I've spoken of it and others have as well. I think the reason we are seeing at this moment better outcomes in British Columbia is because of what we learned at the first outbreak at Lynn Valley. I think the approach has been that, first of all, we lowered the barrier to declare an outbreak on one case. The normal outbreak threshold is two cases, one laboratory confirmed. Also, we looked at staff equally as residents. I don't know how many people here have been in practice, but when I was in practice we never looked at staff for influenza swabbing; we looked at residents. That, I think, has helped.
The minute the outbreak is declared, which is one confirmed case, either staff or residents, public health gets in there immediately and gives direction to the care home around all of the things that need to be done. We talk about the cohorting and about these other things.
In British Columbia, 75% of our residents are actually in single rooms. I think that is higher than other provinces. I think that has also helped us manage the best practices that PHAC has recommended, and that any infection control person would recommend.
The recognition of the care staff as the vectors of transmission and the designation to one work site, which was done earlier, has been helpful. If there's one area where we lagged a bit—and I would say everybody did, and Jodi has talked about this—it was the testing of asymptomatic people in an outbreak situation. I think we learned. Early on, we weren't doing that because the evidence at that time was that the test was ineffective if you were asymptomatic. We now know that asymptomatic people can both shed the virus and test positive for the virus. So we have started that best practice as well.
I think it's those things. Certainly, the quick, SWAT-like intervention of public health at the very beginning has been absolutely key to helping us.
