The confusion started on Saturday when the B.C. government website listed the Sunshine Coast among the communities exempt from the new regional public health order announced by Dr. Bonnie Henry earlier in the day.
Media reported the error and it led to confusion. The mistake was fixed and the corrections made. The Sunshine Coast, alas, was included as part of the Vancouver Coastal Health region.
This didn’t sit well with Powell River Mayor Dave Formosa, who later in the week called on the health minister to grant his city an exemption from the order. “We are totally isolated from the Lower Mainland and the Lower Sunshine Coast,” Formosa told CBC Radio. “We’re all by ourselves over here and we’re doing very, very well.”
Someone hearing that might think the Lower Sunshine Coast is a place you’d want to keep far away from – when in fact the latest local health area numbers (to end of September) show the Lower Coast with 26 COVID cases to date and Powell River with 39 (due largely to a community-transmission event at Tla’amin First Nation).
But we don’t think the mayor intended to paint his neighbours to the south as a COVID hotbed; his point in the interview was that many people in Powell River are more connected to Vancouver Island than the mainland, and for them the public health order’s strong recommendation to avoid non-essential travel to and from the affected regions is an unnecessary hardship.
Formosa says he has MLA-elect Nicholas Simons’ support, and his argument might get a sympathetic hearing, although the Ministry of Health told us this week that Powell River and the Sunshine Coast were both included in the order “based on travel [patterns] and health care access.”
As for the Lower Coast, our closer proximity to Vancouver makes an appeal for exemption even less convincing and less likely to succeed, and perhaps that’s why none of our politicians has pressed the case. Certainly the prime directive in the two-week order – a ban on socializing with anyone outside of one’s immediate household – is an extreme measure, but we suspect the vast majority of Coasters will make every effort to comply, as they have with every restriction imposed during the pandemic.
We await the October numbers with some trepidation.
