Covid-19: Doctor accused of sparking Canadian outbreak faces charges

A doctor accused of reintroducing covid-19 to the Canadian province of New Brunswick by failing to self-quarantine after visiting neighbouring Quebec has been charged under the province’s Emergency Measures Act.

Jean Robert Ngola is charged with failure to comply with a government emergency order, an offence that carries a fine of between $C240 (£138; €154; $182) and $C10 200. He is due in court on 26 October.

The outbreak, first detected in a young patient at Campbellton Regional Hospital, where Ngola worked, brought covid-19 back to New Brunswick after two weeks in which no new cases had been found. It ultimately spread to 41 people, of whom two died. The outbreak accounted for nearly a quarter of the cases to date in New Brunswick, which has seen only 190 infections from the pandemic. Quebec, Canada’s hardest hit province, has seen 61 803.

Ngola has acknowledged that he went to Quebec in May to collect his daughter, when her mother returned to Africa for a funeral. On his return he immediately resumed work and dropped his daughter at a daycare centre for children of essential workers.

On 25 May, health officials told him that a patient he had seen six days earlier had tested positive for covid-19. He and his daughter were both then tested and found to be positive, though neither had symptoms.

Two days later, as new cases emerged in the Campbellton region, New Brunswick’s premier, Blaine Higgs, told a press conference that the area was at higher risk because of the “actions of one irresponsible individual,” a medical professional in their 50s who “was not forthcoming about their reasons for travel upon returning to New Brunswick.”

Ngola was then suspended, and he identified himself to the Canadian Broadcasting Association soon afterwards. “Maybe it was an error in judgment,” he said, but he had made no stops and had minimal human contact on his journey to collect his 4 year old daughter.

New Brunswick had made if mandatory for health workers who leave the province to self-quarantine for two weeks on return, but Ngola said he had thought he was in the same position as thousands of essential workers who live in Quebec but cross the border to work in New Brunswick each day.

Northern New Brunswick’s Vitalité Health Network has hired locums from Quebec, including nine who have worked in Campbellton, without requiring them to self-isolate, although they work under special conditions designed to minimise risk.

Ngola told the CBC that one hour after speaking to contact tracers following his positive test, his name, face, and address were propagating on the internet, portraying him, he said, as “the bad doctor who brought the virus to kill people.”

This triggered a torrent of abuse online and by telephone, said Ngola, much of it from outside the region. “I’m a patient. I have a right to confidentiality, to protection from the system.”

Chris Goodyear, president of the New Brunswick Medical Society, said of Ngola that while public concern about the outbreak was understandable, “there is no excuse for the dissemination of personal information or the racist verbal attacks and false reports to police that he has endured.”

Ngola’s legal defence team has said it may sue over the alleged leaking of his identity. A prominent constitutional lawyer on the team, Christian Michaud, has said he may also challenge the emergency legislation, which he argued lacks clarity. Private investigators hired by the defence have shown that Ngola could not be patient zero, said his lawyer Joël Etienne. The defence has also hired a racism expert to write a report, the lawyer told the CBC, suggesting that Higgs had scapegoated the Congolese born doctor in the run up to a provincial election.

Higgs told a press conference that he was limited in what he could say by privacy laws, but “the comments I made previously, I stand behind those comments.”