COVID-19 'will be with us forever,' says Dr. Janice Fitzgerald

Just over a year ago, Dr. Janice Fitzgerald was settling into a new job: interim chief medical officer of health for Newfoundland and Labrador.

And then COVID-19 happened.

A year later, Fitzgerald is guiding the province out of its second lockdown and through an accelerating vaccination phase that aims to get a shot into most residents by the end of June.

However, she cautions no one should expect the disease to be vanquished by summer.

"I think that COVID will be with us forever," Fitzgerald told CBC News.

"I don't think we're going to eradicate it. it's a sneaky little virus and it's been able to mutate and that's what Mother Nature does."

COVID-19 could re-emerge seasonally

Fitzgerald said COVID-19 may emerge as a seasonal problem, like other viruses. She also pointed out that outbreaks can still occur of other diseases that long have had protection through vaccines.

"We vaccinate a lot of people against measles, but we still have measles circulating not in our country, but in the world."

Fitzgerald said some countries have yet to begin vaccinating anybody, which is always a concern in a pandemic.

"This virus can circulate in those countries," she said. "That's why it's so important to make sure that on a global scale, we're all getting vaccinated."

WATCH | N.L.'s chief medical officer of health speaks with the CBC's Peter Cowan:

Dr. Janice Fitzgerald on vaccines, tough calls and what she misses most in the pandemic

4 years ago

Duration 19:54

N.L.'s chief medical officer of health speaks with the CBC's Peter Cowan

In a wide-ranging interview with Peter Cowan for CBC's Here & Now, Fitzgerald reflected on a dramatic year that changed the world and made her a household name across Newfoundland and Labrador.

In early 2020, there was no way of knowing what was in store, although she knew she and her team faced a daunting challenge. She stepped into the interim role as medical officer of health with eyes wide open.

"There wasn't really anyone else here to do the job at the time, and so we had to do it," said Fitzgerald. "The job had to be done and someone had to do it."

The decisions Fitzgerald and her team have made since then have not been easy. Many people, after all, have lost their jobs as a result of the measures put in place to combat the spread of the virus.

Fitzgerald said those decisions were not taken lightly.

"None of these decisions are easy decisions," she said. "In the beginning, none of us really knew what to expect. We all kind of reacted to what we were seeing, and we had to hit it with everything we had because we didn't know what was going to work, and what wasn't going to work."

Though the province enjoyed a wide berth of freedom compared with the rest of the county, the arrival of the B117 variant in February cast uncertainty over when a return to normalcy will be possible, and what role a vaccine will play in facilitating it.

In that regard, Dr. Fitzgerald is optimistic, but cautioned that there will need to be some changes as the province slowly re-emerges from a second lockdown.

"We just need to think about doing them a little bit differently, and maybe with fewer contacts," she said. "Where we want to make sure that we're not seeing a resurgence of cases as we increase people moving about and doing more things, we're being a bit cautious."

Fitzgerald saidresearchers are still learning about howvaccines will affect the transmission of the virus, so she's hesitant to make any predictions until more evidence can be gathered.

"The hope would be, as with many vaccines, that once we start having more of those people vaccinated who are at risk for more severe disease, that we will be able to be a little more lenient with our public health measures," she said.

"But I think we have to accept that there's going to be some level of distancing and handwashing; all of that is still going to be a part of our lives."

Still waiting for pediatric vaccine

While many in the province are optimistically awaiting a summer of loosened restrictions, the vaccination won't mean flipping a switch. Some won't be able to be vaccinated at all.

"At this point we still don't have children under the age of 16 vaccinated. We don't have a vaccine that's been approved for them yet," Fitzgerald said. "I hope that we'll get that sometime soon, but that's another group that's a significant proportion of our population that we need to think about vaccinating before we can think about herd immunity."

One thing the pandemic has demonstrated isjust how much people can do to mitigate the spread of illness. Annual flu numbers are way down, due in part to mask-wearing and increased hand-washing.

Fitzgerald said she would like to see an emphasis on public health continue.

"COVID has certainly laid bare some of the gaps that we've seen within our in our societies in the way that when we think about elder care, when we think about people who are marginalized, there's been a lot that COVID has taught us about how we provide care, and how we look after those people in our population."

She said she hopes that once the pandemic is over, we will continue to apply lessons learned during it.

"COVID, across the world, has been a great tragedy. There's no doubt about that. But we would add to that tragedy if we didn't take the lessons that we've learned from it and bring them forward, and change the way that we do things, so that the next time we see a pandemic we're not in the same position."

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