N.S. health officials draw lessons from COVID-19 outbreak in Mennonite community

'It's required us to be a lot more creative and trying to be more tailored to populations,' says Dr. Ryan Sommers, the regional medical officer of health for the northern zone.

Philip Dueck says he’s seen COVID-19 cases hit nearly every home in his small town as an outbreak of the disease rolled through the isolated northern Nova Scotia community.

“There’s the odd (household) that’s missed, but pretty much every household got some of it,” Dueck, who owns a firewood business in Northfield, N.S., said in a recent interview.

The Mennonite community of roughly 300 people is about 75 kilometres north of Halifax in rural Hants County. Since the provincial Health Department began reporting on the outbreak on Sept. 13, it has not identified the location. Instead, it referred in news releases to a cluster of cases among a “defined, unvaccinated group” in the province’s northern health zone.

But Dueck and others in the province’s Mennonite community say it was no secret where the cluster was occurring.

When the outbreak was first reported, rumours began to circulate about its location in the northern region, said Franklin Isaac, a deacon at the Mennonite Church of God in Christ near Tatamagouche, N.S. Isaac said he didn’t know much about Northfield – which belongs to a different branch of the denomination – but conversations with other Mennonite groups in the area helped him pinpoint the location of the outbreak.

Dr. Ryan Sommers, the regional medical officer of health for the northern zone has been at the forefront of the province’s response to the outbreak. He said officials estimate between 240 and 250 people in a community of 300 have been infected with COVID-19 during the pandemic’s fourth wave. About 60 per cent of the cases were confirmed with lab testing, while the others have been labelled as “probable.”

Probable cases are defined as people who are symptomatic and live with lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 but don’t get tested for the disease, he said in an interview Monday. About half a dozen people have been hospitalized due to the disease, he added.

Sommers did not identify where the outbreak occurred, but he addressed how officials tackled the problem as case counts climbed.