE 204 which represents 14,000 healthcare support workers in Manitoba at about 60 different sites.
She explained that in recent weeks her membership working in hospitals, long-term care homes and clinics have many questions about the second wave.
“Why are people still allowed to come into visit loved ones when the numbers keep going up?” she said. “There’s questions about having people go out from personal care homes and coming back and not being isolated into a room where they could possibly have come into contact with someone with COVID.”
The once flat curve in Manitoba is trending up, with 32 new cases Wednesday and three additional deaths.
“Second place in the country is not where we want to be right now,” said MGEU President Michelle Gawronsky who said she is hearing about burnout and fear of infection from her membership on the front lines.
MGEU represents 10,000 healthcare workers in Manitoba. That includes staff at Selkirk mental hospital, Cadham provincial lab, the addictions foundation of Manitoba, healthcare aides in personal care homes and hospitals, home care attendants and paramedics in Winnipeg.
Gawronsky said it’s time to put the people first.
“Make sure all positions are filled, that they have exhausted all possibilities of having back up staff having people readily available to be able to replace them, making sure the facilities are there as they are needed,” she told CTV news.
Filling vacancies is also a concern of the Manitoba Nurses Union.
“Nurses are absolutely working flat out,” said MNU President Darlene Jackson.
Jackson said Manitoba went into the pandemic with a nursing shortage, including positions in the intensive care unit.
Now that Manitoba is in the second wave, Jackson wants to know when a similar action to the first wave will happen, like surgery cancellations, the opening of additional beds, or reduced visitation.
“There needs to be a plan in place,” Jackson said, “there needs to be some type of plan on how we are going to manage a spike.”
Bob Moroz President of Manitoba Allied Healthcare Professionals wrote of similar concerns from his members in a statement to CTV news.
“Of course there is heightened concern as COVID-19 cases in hospitals are going up,” he wrote.
“They’re concerned about what happens if they or their kids contract the virus and they have to stay home with no pay if they’re out of sick time. They’re concerned about what happens if they lose even more staff to self-isolation requirements or illness, when many departments are already short-staffed and stretched thin. We saw these problems come up early in the pandemic, and here we are again.”
Boissonneault said Winnipeg Metropolitan’s current code orange provides an opportunity for everyone to help prevent a system overload.
“Wearing a mask may not be 100 per cent protection but its better than nothing and we need to do everything we can to flatten the curve.”
A spokesperson for the province said there are sufficient ICU beds in the system and extra capacity is available if needed. They said most ICUs have empty beds or patients on the transfer list.
“(Health Sciences Centre) Winnipeg, Manitoba’s provincial hospital, and other facilities with ICUs continue to provide care to critically ill patients from throughout Manitoba for a variety of issues, including COVID-19,” they said. “The system also has the ability to repurpose resources to increase capacity as needed – including for those patients requiring ICU care.”
They said the province has focussed on protecting staff who provide care to COVID and non-COVID patients, ordering more equipment including ventilators and beds in anticipation of surges, and ensure the necessary PPE is available.
They said the province’s ‘COVID-19 contingency planning’ allows for more space, equipment and supplies to be purchased, and staff to be redeployed to areas that need more support.
“This could include the consideration of potential reduction of elective and non-urgent services like surgeries and diagnostic procedures in order to free up staff who could be redeployed,” they said.
They said at this point the province does not anticipate shutting down areas of the health system in spring 2020.
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Interior Health says it delivered nearly 800,000 immunization doses last year — a number almost equal to the region’s population.
The released figure of 784,980 comes during National Immunization Awareness Week, which runs April 22-30.
The health care organization, which serves a large area of around 820,000, says it’s using the occasion to boost vaccine rates even though there may be post-pandemic vaccine fatigue.
“This is a very important initiative because it ensures that communicable diseases stay away from a region,” said Dr. Silvina Mema of Interior Health.
However, not all those doses were for COVID; the tally includes childhood immunizations plus immunizations for adults.
But IHA said immunizations are down from the height of the pandemic, when COVID vaccines were rolled out, though it seems to be on par with previous pre-pandemic years.
Interior Health says it’d like to see the overall immunization rate rise.
“Certainly there are some folks who have decided a vaccine is not for them. And they have their reasons,” said Jonathan Spence, manager of communicable disease prevention and control at Interior Health.
“I think there’s a lot of people who are hesitant, but that’s just simply because they have questions.
“And that’s actually part of what we’re celebrating this week is those public health nurses, those pharmacists, who can answer questions and answer questions with really good information around immunization.”
Mima echoed that sentiment.
“We take immunization very seriously. It’s a science-based program that has saved countless lives across the world and eliminated diseases that were before a threat and now we don’t see them anymore,” she said.
“So immunization is very important.”
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that samples of pasteurized milk had tested positive for remnants of the bird flu virus that has infected dairy cows.
The agency stressed that the material is inactivated and that the findings “do not represent actual virus that may be a risk to consumers.” Officials added that they’re continuing to study the issue.
“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the FDA said in a statement.
The announcement comes nearly a month after an avian influenza virus that has sickened millions of wild and commercial birds in recent years was detected in dairy cows in at least eight states. The Agriculture Department says 33 herds have been affected to date.
FDA officials didn’t indicate how many samples they tested or where they were obtained. The agency has been evaluating milk during processing and from grocery stores, officials said. Results of additional tests are expected in “the next few days to weeks.”
The PCR lab test the FDA used would have detected viral genetic material even after live virus was killed by pasteurization, or heat treatment, said Lee-Ann Jaykus, an emeritus food microbiologist and virologist at North Carolina State University
“There is no evidence to date that this is infectious virus and the FDA is following up on that,” Jaykus said.
Officials with the FDA and the USDA had previously said milk from affected cattle did not enter the commercial supply. Milk from sick animals is supposed to be diverted and destroyed. Federal regulations require milk that enters interstate commerce to be pasteurized.
Because the detection of the bird flu virus known as Type A H5N1 in dairy cattle is new and the situation is evolving, no studies on the effects of pasteurization on the virus have been completed, FDA officials said. But past research shows that pasteurization is “very likely” to inactivate heat-sensitive viruses like H5N1, the agency added.
Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the International Dairy Foods Association, said that time and temperature regulations for pasteurization ensure that the commercial U.S. milk supply is safe. Remnants of the virus “have zero impact on human health,” he wrote in an email.
Scientists confirmed the H5N1 virus in dairy cows in March after weeks of reports that cows in Texas were suffering from a mysterious malady. The cows were lethargic and saw a dramatic reduction in milk production. Although the H5N1 virus is lethal to commercial poultry, most infected cattle seem to recover within two weeks, experts said.
To date, two people in U.S. have been infected with bird flu. A Texas dairy worker who was in close contact with an infected cow recently developed a mild eye infection and has recovered. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program caught it while killing infected birds at a Colorado poultry farm. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Canada is about where it should be when it comes to childhood vaccines, but for adult vaccinations it’s a different story.
Dr. Vivien Brown of Immunize Canada says the overall population should have rates of between 80 and 90 per cent for most vaccines, but that is not the case.
She says most children are in that range but not for adult vaccines and ultimately the most at-risk populations are not being reached.
She says the population is under immunized for conditions such as pneumonia, shingles, tetanus, and pertussis.
Brown wants people to talk with their family physician or pharmacist to see if they are up-to-date on vaccines, and to get caught up because many are “killer diseases.”
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