BC's Provincial Health Officer is not supportive of a new Langford initiative offering in-home advice, assessment, and if necessary testing for the COVID19 virus.
Mayor Stew Young, and Forbes Pharmacy owner Michael Forbes, launched the service to allow people to stay home if they think they are ill. The COVID-19 Mobile Response Team includes a contingent of doctors, nurses and health care workers.
A news release announcing the mobile response clinic says it will offer comfort, support, advice, and complementary care packages, as well as in-home assessment and testing in an effort to curtail the spread of the virus, allowing people to stay at home instead of venturing out into the community for help.
At her daily news conference Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry was asked if she supports such a service:
" I don't at the moment. I'm not sure I understand why somebody would do that in Langford. Where I do see a need, that I think that type of a service might be helpful for is for people in that community who maybe don't have access to health care, who are sick, who are concerned, to be able to talk with someone to help them through, to help them with what I just talked about, about self-isolation if I'm sick."
Henry says she has other concerns:
" As we've mentioned we've changed our testing strategy to make sure that we can more effectively target the highest risk and high priority tests. So somebody randomly doing tests in Langford would not meet the priority criteria necessarily. So I don't think that's a good use of resources."
Henry says she could support a service that helps those in self-isolation understand what they need to do to stay home, and who to contact if they deteriorate.