Sisters say mother's death could have been avoided if church had taken COVID-19 seriously
CBC
Pearl Lane was full of life: she still baked regularly, made trips with her daughters and loved her grandchildren with all her heart.
A dedicated Christian, the eighty-three-year-old woman never missed a church service. She spoke in the women's meetings and sang in the church choir.
And by all accounts, her devotion to her husband and her children was even greater.
"She was a sweetheart," said her daughter Kim Hibbs. "She just loved life.
"She wasn't ready to go.… She still had a few years left on this earth. And she was taken from us too soon."
Lane died in October after contracting COVID-19 as part of a cluster of cases linked to the First United Pentecostal Church in Bishop's Falls, N.L.
Hibbs and her sister, Beverley Dean, say their mom's death could have been avoided, if COVID-19 prevention measures were more strictly followed during church services in September.
"If they had went by the government rules and the protocols that were in place and wore their masks and done the six-feet distancing, then this would have never happened," said Hibbs.
Rev. Leroy Gee, the head of the church in Bishop's Falls, refused an interview. In an earlier interview in October, he said physical distancing, sanitizing and mask-wearing "was not a hard problem because we don't have a big crowd."
Hibbs and Dean point to a series of gatherings in the first half of September called "camp meetings." That's where they believe their mother and father were exposed to the coronavirus.
Dean said people gathered from across the province and from as far away as New Brunswick, for the meetings.
"What I can gather is that the church was packed to capacity. There wasn't no social distancing. There was no government protocols. There was no mask-wearing," Hibbs said.
"My mother went to one of the ladies in the church and was concerned about people not wearing their masks properly. And there were people there not wearing masks at all. And the lady just shrugged their shoulders at her."
Dean said the meetings should never have been held in the first place, and that Gee should have known that COVID-19 was spreading in the province.
Intelligence regarding foreign interference sometimes didn't make it to the prime minister's desk in 2021 because Canada's spy agency and the prime minister's national security adviser didn't always see eye to eye on the nature of the threat, according to a recent report from one of Canada's intelligence watchdogs.