New Brunswick opposition parties question government response to pandemic – New Brunswick | The Canadian News

The record counts of COVID-19 cases in New Brunswick are sparking a huge political debate about how the provincial government is handling the fourth wave.

In the last two days, the province registered 317 new cases of COVID-19, with 109 cases as a moving average during the last week. On Friday, a third of the reported cases were in children under the age of 19. Sixty-one were in the Fredericton region. The active case count in New Brunswick is 971 with 139 deaths since the pandemic began.

But Public Health says there is no need for new restrictions.

The government’s response to criticism is to focus on how well the health system is behaving, considering hospitalizations and ICU admissions, Health Minister Dorothy Shephard said.

“The big problem now is how we handle it,” he said.

“People know how to protect themselves, right? Keep your contacts low, keep your inner circles small, get vaccinated. That is our number one protection against hospitalizations, ICU admission and death. “

Both Shephard and Prime Minister Blaine Higgs say New Brunswick residents “know what to do to protect themselves.”

“I think it is New Brunswick that decides that we want to have a life here,” Higgs said in remarks to reporters Thursday. “I don’t think people are in any situation now … that they accept closures or closures that we had before because they would say ‘look’ we are vaccinated between 80 and 95 percent, what was the point? ‘”

But those explanations have not eased the mind of Green Party leader David Coon.

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“It seems that the government has taken this position that Public Health is no longer going to do anything, that we are going to live with COVID and this is the reality with which we are living,” he said on Friday. “So in the summer, the government declared victory, and now they are declaring defeat.”

The number of cases began to climb in August, almost immediately after experts began warning about the fourth wave and the Delta variant. By then, all restrictions in the province had been lifted.

On September 20, the province reinstated mandatory masks amid a record number of broken cases and deaths.

More than half of the deaths reported in New Brunswick have been reported since the restrictions were lifted in July.

The ‘circuit breakers’ were introduced into Zone 1 on October 5, and various other zones or parts of them were later attached.

Coon said this timeline, and the lack of further action, has left New Brunswick residents feeling abandoned.

“They have no news from the public health officials they employ,” he said.

Messages from the province’s health minister and chief medical officer, Dr. Jennifer Russell, are essentially telling New Brunswick residents that they are alone, he said.

“People want to hear what Public Health thinks without being filtered,” he said. “It’s just silly.”

Acting Liberal leader Roger Melanson, who tabled a motion for an independent review of the handling of the pandemic, said he feels the government has no solutions.

“I think they have to consider all the options,” he said, referring to increased restrictions or another lockdown.

But with the Christmas season fast approaching, the province is not indicating a move of any sanitary zone to the second or third level of the Winter Action Plan.

The province removed the “community transmission” classification from the COVID-19 dashboard, but Shephard confirmed that the spread was occurring without any confirmation on the origin of the infection.

“Contact tracing is being managed,” he said. “We probably can’t (do) contract tracking for all cases and some of them don’t even know where they come from.”