The Super 8 Hotel where people have stayed in isolation from COVID in High River, Alta., on Jan. 22, 2021.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
Kent Amores was changing the oil in his truck when he got the call last spring. The caller, a public-health official, told him he had to get out of his apartment, stat. He had tested negative for COVID-19, but lots of people in his apartment building were positive. He waited four hours in his truck for further instructions.
He ended up at the Super 8 hotel in High River, Alta., that spring evening, around 7 p.m. local time. Mr. Amores wasn’t allowed in the lobby. He had to take the utility elevator to his room on the third floor. He opened the door and started his 14-day quarantine at the government’s expense.
“It is like a prison cell, except it has a nice bed and TV,” Mr. Amores said. “You feel bored inside the room, locked up.”
Mr. Amores works at the Cargill meat-processing plant near High River, the site of then the largest workplace outbreak of COVID-19 in the country. Public-health officials eventually recognized the crisis was exacerbated by housing quarters that made isolating difficult. They helped place people like Mr. Amores, as well as those who tested positive, in isolation hotels.
Alberta put 58 people in isolation hotel rooms in May, as an outbreak was sweeping Cargill. But after that, Alberta used just a small fraction of its isolation hotel capacity until December, when the government urged citizens to use the facilities, arranged accommodations in areas outside Calgary and Edmonton, and gave people $625 for completing a stay.
The program’s scant use in the fall is a reflection not of the specific policy but of how Alberta lost control of the virus, according to experts. Slow turnaround times for test results, combined with the busted contact tracing network, gave the virus a chance to spread before public-health officials could intervene.
“By the time we’re calling, the entire family is symptomatic and there’s no need for an isolation hotel because everyone in the house is positive,” said Annalee Coakley, the lead physician at Calgary’s Mosaic Refugee Health Clinic. “They don’t need the hotels at that point because they are all sick together.”
Rachel Talavlikar, a physician in northeast Calgary who works with marginalized communities, had similar experiences calling COVID-19 positive patients. In October, it was not unusual for five days to pass before tested patients got their results. This, she said, was a turning point in the fight against the infection – and one that made the hotel system, however well-intentioned, moot.
“That was a battle we lost,” she said. “By the time you knew that they had it, it was almost too late.”
Just six people used the isolation hotels in June, eight in July, and 14 in August, according to figures provided by the Alberta Ministry of Municipal Affairs. As of September, Alberta had capacity to isolate 1,149 people, but just 18 individuals used the program. Dr. Coakley and Dr. Talavlikar, however, both noted that plenty of people are able to isolate safely in their own houses and are reluctant to leave the comforts of home when ill.
The pandemic escalated rapidly in the fall and Alberta’s testing and contact tracing suffered under the crush of new cases. Alberta recorded more than 10,000 new cases of COVID-19 in October and nearly triple that in November. Despite the explosion of new cases, just 10 people stayed in the isolation hotels in October, and 54 in November. Alberta, at the time, had increased capacity in the hotels to 1,408 a month.
In December, traffic at the hotels jumped. In the first 10 days of that month, 43 individuals stayed in 35 rooms; between Dec. 11 and Dec. 17, 34 people isolated in the facilities.
Alberta’s health care system was on the verge of buckling in the middle of December and Premier Jason Kenney, along with other senior ministers, urged residents to use isolation hotels if necessary. Alberta launched outreach campaigns in 11 communities within Calgary and Edmonton and noted individuals in these hot spots who test positive for COVID-19 are eligible for a 14-day stay – “complete with culturally appropriate food” – and $625 after they finish isolating.
Tracy Allard, then the minister for Municipal Affairs, was in charge of the file. She was removed from cabinet this month after travelling to Hawaii in December, sparking outrage across the province.
The push – and perhaps the cash – translated into more people packing their bags for two weeks. Alberta picked up the tab for 148 people to isolate between Dec. 18 and Dec. 24, 136 between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, and another 238 in the first 12 days of 2021, according to Municipal Affairs.
McKenzie Kibler, a spokesman for Municipal Affairs Minister Ric McIver, did not address questions about whether Alberta considers the program a success or why so few citizens opted in as the pandemic accelerated in the fall and early winter. However, he credited the government’s December awareness campaign in communities with high transmission rates for the spike in hotel stays at the end of 2020 and early 2021.
Mr. Amores, the Cargill worker who stayed at the High River Super 8, passed the time in quarantine by making financial spreadsheets and online drawings. It was mentally straining, and made him think a shift in messaging around the pandemic might help.
“We have to have a behavioural change. I’m locked up there: I’m protecting myself, but I know that when I go out, I’ll be protecting others, too,” he said. “It is for a purpose. And it will help not only themselves, but those who are around them.”
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