Readers Ask Christmas, PMH positivity rate

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This article was published 10/12/2020 (1859 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon Sun readers requested specific questions be asked about COVID-19.

QUESTION: Can a solo-living mother with a daughter and son-in-law living in the same town spend Christmas together at mom’s, or is it just one person, and not the couple? Similarly, can a person, say a grandparent, spend Christmas with a single household of multiple people, or is it only one-to-one?

DR. BRENT ROUSSIN, Manitoba’s chief public health officer: So these are great questions. You recall when we first started moving into the red restrictions, we had restrictions in place that didn’t require us to get down and interpret every eventuality like this. But we had to go to black and white orders.

So when you have black and white orders, then there has to be a line drawn. So right now the orders are, if a person lives alone, they can designate one person to come spend time with them. Not two, but one. But it’s also the reciprocal of that, they can then visit that person in their household, as well.

That’s the strict interpretation of those orders. What we’re advising is to socialize only with people in your household. There are some exemptions, like the one you just noted there — people who live alone. We want to ensure that they do have the ability of face time with other people.

But all of this comes with some risk, right? The more contacts you have, the more risk there is. That’s the interpretation of the orders. Our messaging is to limit your contacts, as much as you reasonably can, to people of your household.

QUESTION: Can we be informed of test positivity rates for all of Manitoba’s separate health regions, rather than just selected areas?

ROUSSIN: When we get into lower denominators, then a rate like that is very variable and very tough to rely on. So we talk about the province as a whole and, of course, Winnipeg has a huge denominator. We talk about health regions, for the most part, we don’t regularly report on that — just because there’s a lot of variability with it. Then we have at some times, when we saw say, in the Steinbach area, where we had very high test positivity we’ll disclose that. But we don’t regularly because it’s a difficult one to find any accuracy to.

THE BRANDON SUN: To put the Prairie Mountain Health (PMH) region in context, we put some numbers together.

As of Wednesday, the PMH region hit a reported 1,201 total lab-confirmed cases, while the Winnipeg region hit 12,194 — so PMH had 9.85 per cent of cases in comparison to Winnipeg.

The PMH region serves a population of 171,458, while the Winnipeg region serves a population of 784,441 — meaning PMH has 21.86 per cent of Winnipeg’s population — according to Manitoba Health’s 2019 figures.

In the big picture, PMH accounts for 12.5 per cent of the total Manitoba population, but comes in at 6.2 per cent of total lab-confirmed cases.

Do you have a question about something in your community? Send your questions to opinion@brandonsun.com with the subject line: Readers Ask.

» mletourneau@brandonsun.com

» Michele LeTourneau covers Indigenous matters for The Brandon Sun under the Local Journalism Initiative, a federally funded program that supports the creation of original civic journalism.