Image Credit: CFJC Today / Kent Simmonds

By Jill Sperling

COVID-19

Interior Health urging people to keep bubbles small as work of contact tracers increases

Nov 16, 2020 | 4:19 PM

KAMLOOPS — Interior Health is once again asking people to limit their social circles to prevent COVID-19.

New COVID-19 exposures were announced over the weekend in Kamloops, including the city’s first cases at a school and a long-term care facility.

“I would say that these new exposures are all together not surprising given the pattern that we’re seeing across IH and across the province,” said Interior Health Medical Health Officer Dr. Carol Fenton. “These are new experiences for Kamloops, which is very lucky and a testament to how well our prevention measures have worked until point.”

Fenton says it’s now time to buckle down to prevent anymore transmission.

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Over the weekend, a letter went out to parents of NorKam Secondary students, alerting them to a positive case within the school community.

“What we’re seeing in schools is a reflection of what’s happening in the community,” Fenton said. “It’s really important to remember that all of the school settings have COVID safety measures in place to protect everyone. We have protocols so we know that someone was infectious while in school, so we have ways to track if there were any possible exposures and ways to notify all of those who need to self-isolate and those who need to monitor for symptoms.”

But, contact tracing has become complicated and time-consuming based on the number of contacts people have over their infectious period.

“Every single time we have a new positive result, we have to phone that person and conduct an interview, determine when their infectious period occurred and then find out every place they’ve been and every person they’ve been in contact with within that 12-day period. And then, once we have a list of everyone they came in contact with, we phone all of those people.”

Ideally, Fenton suggests a list of contacts should contain no more than eight people, assuming people are sticking to the household-plus-six gathering restriction.

It appears that hasn’t been the case.

“Many cases that we’ve seen over the last week or two have traced back to a social gathering or a party and I wish I knew how to prevent those beyond asking people not to, but it’s really important now, especially heading into the holidays that we don’t have any gatherings,” Fenton said.

Fenton says if people want to celebrate the Christmas holidays with fewer restrictions, the number of active COVID-19 cases must go down.