The town council of a remote Inuit community in northern Quebec said the region’s public health authority has to go through the proper channels to approve gradual reopening measures — and not take any shortcuts that could jeopardize the community by allowing in COVID-19.
Nancy Etok, the deputy mayor of Kangiqsualujjuaq, a community of 1,000 on Ungava Bay, said council recently denied a request from the Nunavik Regional Board of Health to fly in workers from Montreal to do much-needed construction work at the local health clinic.
Etok says she was surprised when she got a call from the board’s public health director May 14, asking if the village would welcome workers from the south the following Monday.
”We felt as though the decision to send unquarantined construction crews, with four days’ notice, was really risky,” Etok said.
Mayor Davidee Annanack said the workers would not have been subject to the usual 14-day quarantine imposed on all travellers before and after their arrival in Nunavik.
“It is difficult to understand that, all of a sudden, the same protocols and measures imposed by public health and public security don’t apply to these construction people from the south,” Annanack said in a written statement.
Nunavik has been largely successful in limiting the spread of COVID-19, with only 16 cases since the pandemic began. There have been no cases in Kangiqsualujjuaq, Etok said, and seeing a crew of workers land in the village would have been stressful for residents.
Most flights to Nunavik have been cancelled since April 2 — the only exceptions being those carrying health-care workers or other essential-service workers like police officers and patients requiring medical treatment.
Etok said the request to send in workers should have been submitted to the local committee in charge of deciding when and how Nunavik will reopen to others.
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