COVID crunch-time missteps rattle New Brunswickers' confidence
CBC
It's crunch time for New Brunswick's COVID-19 response and the cracks are showing.
Case levels over the last month have been beyond what anyone would have imagined last summer, when we were patting ourselves on the back about the province's sound management.
But that management is now undergoing its biggest stress test, and missteps, mistakes and reversals have shaken public confidence.
The bumpy rollout of a new registration system to pick up rapid tests "makes people feel not as confident in the process and maybe not as confident in the information that's being sent out," says Işıl Flynn.
Flynn is a Fredericton technology project manager who works on improving the "user experience" with websites. She says that in general, the province's COVID sites are far too text-heavy and confusing.
More visual information would be easier to understand than large amounts of text, she says.
"Unless there's a legal need to have that much information, it's probably going to get skimmed over anyway."
Rothesay teacher and lawyer Brian Stephenson says the province's plea that people follow Public Health guidelines "presupposes that we knew what they were yesterday, and therefore can incorporate whatever changes we heard today."
Last Wednesday night, a simple mistake led to short-term alarm among francophones who thought the province was banning travel between health zones and restricting contacts to two-household bubbles.
Linda Dalpé, a doctor in Caraquet, heard from a counterpart in Tracadie that those measures were listed in a new PDF of the province's Level 2 restrictions.
The two physicians are among several who've been collating pandemic information and posting it on Facebook to fill what they consider a communications shortfall by the province.
"She had just written a post, and then she noticed: 'Did they change Level 2 again?"" Dalpé said.
"We were trying to go back in time in our documents to find what error happened. … The colleague took down her Facebook because she said everybody's going to freak out and be confused."
The document was eventually corrected, but in the meantime a lot of people were rattled.