Laura Bantock (left) and Dr. Shane Barclay pushed hard last year to have a testing centre at Sun Peaks (Image Credit: Kent Simmonds / CFJC Today)

By Chad Klassen

PANDEMIC HEROES

HEROES OF THE PANDEMIC: The healthcare professionals in Sun Peaks who helped to contain COVID-19 spread

Mar 16, 2021 | 3:05 PM

KAMLOOPS — The second installment of the series “Heroes of the Pandemic” features two healthcare professionals who have been instrumental in containing COVID-19 spread in the resort municipality of Sun Peaks. Dr. Shane Barclay and Laura Bantock have been on top on the pandemic from its beginning last March and helped launched a new testing site in December that they had been pushing for.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Sun Peaks was at times – a ghost town.

A few COVID-19 cases early on discouraged people from coming and ultimately shut the resort down. One of them was Dr. Chip Bantock, who went public and switched the community’s mentality towards the virus.

“That changed behaviour immediately. Now COVID was real,” noted Dr. Shane Barclay, a colleague of Dr. Bantock’s at the Sun Peaks Health Centre. “There was a physician in the community who was positive, and I’m a great believer that threat perception is the only thing that will change people’s behaviours dramatically.”

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From that moment on, Dr. Barclay pushed for more testing. He had been on the frontlines of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s in Vancouver. He knew the importance of frequent testing, which is why he and Laura Bantock at the Sun Peaks Health Centre lobbied so hard to get a testing facility at the resort.

“We were worried just because of our experience in 2020,” said Bantock, the executive director of the Sun Peaks Health Centre. “We’re a destination and people come and they leave. They bring with them what they bring, and then they take away things they take to home or wherever else they’re going. We knew that we could be responsible for spreading.”

They pushed for a testing site right away, but it wasn’t until outbreaks at Big White near Vernon and in Revelstoke that Sun Peaks got one in December. He says it’s made all the difference.

“One, it’s allowed us to contact patients immediately because the swabs go down, they’re done during the night, the results come on my computer in the morning,” said Dr. Barclay. “I get up early, 7-7:30 and any of the positives I phone right away.”

Dr. Barclay says without a testing site, resort employees likely wouldn’t have travelled to Kamloops to get tested.

“A lot of them don’t have vehicles and they’re not going to spend $120 on a taxi to go down to Kamloops to get a COVID test,” he said. “A number of our positive cases were people who only afterwards realized, ‘Oh, my mild headaches that I was having was actually COVID.’ So I think a lot of people, if we didn’t have the centre here, would not have gone in for testing at all, and therefore our ability to contact-trace would’ve been just gone.”

Sun Peaks mayor Al Raine can’t say enough about the work Dr. Barclay and Laura Bantock have done to get the testing centre up and running.

“The staff have done a wonderful job of making sure that anybody who was associated with somebody who’s tested positive is self-isolating and following up on that,” said Raine. “And being able to tell people the next day, ‘Hey look, you’re fine. You tested negative, but still be careful.’ So that’s all helped.”

Dr. Barclay doesn’t see himself as a ‘pandemic hero.’ He feels he’s simply doing his job.

“Not at all,” he laughed. “To me, this is just good medicine. It’s literally the way medicine should be practiced in my books.”

After an early COVID-19 scare, there have been only 16 positive cases since last March.