( Facebook/City OF Brooks)

By Tiffany Goodwein

Brooks Mayor braces residents to prepare for more COVID-19 cases

Apr 18, 2020 | 12:04 PM

BROOKS AB., – Taking to Facebook Live Saturday morning, Brooks Mayor Barry Morishita told residents to prepare for additional COVID-19 cases.

“I want to prepare you that the numbers in Brooks are likely to go up if not today, but in subsequent days,” Morishita said.

Morishita took to Facebook live Saturday as part of a Q&A session with residents.

The City of Brooks confirmed multiple COVID-19 cases at the JBS Food Canada meat plant on Thursday.

A positive COVID-19 case was also discovered at Sunrise Gardens continuing care centre, and on Friday McDonald’s Canada confirmed an employee at the restaurant tested positive for the virus. The restaurant has since been shut down for deep cleaning as a precaution.

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As of Saturday morning, the city has 33 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 virus, all of which are believed to be community spread, according to the mayor.

Fielding questions from viewers, the mayor said that they aren’t at the point yet where they are considering a full shutdown of the city.

” To lock down the city would create a lot of devastation for businesses and people’s personal and mental health, so we aren’t going to lock down the city but we need everyone to follow the rules,” Morishita urged.

On JBS and a possible shutdown of the meat packing facility, the mayor said it is not in their jurisdiction to issue a shutdown.

” We do not govern the activities of JBS, in fact JBS in being a good partner for the city is not even required to so to speak because they are in the county jurisdiction as well as their operations are regulated by the federal and provincial government,” the mayor said.

He instead, reassured the public that te company has put good protocols in place to ensure the safety of workers.

” They have increased their sanitation and disinfection efforts including whole facility deep cleaning everyday.They are promoting physical distancing by staggering shifts, shifts and breaks, increasing spaces in cafeterias, breaks and locker rooms, including the use of tents to increase space and plexi-glass dividers in key areas.” The mayor said.

The mayor also mentioned all staff get temperature tested prior to entering.

The JBS plant has also increased access to PPE, and has relaxed attendance polices, among other measures to ensure people don’t attend work while sick.

” On site they have great controls however the community spread is coming from people that are not obeying the rules, not paying attention, not being thoughtful about what they are doing in public and that’s where we have work to do if we want to keep the cases down to a minimum,” Morishita said.

The mayor also touched on the cancellation of the drive-in movie, telling viewers that it did not seem like the responsible thing to allow, now that the city has seen cases of community spread.

” So prior to the drive in event going, we had no community cases, and while we knew that their would be some risk involved in bringing a large number of people together albeit in their cars and spaced out, there was reasonable risk.”

“However when we heard that we did have community spread, we did not think it was responsible for us to facilitate a possibility of their being more,” Moishita said.

Later this afternoon, the province is expected to provide an update on cases of COVID-19 throughout Alberta.