COVID-19 pandemic, one year on Chrest looks forward with lessons learned

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This article was published 13/03/2021 (1725 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Reflecting on the past year as a significant learning experience, Mayor Rick Chrest said the City of Brandon is in certain ways better off for it.

Although 20/20 reflective vision points to certain things they might have done differently, he said it only speaks to their added level of preparedness moving into year two of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“A lot of organizations and businesses and individuals are going to be better at a lot of things now that they’ve had to be that resilient to get through this,” he said by phone on Friday, at the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 hitting Manitoba.

“That’s the hallmark — the bright light in this whole thing is that human beings don’t just roll over.”

The pandemic’s impacts hit Brandon fast and hard one year ago yesterday, when the municipality activated its emergency preparedness centre.

“It’s not stood down for 365 days straight, which is unprecedented,” said Chrest, adding that at one point the COVID-19 emergency even overlapped with a summer flood emergency.

With the majority of municipal services considered essential, there was no sitting out the pandemic, and the City of Brandon had to join the rest of the world in learning about the COVID-19 pandemic on the fly.

Now-retired director of risk and emergency management Brian Kayes led the city’s pandemic response during its early days, heralding the motto, “Get big, fast.”

“It’s a lot easier to back down from some measures if you don’t need them than it is to try and ramp up in the middle of an emergency,” explained Chrest. “Then, you’re fighting — chasing it.”

Among the strongest measures the City of Brandon undertook during the pandemic’s earliest days was sequestering water treatment plant staff in the facility from March 26 to May 28.

The municipality hasn’t resorted to the measure since that time, even as COVID-19 numbers peaked in Brandon and resulted in the province imposing level orange restrictions throughout Prairie Mountain Health in late August.

With sequestration coming at an added cost of almost $225,000, Chrest maintains it was at the right decision at the time, but not one he would necessarily repeat if he had a time machine.

“Maybe if we knew everything then that we know now, we might have approached it differently, but in the immediacy of it, it seemed like the most prudent thing to do,” he said, adding that at the time there was concern about continuity of the city’s drinking water supply due to the specialized nature of work at the plant necessitating a crew trained in that particular setup of equipment.

“At the beginning, there wasn’t a lot of knowledge, so we get big fast out of an abundance of caution.”

Much of what the municipality has done in reaction to the pandemic has followed the advice of Manitoba chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin and whatever regulations the province has handed down.

Although the province sets minimum requirements, said Chrest, “generally speaking,” there hasn’t been an appetite for the City of Brandon to exceed these minimums with their own rules.

Last summer, when numbers spiked in Brandon due in part to a cluster of COVID-19 cases among staff at Maple Leaf Foods, Chrest said some people were pushing the municipality to take it upon itself to shut down the plant.

Meanwhile, he said, health officials were “all over Maple Leaf … inspecting everything backward and forwards” and determined COVID-19 transmission was not occurring at the plant itself.

“My attitude was, as soon as we start veering off of the science or what the public health people or the trained professional regulatory people are advising, then it kind of opens it up for me to vary from any one of the measures,” he said, adding, “We’re not health experts.”

It has been interesting to see what’s taken place in Texas, said Chrest, where state officials have opened up everything and done away with mask requirements.

Although he disagrees with this directive, arguing the mask requirement is what would allow businesses to be able to reopen safely, Chrest stopped short of saying he’d support harsher restrictions on a municipal level if the province were to have done what Texas did.

“I’d sure have to hear the reasons and what’s the science, what’s the medical rationale — and it’d be tough for me to start trading expertise with Dr. Roussin.”

Looking forward, Chrest said the past year has put the City of Brandon in the position of being more prepared than ever to take on future emergent situations.

“We were good, and now we’re better,” he said. “I think a lot of organizations and people are, too.”

Following restrictions and advice from the province, he said the city would continue what he anticipates will be a continued “safe and methodical” reopening of city facilities.

“When we’re allowed by public health and following all their rules … we’re opening things as quickly and safely as we can,” he said. “I could see us do some marketing to rally the community around things. The good thing is, I think there’s going to be a pent-up desire to do stuff.”

On Friday, the City of Brandon announced the latest round of reopenings by re-establishing public access to both the A.R. McDiarmid Civic Complex and Fire Hall No. 1.

» tclarke@brandonsun.com

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