Wednesday April 8, 2020 ~ LANGFORD [Updated April 9, 2020]
by Mary Brooke, B.Sc, Cert PR, editor ~ West Shore Voice News
The COVID-19 pandemic was on Stew Young’s radar long before it was a household word, or even before the novel coronavirus had an official easy-to-remember name.
But the new infectious respiratory disease caused by the COVID-19 virus is not battled by a vaccine, because there isn’t one. And if a person experiences symptoms and deals with the disease in an active way, it’s a bareback experience (and sometimes a rough ride), because there is no treatment.
And for everyone, COVID-19 comes with a fear factor, because it presents itself unseen. We know it’s there, but we can’t see it — and very often people who become infected with COVID-19 can be asymptomatic but still could shed the virus to someone nearby (including young adults and children). Hence the need for physical distancing, along with its counterpart known as self-isolating.
By order of the BC Provincial Health Officer Dr Bonnie Henry (and Canada’s Chief Medical Officer Dr Theresa Tam) we are asked to self-isolate at home and to stay two meters (six feet) away from anyone other than people we reside with. Even so, if the person you reside with is an essential worker who comes and goes each day from home to work and back, you may also be trying to physically distance yourself from someone right there within your own home.
And the other reason we’re asked to stay home and keeping washing our hands regularly (and not touch our face, which is how the virus is transported to our eyes, nose or mouth) is because the stealth action of COVID-19 is to reside and survive on surfaces (like cardboard, plastic and metal) for hours or possibly days.
We may not all be scientifically-inclined, but everyone is getting a fast education on how the virus behaves and what we can do about avoiding its snare.
And that’s only the beginning of how complicated this coronavirus — transferred in the first instance from animal to human — has already ravaged everything in its path. Animals handle coronaviruses alright for the most part, but humans do not. It’s considered unnatural for such a virus to jump between species. The human body has no natural immunity upon first impact, though immunity might possibly develop (medical and science folks aren’t sure about that yet — though they’re thinking immunity for at least the duration of one normal influenza/respiratory season could happen).
Physical health is number one of course, but there is also the mental health impact of social isolation to deal with, and the economic impact of not going to work. Even home-based work can take a financial toll if you weren’t already already set up for that, or if optimal function of your business requires interpersonal contact with customers, clients or suppliers.
The economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are not just personal and upon the family. The entire economy is imploding as by now pretty much every sector has been put into an operational coma by the protective measures that we are — as a society — taking against COVID-19. So that we can all stay home and apart, but connected (through cyberspace).
Without a treatment and without a vaccine, all we have in our COVID-fighting toolkit are self-isolation and physical distancing. The contrast is rather ironic, that in such a high-tech world — supported by wireless and cyberspace services that keep us intimately connected and functioning in business and education — our strongest defense is found in the simplicity of managing our own personal body space.
We are not to share our body space with anyone, as a way to keep the virus at bay. Oneness, singularity, and isolation… this package is our only weapon for the next few months or possibly even longer than a year while humanity awaits scientific deliverance by way of a vaccine.
A vaccine must of course be developed in the laboratory, then go through trials, and may not be available until the Fall 2021 influenza/respiratory season. The typical flu season can begin as early as August or September and run through winter into March or April each year.
As most everyone knows, vaccine shots as encouraged by public health officials are not 100% effective. That’s because viruses do mutate, and that renders particular ingredients of combination vaccines inert.
In the meantime, there are trials going on already in Canadian hospitals to try plasma infusions from people who have already developed antibodies to COVID-19. Even if results are promising from that, it still doesn’t help to address the first wave of infection that we’re trying really hard to hold to a trickle in BC.
The most significant COVID-19 outbreaks in BC have been in as many as 24 long-term care homes where seniors are clustered in relatively stationary and close proximity to one another, conjoined in that space by care aides (mostly in the 20 to 40-year-old age range) who come and go from the outside world (oftentimes working in more than one facility).
The initial introduction of COVID-19 into care homes in BC happened due to one worker at one care home in North Vancouver, and the virus took its infectious path from there.
Provincial Health Officer (PHO) Dr Bonnie Henry has become a public health rock star overnight, with her achievements of data modelling and strategies based on the data and her experience with previous pandemics like SARS and H1N1. She now has notoriety even beyond BC.
Dr Henry’s approach to strategically take out the ‘sparks’ (first infections that pop up) by tracking all possible contacts of the infected person and then isolating all those people for 14 days has — together with a massive shutdown of society through self-isolation and physical distancing — has probably saved hundreds if not thousands of lives in BC so far.
Dr Henry’s strategic approach has been particularly intensive in the long-term care home settings. Sadly, however, all the deaths in BC (other than two) have been in elderly people, mostly in care homes. All the affected care homes are in the BC lower mainland (specifically the Vancouver Coastal Health and Fraser Health authorities) in high-density population areas and in more direct proximity to people to have returned from travel.
The rate of community spread of COVID-19 has been relatively tame on Vancouver Island. That’s partly due to fewer high-density areas of population, but also in attentive response seeing what happened in the long-term care homes in the Lower Mainland. As well, the international airport in Victoria probably wasn’t receiving as many travellers returning from outside of Canada in the initial phases of the pandemic as was YVR in Vancouver. And, people tend to get out and about in fresh air and focus on well-being as part of the island lifestyle; this helps.
Today Stew Young was glad to hear Premier John Horgan’s announcement about stricter management of incoming travellers who are of course already supposed to be self-isolating for 14 days (under the federal Quarantine Act and the PHO’s orders). But now a more strident process of filling out some detailed paperwork about the returning traveller’s 14-day self-isolation plan is required upon their arrival; no plan, no release (BC has some quarantine locations ready for anyone who is still putting together their plan).
Now here we are approaching the four-day Easter long weekend in another phase of containment. It’s bad enough tip-toeing around people at offices that are still up and running or in stores where we need to shop for essentials like groceries or medications. Now we have a celebratory weekend under containment.
We face the first-ever Easter long weekend (normally a time for families and fun, and religious gatherings for those so inclined), where no one should be going anywhere … except maybe for a short walk in your neighbourhood (being careful not to get too close to anyone). If this wasn’t such a dire situation it would be quirky … all these people, but so much avoidance, no mingling.
The oneness, singularity, and isolation of the required measures to combat COVID-19 are powerful on many levels. These don’t have to be the same as loneliness but that will for sure creep in. And that’s where we’ll get back to our interview today with Langford Mayor Stew Young and what he is doing to take care of his life-long community during this crisis that none of us could have imagined even a few months ago.
The pandemic crept up on each of us with different tempos. For news junkies (especially if watching American and European news streams) it was already on their radar in December. For governments and public health authorities in BC and Canada which answer to their governments, it was already under discussion in January, but still at that time in meetings and focus groups — not much in public view yet. Inject into that timeline the multi-week Indigenous blockades in February over land issues, and the ramping up of a pandemic response was still frustrated at the organizational level and obfuscated in terms of public delivery.
By February there were public health plans in place for many communities, but not much was rolled out yet. There was chatter in the news and in neighbourhoods. Many people began to shop for extras but routines went on as usual. Early-adopters of social (physical) distancing were not shaking hands with people anymore (but still having to explain why, so as not to seem rude, because the full blown public health education piece had not been rolled out yet).
By early March everyone was talking about the virus, and there was instinctive physical distancing. On March 11 the new coronavirus was anointed with its COVID-19 moniker. And just a few days later on March 16, COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic. Physical distancing (at first called social distancing) was mandated.
The official declaration of COVID-19 being a pandemic was declared rather late in the game by the World Health Organization (WHO). They were on top of the data about the infection, but WHO was caught between a rock and a hard place for their job to be politically savvy with the public health file of the entire world. They found themselves having to glean as much COVID-19 data from China (the ground zero epicenter) as possible, while restraining their verbalization of the steamroller that was coming. They did not want to incite panic around the globe, which might have made them seem weak and possibly slow on the trigger.
But as WHO chatted nicely with China (a sort of helpful diversion), countries around the world had more time to assemble and organize their pandemic response plans. WHO bought a bit of time for nations with advanced public health systems to brush off and ramp up their emergency preparedness toolkits. An outright blaming of China would not have been (nor would it still be) politically wise.
WHO took the fall for the world’s nations, like giving the person who is ‘it’ a chance to run and hide. It was a high-stakes game of ‘hide and seek’, that finally by the sheer force of its innate horror (watching thousands of people hospitalized and hearing about thousands of deaths in China) tipped over into public awareness. That made the eventual official declaration of a pandemic by WHO seem like an afterthought. But the psychology of that was quite astute… nations who were aware of what they had to do had time to prepare.
While WHO may have appeared weak in their stance, they were actually exercising high-wire diplomacy so that the rest of the world could benefit by observation and study of what China went through and dealt with. For the sake of this article we won’t get into the reported bits about artificial manufacture of the virus and this whole thing possibly being a biological warfare experiment.
As we wrote in our editorial “The high stakes politics of public health” on January 24 (by Mary Brooke, West Shore Voice News), there is no point now in laying blame as to the source of the virus; it’s far more important to deal with dousing the fire that is destroying the house. Just like doctors might know that your heart attack resulted from years of dietary and exercise neglect but they don’t worry about that while treating your heart attack or doing an organ transplant.
Langford’s Mayor is known for his slap-dash ‘get stuff done’ style of politics and management of the city with business-style acumen and force. He was already watching the news out of China in December, and already convening meetings with staff and key community leaders in January. He and his pandemic team had a plan in place by February, and Stew himself was capturing a news moment for not shaking hands with a government minister at a high-profile meeting. Mayor Young was an early adopter of active physical distancing and has brought his community along with him.
Now as we know, the management of public health is a provincial responsibility, and everyone is fully behind Dr Bonnie Henry and her masterful rollout of protective measures for British Columbians. But this pandemic caught fire in Mayor Young’s natural way of treating his entire community like family, and his socially protective nature has produced some unique outcomes.
Pulled together in February and formally addressed at a special council meeting on March 19, Langford council ushered in (though not unanimously at the time) a COVID-Langford plan to make sure no one in municipality of over 42,000 people was left unattended with regard to their needs. An update report at the April 6 council meeting outlines that the initiative includes addressing the needs of individual residents and businesses both large and small.
In addition to the COVID-Langford Help Line dial-in service (backed by a doctor, pharmacist and team of nurses) which has reached beyond Langford to the broader west shore and Sooke, there is a Resident Check-In Hotline which will try to reach all Langford residents to see if anyone is ‘home alone’ or needs other types of support.
There is also a Business Check-In Hotline which has seen the city contacting all their commercial businesses, and also sending their City of Langford COVID-19 Business Resource Guide to also the small and home-based businesses in town. And a partnership with the United Way to provide hotel accommodation to health care workers who live in the west shore, for a bit of respite between shifts on the frontlines.
The budget for all of that is $400,000. Council approved, as well, a staff report that itemized some ongoing monthly costs for the COVID-Langford Help Line as well as three bylaws that strengthen the roles and permissions for the city’s bylaw officers to address infractions of the provincial health orders that keep people safe during the pandemic.
Langford’s approach to enforcing those bylaws starts — as it always does — with the goal to inform and educate any person or business which is not complying with the bylaw. If non-compliance is repeated or persists, then there may be a fine. The maximum is $500 for a municipal fine, but if it goes to court and further to sentencing it could result in a maximum fine of $10,000 for an individual or a business.
At the April 6 council meeting (conducted via teleconference) the public heard that Langford has four bylaw officers (Lorne Fletcher, Manager of Community Safety and Municipal Enforcement, and three of his staff). But after the in-camera session there are now 10 people to carry out the bylaw enforcement of COVID-19 in Langford. There will also be in total seven new officers at the West Shore RCMP detachment, said Mayor Young today in an interview with West Shore Voice News.
In the ‘early days’ of COVID-19 (though not so long ago on the 2020 calendar), Stew Young was the one on the TV news asking for people to be able to stay below deck in their cars on the BC Ferries ships (before that was eventually allowed by Transport Canada), and he was the one calling for cessation of the Clipper catamaran sailings between Seattle (at the heart of the Washington State COVID-19 outbreak) and Victoria, before it became obvious to others to do so.
It’s kind of just common sense to ‘see’ the unseen virus — especially now that we know how it travels. And people who have for years followed natural health awareness were already physically distancing early in the year and taking deliberate action to build up their immune systems (health food stores have in recent months been doing a booming business).
But some things did — in hindsight — take too long, says Stew Young. It was a bit of a hedged bet to let the clock tick to March 13 as the last day of regular classes in BC before spring break. That’s the risky high-wire stuff again. Dr Henry would make a good poker player! But even attending a school district gathering on March 12 to celebrate new schools in the west shore was like walking the slippery edge of the pool, an example of how ‘business as usual’ was beginning to collide with the evident danger of an already-identified viral spread.
School’s out. Since March 13, students in Kindergarten to Grade 12 in BC have not been back in class, by order of the Provincial Health Officer and announced by BC Education Minister Rob Fleming.
Teachers and students both were on spring break March 14 to 29. Teachers were asked by school districts to repackage and reformulate their instructional delivery for their students, once they were back on the job March 30.
At this last leg of the 2019-2020 academic year, this come with a bit of added pressure — in particular for the completion of Grade 12 students who are looking to post-secondary. And for families this has suddenly thrust parents or caregivers into the process of homeschooling, at least until new lesson plans are rolled out.
Young also feels that the federal government has missed the mark in terms of understanding how the social safety net should be delivered to Canadians and businesses. Understandably, the pace and pressure have been fierce under pandemic conditions for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his cabinet, and thousands of civil servants working under unthinkable time constraints. But leaving businesses falling between the cracks is bad for a town like Langford where small businesses predominate.
Construction projects have for the most part continued in Langford, working within the Provincial Health Officer’s guidelines, though several building permits have been ‘pushed back’ out of necessity.
Huge projects like the dreamed-of Maritime Centre, performance theatre and Martime Museum of BC in Langford are now quietly on hold.
Sports seasons for soccer, lacrosse and hockey are already an early-2020 faded memory, each falling like dominoes, one after the other. These are dampening moments for a go-forward community.
And starkly noted by rapid demise — it was only February 14 when Langford’s Mayor and Canada Soccer announced with great excitement a two-part exhibition match for March 27 and 31 at Westhills Stadium. By early March that had also become a would-have-been moment that was quietly put to bed.
For Langford this is a community now teeming with pent-up energy that would normally be expressed in business, school, sports events, and a wide range of community events. Seeing the rescheduling of the annual Rotary of the Westshore Lobsterfest fundraiser from April to August was a sure fire signal that Langford would be taking its physical distancing quite seriously.
There was also no fanfare about completing the installation of memorial bricks at the Sarah Beckett Memorial Playground before spring; equally sobering was the installation of yellow caution tape on the playground’s equipment last week.
The city’s COVID action committee meets every day at 9 am has been driving the development and delivery of all that it takes to put the Langford stamp onto COVID-19. The team includes the Mayor, Councillors Matt Sahlstrom and Roger Wade, senior staff, business development leadership from Royal Roads University, pharmacist and doctor of the Help Line service, police, fire and social services.
A flyer was sent by the city to over 18,000 addresses letting people know about the COVID-Langford initiative, including a suggestion to check out the BC Health’s COVID-19 self-assessment tool. And the phone lines at city hall are lit up every day with staff calling residents and businesses to tell them know about the available supports.
On March 19, Council approved $400,000 toward COVID-19 initiatives. About $175,000 of that has been transferred over from the remaining Danbrook One housing relief fund (from December 2019). The remainder of the funding is the remaining surplus from its own Emergency Operations Fund, of which the City has set aside $400,000 for 2020. Langford Mayor Stew Young has donated $60,000 of his own money toward COVID-19 supports in his community.
On a bigger scale, the Langford COVID-19 team has secured the much-sought-after protective personal equipment (PPE) that is so vital for frontline care of people during the pandemic. This week Langford managed to track down 40,000 masks (giving 10,000 to Island Health about three days ago) and order 4,000 reusable face shields.
Some of the face shields will be for health care workers at the hospital and the others for first responders in the west shore, aviailable for sale to essential workers in Langford at cost.
“There should be a law that says we have enough equipment for a pandemic,” he adds. “So we can be faster in our deployment.”
“Construction workers can come to work as long as they physically distance. Once we secure another 100,000 masks those will be given to construction workers for the job site. We’ll do an education program on that next week.
How are things at city hall? “Everything is online… doing permits and inspections. We’re keeping up with construction in March… same number of permits as in March of last year. Everyone single one of our staff are still working. Some staff are now phoning residents to see how they’re doing and make sure they’re aware of the programs that we have available for them,” said Mayor Young today.
Business is the lifeblood of the Langford economy. “We are working with our 1,000 businesses to help them stay in business by showing them how to do the plexi-glass face shields for their workers,” said Mayor Young. He says that after the Easter long weekend that face shields will be made available to front line workers if they don’t have plexiglass in place. Per a new Langford bylaw coming into effect April 20, face shields and masks are to be worn by frontline retail workers.
“For-profit companies can procure them at our cost, so they get it at a good price. Cashiers should be behind the plexiglass and we will suggest they wear a mask, once we have a supply,” he said. “But it’s tough. Up until a week ago everybody was told ‘you don’t need a mask’. Now it’s changed.”
For the stores in Langford there are plexiglass shields available for checkout areas, and stick-on floor markings to show where customers should travel down the aisles or be standing two meters apart toward the checkout. Much of this information is of course part of the provincial mandate, but Langford is being thorough about making sure it is applied within its municipal borders.
Stew Young has done a series of west shore podcasts since the last week of March, exploring the highlights and valleys of COVID-19 in the broader community. His voice and image are incorporated into Public Service Announcements during the dinner-time TV news hour. He does radio and TV interviews, and think-piece interviews for producing articles like this one.
“Think of all the people that would have to stay home — about 4,000 — if one person gets sick,” said Young as he works through the profile of the whole thing.
Progress. “We’re doing very well with our COVID initiative. People are being so supportive of the program. We’re saving lives. We’re a community of younger people,” said Young. “The messaging was ‘oh it affects old people’, I heard that so much”. “Stop this right now… we look after everybody. Seniors are the most important part of our community — they’ve lived through the wars and all the problems that we’ve had, and we need that experience,” said the Mayor who will turn 60 this year.
Proud of his town. “I’m very proud of the people of Langford, of the work they’ve done to stop the spread of this thing,” says the city’s high-energy mayor. “You can’t measure it, but I know that it’s successful and making a difference. When you’re dealing with a lot of young people and they think they’re invincible, it’s hard to explain to people unless it actually affects them and they actually see it. But if they see the effects then we’re not winning the war. The best way to win this war against COVID is to know that it’s not affecting anybody.”
Living with COVID-19. “It’s probably something that’s going to be with us for at least six months,” said Young. “We’re going to have to be vigilant. It might be longer than six months. It might be just a part of life that is just like washing your hands for the rest of your life. You just have to do it. Certain cleanliness rules will be with society forever. If you come to Canada now, you should not be allowed to get off a plane and just go into our community (as before COVID-19).”
He faults the WHO for being too political with guiding the evolution of COVID public awareness. But it’s a delicate message to lay out the impact of a 3.4% infection rate. “That’s 300 million people if everybody got it,” said Mayor Young, as part of explaining why he’s so fired up about all this.
The Langford way. Langford may have seemed to go out of bounds on stepping into the public health fray of a provincially-guided pandemic response. We note, at different junctures, the politely raised ire of Island Health’s Chief Medical Officer mid-March and the PHO herself the week after that, as well as an urgent reminder by the Premier during a dinner-hour live TV message last week appealing for everyone to be on the same page with this pandemic.
But in stepping forward first in a way that was down to earth and infused with the emotion of human urgency, Stew Young has pegged COVID-19 at the center of everyone’s dart board. As Health Minister Adrian Dix has repeated now for weeks… that everyone needs to be all-in, 100% committed. The community of Langford can rightly feel well served by its Mayor and Council who tamed a wild beast into a defined response of community support.
Expressed concern from a squeaky wheel is never gently tolerated, but it usually highlights the problem which in the case of COVID-19 was necessary in short order. And taking action on new ideas can seem messy — especially in new territory — but gets stuff done.
Oh yeah, the Langford motto of “GET SH#T DONE” (as launched at the last close-quarters Langford council meeting on February 25, the likes of which we’ll not see again for a good long while) is very clearly in active mode around Langford city hall on the COVID-19 file.