by Tracey Bowers-Lee
There are so many aspects to keeping the public safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last week, I spoke with Toronto public health inspector, Godfrey Hunte, about how his job has changed.
Can you tell me a bit about yourself?
I started my field training in early 1999, which led to my certification and I've been through various programs with the City of Toronto. I'm stationed in Scarborough at Markham and Milner office. Currently, right now we are at public health. We are now involved in the pandemic, which is greatly changed from our daily responsibilities of what we're doing as to now.
What are those daily responsibilities?
Our job title is a public health inspector. Part of our job mainly includes types of investigations, inspections, education, communicable disease, healthy environments, zoonotic diseases. The job varies. So, within our job, we are broken up into many different units to handle many different things, all-encompassing within public health goals. My job is titled as a certified environmental health officer. When everybody hears health inspector they automatically think restaurants. But food safety is just one aspect of what we do. We're divided up into teams and units. It'll be food safety, communicable disease, health hazard investigations. It will be outdoor environments, safe water programs. It's mainly five different programs.
With COVID-19, how has your role shifted?
When we first got the performance of the pandemic, our whole public health, organizational just restructured. There will be no more investigations, no more inspections based on complaints. Right now, we're only responding to emergency situations. Our team has been broken up into COVID teams. One team will be involved in contact tracing, identifying positive individuals with COVID. Another will be involved in inspections of premises that are open because of the quarantine. We will have teams go out and inspect premises that maintain they are closed. We'll also have a third team involved in communicable disease, which is just basically followed up with individuals that have tested positive and we're following up, how they're managing, what are their contacts within their home, are any of their contacts reporting any illnesses. And then we'll finally have a fourth team that’s just primarily taking in data.
How do people react when you contact them?
Well, reactions are going to be based on two different things. The general reaction is they generally know or they have an idea that they came into contact. For the most part, I'd say about 60 per cent of people have an idea that they have come in contact with. The other 40 per cent is kind of shocked because they're expecting a different level of symptoms which they should have had, and a lot of people are asymptomatic carriers.
How do we figure out how to manage this disease?
Well, this typical disease is just like any other virus that has come up through the course of human existence. What makes this virus a little bit unique is that it starts as asymptomatic. An individual feels fine, and he's not displaying any symptoms and…is now generally infecting other individuals. In today's society, we tend to wait to see symptoms first before we try to quarantine or remove ourselves from that individual. What's happening here is you've had traveller who went to an infected region, they've come back, they're fine, they don't feel anything. It gets passed to somebody else. We are waiting right now a little too long to detect. If we can detect earlier, then we could screen earlier. The hard part about this is that the asymptomatic part is what's really fooling people right now.
How has this impacted you?
So right now, for us, it's impacted us greatly because we can now consider directly frontline. When we first started, we were direct with the public in hands-on roles enforcing premises are closed, enforcing people that they are quarantined, enforcing legislation. So, we would be in large crowds, we would be in facilities, we would be in places where, again, at the same time, we don't know who's infected. And while everybody's trying to run away from the problem or run away from the disease, public health is out there in front, meeting the disease head-on.
How are your co-workers feeling?
We are putting ourselves directly in the line. We're in a shortage of equipment, mask and gloves. We’re out at nighttime, we’re out 24 hours. We're putting ourselves in different situations where we might not meet the nicest owner of a place of business who wants to confront us. Sometimes we don't have the aid of Toronto Police Services with us and we're going in on our own. Sometimes we have female inspectors that are going out there, putting themselves in jeopardy too. There is a backlash of things that we've never used to do and now it's on a 24-hour basis. That has created a lot of negativity within public health. We've had situations, too, where our inspectors we're exposed to COVID. We have 10 workers in our downtown office, test positive…Of course, the morale of the staff is low. Nobody's happy about it, that would be the negative side. If other inspectors were interviewed there would be a lot of negativity. The big thing that we're waiting on now is, who did those 10 infect?
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