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Keeping COVID-19 out of rural Canada proving more difficult as variants spread

Regional and inter-provincial travel have contributed to the spread of COVID-19 in small and rural communities. Restricting people’s movement is more challenging than it seems on the surface.

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3 years ago

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Travel in to and out of small and rural communities is spreading COVID-19. (Shutterstock)

One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, communities across Canada have cycled through two waves of infections and control measures. As more virulent new variants enter the arena in our battle against the virus, many are preparing for a third wave that stands to be the most serious and significant yet.

On Feb. 17 — just one day after Ontario’s formal stay-at-home order lifted — Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer, stated that she had never been more worried about the threat of COVID-19.

De Villa’s concerns are echoed by many outside the Greater Toronto Area and across Canada. Outbreaks have started to emerge outside the previous hotpots, with places like Barrie and North Bay in Ontario seeing large spikes in the coronavirus variants that originated in the United Kingdom (B117) and South Africa (N501Y).

Regional reopenings without any strict barriers to intra-provincial travel have lead to the strange contrast between areas still in lockdown and crowded scenes like the one at a HomeSense in Vaughn, Ont. Ski hills, restaurants and other businesses have reopened in some areas, however leaders in those communities continue to ask people not to travel to them.

Some of the worst outbreaks in Canada have happened in rural communities, such as the April 2020 outbreak at the Cargill meat-packing plant in Alberta; the province’s highest rates of the virus continue to be associated with rural areas. Nunavut, which had previously managed to keep COVID-19 out, experienced some of the fastest rising case numbers in late 2020.

Small communities, outsized impacts

Almost a year ago, I wrote about the tensions involved in conversations about “the right to be rural” and the implications of “region hopping” during the pandemic. While these tensions appeared to ease somewhat when case numbers declined in late summer, they’ve started to escalate again as we navigate the second (and potentially third) wave.

The fears expressed early in the pandemic about overwhelmed health-care systems and strained local supply chains. Challenges to service delivery continue to simmer. Many rural, remote and small communities were able to weather these challenges fairly well early in the pandemic — to the extent that patients from overwhelmed hospitals in urban hotspots were being redirected to smaller centres.

In other communities, patients in need of critical care faced the prospect of being triaged in their cars in Manitoba and nurses worked 16-hour days in rural Québec communities like Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean, which produces one-third of Canada’s aluminum.

The number of cases in Steinbach, Man. taxed the community’s health-care system.

On Feb. 17, the Grey-Bruce Health Unit recorded its first case of a COVID-19 variant. Critically, the case is associated with someone whose primary residence is outside the region and who was isolating at their secondary residence. While inter-regional travel in the province is no longer strictly limited to only essential reasons, it remains heavily discouraged due to concerns about spread in exactly this manner.

However, even when the stay-at-home order was in place, there was confusion about what was considered essential and how the restrictions would be enforced.

Read more: The coronavirus pandemic is pushing Canadians out of cities and into the countryside

Beyond trying to manage the impatience of people who are looking to escape or work around pandemic protections, many regions must also contend with inter-provincial travel of essential workers and those who bring critical goods like food, medicine and other necessities.

Restricting travel

Restrictions on travel across provincial borders have been easier to manage, but they have not been perfect solutions. The Atlantic Bubble was largely regarded as a successful case study in controlling the spread of the virus — until it wasn’t.

No one expected an outbreak in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the explosion of cases connected to the variant identified in the U.K. disrupted a provincial election, led to calls for inter-regional restrictions to protect vulnerable communities and emphasized just vulnerable we are, no matter where we live.

A worker at a checkpoint with a truck
Provincial health department workers stop traffic in Borden-Carleton, P.E.I., on March 22, 2020 in an effort to contain the coronavirus. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

In light of these trends and challenges, some leaders, like the mayor of Sudbury, Ont., called for checkpoints and controls on inter-regional travel, much like the measures instituted in other jurisdictions such as Australia.

As continued public health measures produce pandemic fatigue and front-line worker burn-out, restrictions on our daily lives chafe against our right to freedom of movement. While policy-makers wrestle with the political hornet’s nest of restricting travel between regions, individual businesses are taking matters into their own hands and limiting service to locals only.

We can’t police our way out of the pandemic

As the world’s second largest country, developing effective movement controls that can be equally and equitably enforced across Canada’s 9.9 million square kilometres (approximately 40 times the size of the United Kingdom) is nearly impossible on both the individual and policy levels. In most provinces, public health units cover multiple municipalities in arrangements that don’t always reflect other local governance arrangements.

In Ontario, 34 health units are responsible for 444 municipalities. Where would we install barriers for inter-regional travel? Who would monitor those barriers? And is it an effective use of finite resources to monitor every access point, whether by gravel road, lake access or highway?

To curb region-hopping at the local level would require an extraordinary level of co-ordination among all policy players, as well as enforcement capacity based on clear, consistent directives that adapt to regional contexts. This is something we have not exactly succeeded at to date.

Practicalities aside, experts have cautioned that we can’t “police our way out of the pandemic.” And many marginalized people are rightfully concerned that such approaches put them at greater risk.

Fail to plan, plan to fail

In Ontario, the responsibility for the vaccine rollout been passed on to local public health units, potentially producing 34 different vaccination strategies. In both Alberta and Ontario, a digital-first strategy of online booking portals ignores the reality of many rural, remote and marginalized communities.

A chronic lack of both transparency and accuracy in data collection and pandemic planning across all orders of governments has produced what epidemiologist Raywat Deonandan calls a “failure of imagination.” This lack of responsive planning could leave those most vulnerable to the virus in rural and remote regions waiting longer than their urban counterparts for vaccines.

The pandemic has not created these jurisdictional challenges, it’s just revealed how easily important and urgent work can fall through the bureaucratic cracks. The lessons we are learning during this pandemic continue to remind us that our individual actions have community impacts. Our way forward will have to depend on a mix of policies and practices that remind us that we live in a society where our personal well-being is inextricable from the well-being of those around us.

S. Ashleigh Weeden is a PhD Candidate in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development at the University of Guelph. She is currently coordinating the 'Rural Insights Series: COVID-19' for the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation (CRRF) and supported by the Rural Policy Learning Commons (RPLC), a research network funded through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) partnership grant. Ashleigh is involved in a variety of research initiatives related to future-oriented rural policy, rural infrastructure, and place-based approaches to rural development. Ashleigh has received funding from the RPLC, CRRF, the Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance, the Digital Justice Lab, Mitacs, and the University of Guelph to support her research activities.

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There will soon be one million seats on this popular Amtrak route

“More people are taking the train than ever before,” says Amtrak’s Executive Vice President.

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1 hour ago

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March 11, 2024

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While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.

Related: This is what it's like to take a 19-hour train from New York to Chicago

Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.

Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall. 

Veronika Bondarenko

Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’

Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.

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According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.

“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”

Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see

Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.

To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.

As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.

The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.

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The next pandemic? It’s already here for Earth’s wildlife

Bird flu is decimating species already threatened by climate change and habitat loss.

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2 hours ago

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March 11, 2024

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I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.

I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.

This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.

How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.

This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.

This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.

H5N1 originated on a Chinese poultry farm in 1997. ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock

The first signs

Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.

We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.

Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.

Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.

Unfortunately, our warnings were correct.

A roving sickness

Two decades on, bird flu is killing species from the high Arctic to mainland Antarctica.

In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.

Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.

The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.

Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.

At the crossroads

Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.

Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.

It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.

Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.

Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.

A colony of king penguins.
Remote penguin colonies are already threatened by climate change. AndreAnita/Shutterstock

How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.

To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.

Diana Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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This is the biggest money mistake you’re making during travel

A retail expert talks of some common money mistakes travelers make on their trips.

Published

3 hours ago

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March 11, 2024

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Travel is expensive. Despite the explosion of travel demand in the two years since the world opened up from the pandemic, survey after survey shows that financial reasons are the biggest factor keeping some from taking their desired trips.

Airfare, accommodation as well as food and entertainment during the trip have all outpaced inflation over the last four years.

Related: This is why we're still spending an insane amount of money on travel

But while there are multiple tricks and “travel hacks” for finding cheaper plane tickets and accommodation, the biggest financial mistake that leads to blown travel budgets is much smaller and more insidious.

A traveler watches a plane takeoff at an airport gate.

Jeshoots on Unsplash

This is what you should (and shouldn’t) spend your money on while abroad

“When it comes to traveling, it's hard to resist buying items so you can have a piece of that memory at home,” Kristen Gall, a retail expert who heads the financial planning section at points-back platform Rakuten, told Travel + Leisure in an interview. “However, it's important to remember that you don't need every souvenir that catches your eye.”

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According to Gall, souvenirs not only have a tendency to add up in price but also weight which can in turn require one to pay for extra weight or even another suitcase at the airport — over the last two months, airlines like Delta  (DAL) , American Airlines  (AAL)  and JetBlue Airways  (JBLU)  have all followed each other in increasing baggage prices to in some cases as much as $60 for a first bag and $100 for a second one.

While such extras may not seem like a lot compared to the thousands one might have spent on the hotel and ticket, they all have what is sometimes known as a “coffee” or “takeout effect” in which small expenses can lead one to overspend by a large amount.

‘Save up for one special thing rather than a bunch of trinkets…’

“When traveling abroad, I recommend only purchasing items that you can't get back at home, or that are small enough to not impact your luggage weight,” Gall said. “If you’re set on bringing home a souvenir, save up for one special thing, rather than wasting your money on a bunch of trinkets you may not think twice about once you return home.”

Along with the immediate costs, there is also the risk of purchasing things that go to waste when returning home from an international vacation. Alcohol is subject to airlines’ liquid rules while certain types of foods, particularly meat and other animal products, can be confiscated by customs. 

While one incident of losing an expensive bottle of liquor or cheese brought back from a country like France will often make travelers forever careful, those who travel internationally less frequently will often be unaware of specific rules and be forced to part with something they spent money on at the airport.

“It's important to keep in mind that you're going to have to travel back with everything you purchased,” Gall continued. “[…] Be careful when buying food or wine, as it may not make it through customs. Foods like chocolate are typically fine, but items like meat and produce are likely prohibited to come back into the country.

Related: Veteran fund manager picks favorite stocks for 2024

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