Shomporko Desk:-With an end goal to keep its COVID-19 case check at zero, the Nunavut government has paid almost $5 million for more than 1,200 of its residents to isolate at an Ottawa hotel before returning home.
The territory is the main spot in Canada that hasn’t had a single confirmed case of the virus and has forced exacting section guidelines to guarantee it remains as such. In order to return home, residents require a letter from Nunavut’s chief medical officer of health confirming they have finished a 14-day self-isolation.
The letter is composed dependent on a report from a hotel nurse.
The territorial government has been paying the costs of a resident’s stay in one of four cities — Ottawa, Edmonton, Winnipeg or Yellowknife. The Yellowknife centre has since closed.
So far, the government has spent $21 million for residents to isolate, the territory’s department of health wrote in a statement.
Of the approximately 3,200 people who have been required to self-isolate, more than a third — 1,263 — did so in Ottawa, and that number continues to climb as more people prepare to return home, the health department said.
Heidi Nowicki is currently isolating with her husband at the Residence Inn by Marriott near Ottawa’s Macdonald–Cartier International Airport.
Nowicki is a healthcare worker in Iqaluit. She’s had to use her own vacation days to cover the two-week quarantine period. She said she and her husband are trying to treat it as a “vacation after my vacation.”
“It’s been actually nice and relaxing and the hotel is very accommodating.”
Even though Nunavut has had zero confirmed cases of COVID-19, it has had some presumptive case scares. Last month two workers from the Mary River Mine tested negative for the virus. At the time, the territory’s chief public health officer said the mineworkers could have had the illness before but recovered.
Nowicki believes the government has done a good job keeping the virus out of the territory and said it could be a burden on the health care system if there were an outbreak.
Photo credit: Leah Hansen/CBC
News source: CBC News
