Rob: I wanted to bring up something. This has to do with stigma around people who have COVID-19. I came across an article in the Rocky Mountain Outlook this week about how a lot of the recent spike in cases in Banff were all linked to one household. According to Dr. Vamini Selvanandan, she said that, sadly, some members of this cluster were stigmatized and treated unfairly within our community. Then I also go to the exchange in the Letters to the Editor section of the Outlook,where someone was taking issue with the parking lot testing in front of Ridgeview at Safeway, and there was a bit of a rebuttal from a doctor at the Mineral Springs Hospital about the safety of that. There really seems to be some people who are shaming people and stigmatizing people who catch COVID. I don’t think that’s right.

Tanya: Fear is a natural response, but targeting people for something that’s happened to millions of people around the world, they’ve caught an infectious disease, is not helpful to anyone. As the editor of the newspaper, I received an unusual amount of “tips” which have turned out to be unfounded rumors from residents of Banff. Every single time it’s a fear response. It’s resulting in these situation being overblown to the point where someone has to step in and correct these rumors.

Banff had done an exceptionally good job through the lockdown of managing people coming in and out of the community. Really low numbers. I think everyone, when we saw Banff had eight cases, we were like, “Oh no!” But knowing now that six of those were related to a group that had attended an event in Calgary, it’s a lot different than having community spread. There are a lot more details than just “there’s a COVID case in your community.” We don’t have to treat others with a lack of dignity because this is happening to them.

Rob: Part of it might have to do with the fact that I think some people make a direct connection between someone catching COVID, and they caught COVID because they did something wrong. They weren’t socially distancing, or they put themselves in a situation that they shouldn’t have been in. And I think a lot of times we hear those media stories about COVID outbreaks linked to people doing something really dumb, but there are also many cases of people, through no fault of their own, catching this disease that nobody has any immunity to. So just because somebody has COVID doesn’t mean that they should be made to feel like an outlier in their community, because this is something we’re all dealing with together. People are going to catch this, and hopefully recover from it.

Filed under: Banff, covid-19, Mountain Insider