Manitoba keeps the size of COVID outbreaks at personal care homes under wraps

On a day when Heather Stefanson sought to turn the page on the deadliest COVID-19 outbreak at a Manitoba personal care home, a new COVID-19 outbreak at a different personal care home forced the premier to scramble.

On Wednesday, Stefanson planned to announce $15 million in new provincial funding for personal care homes at River Park Gardens, a seniors' facility in Winnipeg's Royalwood neighbourhood.

The event was moved to the Manitoba legislative building because of a COVID-19 outbreak at the home.

The province informed the media of the venue change one hour before the scheduled announcement.

The severity of this outbreak is unknown, because the province no longer discloses how many people are infected at care homes.

Under Manitoba's two-week-old strategy of publishing statistics such as hospitalizations and case counts on a weekly  basis — rather than every weekday — the province has stopped revealing how many personal care home residents are infected with the virus.

CBC News made repeated requests for this data over three days, but the province declined to disclose it. 

The province instead pointed to the weekly release of COVID-19 epidemiological reports that list the total number of COVID outbreaks, but not the number of people infected in those outbreaks.

That means two outbreaks could denote four sick elderly people. They could also denote 400. There is no way of knowing if the personal care homes do not publish the data themselves.

Some, like the Saul & Claribel Simkin Centre in Winnipeg's Linden Ridge neighbourhood, disclose this information proactively. It informed families of 16 infections on April 3.

"I think that it wouldn't be a coincidence that we're seeing a rise in our cases with the ending of the restrictions that were previously in place," Simkin care director Alanna Kull said in an interview, referring to the end of the mandatory indoor mask mandate and mandatory quarantine for COVID patients on March 15.

"I can't say that 100 per cent, but obviously we're making that correlation here, that we're seeing staff coming in sick, we're seeing visitors coming in sick and we're seeing residents that are now getting sick."

The infected staff and visitors were not symptomatic when they entered the care home and disclosed their illnesses as soon as possible, Kull said. The severity of the symptoms among residents is also less severe than it was during a January outbreak, she added. 

But she said it would be preferable if the province reinstated basic pandemic measures such as the mask mandate.