Ninety-six people who have returned to B.C. from out of the country are in provincial quarantine at hotels, North Delta NDP MLA Ravi Kahlon said Wednesday.
They’re part of the 14,627 people who have returned to the province from the U.S. or overseas — 6,064 at YVR and 8,563 at land crossings — since the province put its isolation/quarantine plan into action April 10.
Of those 14,627 people, 26 have since shown symptoms of COVID-19 and are being looked after by health authorities.
“We monitor people who have returned, we follow up to make sure they’re self-isolating,” Kahlon said. “We ask people, ‘How are you doing? How are you feeling?’ and we’ve found people say, ‘Well, I’m starting to get a cold.’
“We’ve got 26 people we’ve identified through our monitoring that we referred to 811 or other health officials.”
Arrivals at the Vancouver airport are first met by federal officials for COVID-19 screening and, if they show symptoms, they’re sent to a federal quarantine facility. Visitors and returning residents are then met by officials from the province who need to be convinced that the travellers have adequate self-isolating plans.
The 96 in quarantine are those who didn’t have acceptable self-isolation plans or places to self-isolate after arriving. Two weeks ago that number was 108.
“That number goes up and down,” Kahlon said. “After a few days in quarantine, people say, ‘OK, now we have an adequate plan,’ and they show it to us. If we feel it’s adequate, we let them go. So it’s not that they have to stay the full 14 days, they just have to stay until they can show us they have an adequate plan.”
Most of the people getting their followup calls to make sure people are practising self-isolation protocols have been happy to follow the rules, Kahlon said.
About 500 people, however, didn’t respond to followup phone calls and police were sent to visit them. “Overwhelmingly, once they’ve had a visit from a local officer they have re-engaged in the process and follow the rules,” Kahlon said. “That’s … very positive. Sometimes people think it’s not serious until a police officer knocks on their door, then they realize: ‘Holy crow, this is serious, this is for real, I get it, I’ll call them back.’ ”
The hotels people are sent to for quarantine are near YVR and highway border crossings, Kahlon said. He doubts people are taking advantage of the program for a free, two-week hotel stay.
“One of our concerns was that if you put a significant cost to people having to go [to a hotel], that people wouldn’t go,” Kahlon said. “I don’t think you’re seeing people who would purposely go there, people after all this ordeal want to go home.”
In addition, about 900 foreign workers have been housed by the province.
