With B.C. health-care workers now required to be fully vaccinated, organizations that manage temporary housing and shelters not covered by the mandate are implementing their own vaccine requirements.
As of Thursday, vaccination will be mandatory for all Our Place Society staff and volunteers. Cool Aid is implementing the same rule for all its staff, volunteers and contractors, which comes into effect Nov. 1.
The province’s vaccine mandate for health-care workers, which came into effect Tuesday, affects workers in housing facilities funded by Island Health. Since Cool Aid has some housing funded by the health authority and some funded through other avenues, the organization decided to institute its own mandate for consistency, said CEO Kathy Stinson.
“There’s a lot of crossover, you know, our management staff, our maintenance staff, our food services, our IT, they go into all of our sites, so … Island Health-funded sites as well as other funded sites. So, just operationally, it just made sense that we make it an organization-wide policy,” she said.
Grant McKenzie, communications director for Our Place, said the organization felt requiring staff and volunteers to be vaccinated was the best way to protect the vulnerable people they serve, as well as those working and volunteering.
The rule will not apply to people who use their supports, however, because Our Place provides essential services such as food and showers, McKenzie said.
“We can’t block people coming in, even if they are COVID-positive. Because we know that some people who are COVID-positive are self-isolating at home, but they don’t necessarily have access to food. And so, they’re still coming to Our Place,” he said.
The rules come into effect as COVID-19 cases in people living in temporary housing and shelters ease off after rising last month.
There were two cases of COVID-19 among the roughly 500 people living in housing facilities managed by Our Place last week, down from a peak of 56 cases last month, said McKenzie, who was surprised and pleased to see the numbers drop.
“I was really sort of holding my breath, because you know how compromised people’s health is, so I was really expecting the numbers to increase dramatically,” he said.
He said the facilities created by the province this year to house hundreds of people likely helped keep numbers from ballooning, providing many with a place to isolate. The province also created 50 isolation spaces in Victoria for people who contract COVID-19 and have nowhere else to go, in response to rising cases in the unhoused community.
If the virus had hit hard during the first wave, when so many had nowhere to go but a tent, “it could have been a different story,” he said.
Stinson also said cases are “quite low” after “significant numbers” through September and early October.
“It seems we’ve come out the other side of that,” she said.
regan-elliott@timescolonist.com
