Sioux Valley to maintain health measures indefinitely

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This article was published 16/02/2022 (1691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sioux Valley Dakota Nation will be taking a cautious approach to the easing of COVID-19 health measures to ensure the safety and well-being of its members, while the rest of the province is aiming for a restriction-free spring.

Any decisions regarding COVID-19 health measures are being made on evidence-based practice to protect the health and safety of nation members, said Christopher Hersak, director for Sioux Valley and appointed incident response commander. The nation has about 2,500 members.

Sioux Valley is not “prepared to raise hands in defeat,” Hersak said. Outside of the total eradication of the virus, there’s not much that could ease people’s minds at the moment, he added. They continue to recognize that there are still serious clinical outcomes that happen for people that are infected with COVID-19.

There are a number of risk factors that place the population at increased risk of negative health consequences, including crowded housing and underlying health conditions, he said.

Sioux Valley has always had a fairly rigid pandemic co-ordination response since it first began tracking the virus.

“We serve and are protecting some of the most vulnerable populations,” Hersak said.

Every community differs, he said, but as a community Sioux Valley has certain chronic disease indicators that place people at increased risk of poor outcomes.

“We have a disproportionate representation of some of these key things — diabetes, hypertension, chronic kidney disease — that wouldn’t be found in urban Brandon settings,” Hersak said. “That places our people at increased risk and unfortunately, that’s not unique to First Nations communities. What has always been at the forefront of our pandemic preparedness is that some of the generalizations that people fare quite well can actually have severe outcomes for people that have some of those risk factors tied to their experience.”

While some may say COVID-19 is just like a cold, in Sioux Valley they have always recognized the virus can result in severe health outcomes.

Metrics released by Indigenous Services Canada show the disproportionate representation of First Nations in the health-care system. In Manitoba, the First Nations Health and Social Secretariat of Manitoba reported as of Monday there were 601 new cases of the virus reported on-reserve and 58 off-reserve. Of the total 1,290 active cases reported that day, 186 First Nation members had been hospitalized, with 23 in ICU.

There are several factors that can impact COVID-19 spread in the community. Hersak noted multi-generational households are more common in Sioux Valley compared to urban settings like Brandon.

“I don’t think any of us are prepared to take a deep sigh of relief yet. I think, at the end of the day, we watch our population closely and we encourage the act of self-reporting of symptoms and certainly, we continue to spend energies with contact tracing,” Hersak said.

Speaking generally, one of the biggest areas of contrast is the isolation period, which has been revised several times by the province. One of the key differences is as a community Sioux Valley has never ascribed to a five- or seven-day isolation period. Sioux Valley has maintained 10 days, five full working days, and then self-monitoring beyond that.

Crowd gathering sizes were limited to 250 people by the province and later repealed, while the nation has always been half of that capacity at 125.

While the province will be ending all health measures, including mask mandates in March, Hersak said Sioux Valley is not prepared to remove the requirement for the critical PPE.

And when case counts increase, so do the health measures.

“We run a health system parallel to the province and just at this point, it’s never made sense to us to try [to] run a marathon for two years and basically give up when the finish line is in front of us,” Hersak said. “We continue to be vigilant and are prepared to obviously escalate containment strategies if we do find the caseloads rise.”

The biggest difference now is the level of herd immunity, from both vaccine uptake and prior exposures.

“Those are tools we didn’t have in our tool belt earlier in the year and certainly in the year prior to that,” Hersak said. “We certainly take that to heart in each action or reaction that we do as a community … We’re all in this together.”

» ckemp@brandonsun.com

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