Masks, delta and deadlines: Six months of mixed messages in New Brunswick's COVID fight
CBC
Remember when we were winning?
Last spring, New Brunswick was one of the shining stars of the fight against COVID-19.
"People living in other provinces and around the world look at us with envy when they see how much freedom we have been able to enjoy while still avoiding the full force and the damage of COVID-19, and all that it can create," Premier Blaine Higgs said May 27.
He was right. At the time.
We never plunged as deeply into crisis as Alberta or Saskatchewan, but we've lost our bragging rights.
Half our COVID deaths have happened in the last six weeks. At the end of October we had the second-highest provincial death rate in the country after Saskatchewan.
The spike followed months of mixed messages and contradictory signals.
It was a half-year in which the premier described masks as a punishment, and the province's chief medical officer of health spoke of intangible goals like hope and undercut her own deputy's stark advice about masks.
24 new cases, 137 active cases, six hospitalizations including two in ICU, 36 total deaths
At a COVID-19 briefing, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Jennifer Russell says officials are "very, very concerned" about a new variant of the novel coronavirus, later called the delta variant, that has arrived in New Brunswick.
Because variants are more contagious and can cause more severe symptoms, Russell says her office will presume that all new COVID cases are variants.
Russell says we need to err on the side of caution by strictly following Public Health rules.
"This new variant introduces yet another layer of complexity to our effort to control COVID-19, and the issue is not what we know about this particular variant but rather than we don't," she says.
9 new cases, 137 active cases, six hospitalizations, including 2 in ICU, 43 total deaths
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