B.C. doesn’t have capacity to help Alberta as it struggles with COVID-19: ER doctor

DELTA (NEWS 1130) – Alberta is looking directly to B.C. for help amid a newly declared public health emergency due to rising COVID-19 case numbers and poor vaccination rates, more than two months after being told by experts across the country not to fully re-open.

It’s believed Alberta could run out of available staff and ICU beds within the next 10 days. However, B.C. does not have the capacity to send frontline health care workers nor equipment, according to one veteran doctor based in Metro Vancouver.

Dr. Michael Curry is an ER doctor who predominantly works in Delta. He’s been a physician for nearly two decades and was recently in northern Alberta, treating COVID patients.

“The problem in Canada is we design our health care system to run at almost full at the best of times,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of excess capacity in Canada for this sort of surge and, as we’ve heard about, there’s already been issues with staffing across Canada because of the stresses brought on by the pandemic.

“I think there may be, around the edges, some ability for some health care staff to leave British Columbia or other provinces to help in Alberta. But the truth of the matter is we don’t have a lot spare health care providers. Our system, even before COVID-19, was running close to capacity on a daily basis. We don’t have a lot of extra surge capacity available to share.”

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That would leave Alberta without many options to ask any other provinces or territories for help and it may need to lean on the federal government.

“I’m not sure the federal government really has much resources available, either,” Curry said. “They do have a little bit through the Canadian Forces that might be deployed, but we’re talking on the scale of dozens and dozens of people — not hundreds, not thousands of people available.”

He notes another “limiting factor” is the physical space available to care for the most critically ill patients and the ability to get ventilators for the people who need them.

“The COVID patients who do need ventilators need it for weeks, so it’s not something where you can just take care of somebody for a couple of hours and move on. This is a long-term commitment of a hospital bed, with highly specialized staff and highly specialized equipment needed for one patient for weeks going into months.”

He thinks it’s possible B.C. could send some ventilators to Alberta, but even that is a long shot.

“Patients [are] brought into hospitals for COVID-19 to be divided, basically, into two groups. The one group needs oxygen support. That’s relatively easy to arrange. That’s something you can set up like we saw here in British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

“The chokepoint is the sicker COVID patients who need mechanical ventilation and critical care. That’s ICU-type care that’s very resource-intensive. Most physicians and most nurses are not trained to provide that level of care and it is dependent on very specialized health care workers and very specialized equipment and we don’t have a lot to spare.”

Health Minister Adrian Dix confirms that B.C, is not in a position to treat people in or from Alberta.

“The Ministry of Health met with our Alberta counterparts today,” he writes in an email. “Given the current demands on B.C.’s healthcare system, we will not be able to assist with taking patients at this time. However, we have told Alberta that if there are things we can do to support them, we will. And if we can take patients on in the future, we will.”

While treating patients in northern Alberta over the Labour Day long weekend, Curry says what he witnessed was horrific.

“You saw a health care system that was stretching to provide care. It’s still within Alberta’s capacity to provide care but at the rate of growth in COVID, continuing like it’s going … they’re not going to be able to provide that care. And with not being able to provide that care means the sickest of the sick with COVID are going to have substantially worse outcomes than they would have had when we had the room and ability to provide the proper critical care they require.”

He adds the difference between B.C. and Alberta’s COVID situation is like night and day and it hinges around vaccination rates.

“We seem to be, at the hospital I’m working at, at a much better situation in terms of controlled COVID than what I was seeing when I was working in northern Alberta. The patients I was seeing that were sick and really needing hospital-based care in Alberta were almost exclusively unimmunized people and in that area of rural northern Alberta, where I was working, the vaccination rate is extremely low.”

Related article: Alberta’s dire COVID-19 situation compared to B.C.’s fourth wave fight

On Wednesday, Alberta’s premier announced the province is bringing in a proof of vaccination program for some discretionary services. Jason Kenney also apologized for his government’s recent handling of COVID-19, admitting Alberta opened up too quickly.

“It is now clear that we were wrong, and for that I apologize.”

Curry feels neither the vaccine passport system nor restrictions in both provinces make as big an impact as getting vaccinated does, in terms of keeping case numbers down.

He admits he was dealing with many patients in Alberta who, despite having COVID-19, didn’t believe it was real or that vaccines work.

“I had one patient explain to me at length how they don’t believe in COVID so they obviously can’t have it. Whether you believe it or not, it doesn’t change whether it exists,” he explained, adding he didn’t lecture people about their decision.

“I don’t think it does anything other than make a person perhaps feel guilty about it and I think it really compromises the health care worker/patient relationship to dwell on it. Either they’ve made the connection themselves that, ‘Hey, maybe I should have got the vaccine and I wouldn’t have this,’ and if they haven’t made the connection about the time they’re in hospital and they’re diagnosed with COVID — I don’t think any amount of lecturing or talking is likely going to change their opinion.”

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