Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have questions again for the Minister of Health and Social Services as to what happened this week with the mix-up with the case in Inuvik. I know that the Chief Public Health Officer had a media. She updated, and I've read the newspaper. I still have constituents asking me, "How did this happen?" With the earlier announcement that the person that was the first positive in my community of Inuvik and that they had no contacts and now we say the next case that we have was a contact of the first case, what happened in this case? Can the Minister explain? Thank you.
Thank you, Member for Inuvik Twin Lakes. Minister of Health and Social Services.
Yes, thank you. I just start by saying that the CPHO is an independent office within Health and Social Services, so I don't have any information that hasn't already been made public about what happened this week. There was a communications breakdown that led to the announcement of a positive test when it wasn't positive. It was presumptive and has since been confirmed as positive. My understanding is that the first case news release talked about contacts for the travel case, and the second case news release was a household contact of that original travel case. Thank you.
Thank you to the Minister. The thing that came about, I had a lot of calls. I had some discussions with the Minister as well that day. It's just the way that the first announcement came out with the first case. It just didn't add up, so a lot of Members were very, very concerned that we weren't getting the truth out of the first case. That's what my question was: knowing that there was a household and a family isolated, why did it not come out that they were not alone, or they were with other family members?
Yes. I appreciate that there's a lot of anxiety and fear about the prospect of COVID being diagnosed in our communities, and Inuvik is no different in this case. People who are tested for COVID are entitled to their privacy. Identifying information and additional information is very tightly controlled by the CPHO. There is no reason that she would feel obliged to enumerate who else lives in the house with the infected person unless that person was also infected. When that person did test as infected, it turned out that they did live in the same house. There's no obligation to provide a complete breakdown of the family's circumstances for each positive test.
I guess what I'm saying is: when we had the first case, it was a family that arrived back, and it said one member has tested positive. The rest are at home isolating. I think that was the concern after hearing what happened in Yellowknife. My next question is: is the department looking at their policies on travellers coming into the territory and isolating at home with other family members? That way, family members know exactly what they need to be doing at home, and what they should and shouldn't be doing. That way, the public also can feel a little bit of security that they're not out in the public?
Yes. I'm well aware that the Member is a nurse and very knowledgeable as a result about how infectious COVID is. People are given advice about isolating at home, about having separate bathrooms, separate bedrooms, about good cleaning practices, good hand hygiene, wearing masks, and so on. There is nobody there checking up on them to make sure that all of that is being done. This is something that happens in the privacy of a person's home. We do recognize that there has been some household spread in this particular case. I am really interested to see what the CPHO comes up with in her revised orders to address this issue. Maybe it turns out that it's not possible to isolate at home. People will have to isolate in regional hubs because the infectiousness risk is so great that it doesn't make sense if people are all in the same house, especially if the house is limited in size and has a lot of people in it.
