Brooks moves toward new normal after COVID-19 outbreak

An African woman in a bright blue hijab turns and shields her face from a dusty prairie gust as she crosses a deserted downtown street in Brooks, Alta.

Further down the historic block lined with thrift stores, a coffee shop, an old movie theatre and a new Cannabis store, a lone pickup truck makes a turn and blasts into the distance.

Brooks is a unique community attracting thousands of workers from faraway places like Sudan, Eritrea and the Philippines. They are drawn here by the lure of life at the local meat-processing plant, living their lives alongside rural Albertans and others who all call this small southern Alberta city home.

Right now, the population of nearly 15,000 is adjusting to a new version of life as the city tries to shake off the sudden and unfortunate notoriety of becoming one of Alberta's COVID-19 hot spots.

• Watch the video above to see how the community is staying positive

Brooks is known for oil and gas, manufacturing, construction and being home to one of Canada's largest beef slaughterhouses — the JBS Foods Canada facility on the outskirts of town. You can smell it before you can see it.

For a time, the city was Alberta's No. 1 hot spot for COVID-19, with the community that makes up just 0.3 per cent of the province's population representing 26 per cent of Alberta's total cases.

But with numbers dropping and the all-important curve finally flattening, the city is now looking forward with JBS ready to start ramping up production again.

As of Monday there have been 1,090 cases in Brooks with 1,009 people recovering. Seven people lost their lives to the virus, including a worker at JBS.

The number of active cases stands at 74.

More than 500 of those cases were linked directly to JBS, which today begins the move back to two shifts with a long list of new safety measures in place to try to minimize the risk of a second outbreak. 

"We have proactively identified and adopted more than 100 preventative measures at the Brooks facility to ensure a safe working environment for our team members," said JBS spokesperson Rob Meijer this week.

Some of those measures include partitions between workers, more distance between employees and the issuing of PPE (personal protective equipment).

Meijer says returning to two shifts won't increase the number of employees in the facility at any one time. 

Workers who have already returned to JBS, along with their families, say they feel safer now with the new measures in place, but it's been a scary couple of months.

"It was really tough, those first weeks," said the wife of one Filipino JBS worker who tested positive for COVID-19, along with her two children. She tested negative and has been living separately in the family home. 

"I had to disinfect the whole house. My husband has been isolating himself in the basement. My two kids were together in a different room," she said. "We can't do anything about it, I guess."

"My husband has tried to make sure he gets all the PPE now when he gets to work. They provided him with a mask and I bought masks, too. There's a lot of sanitizer and disinfecting there," she said.

"I'm not sure if it's really safe or if people are just acting like everything's normal," she said. "I don't know what normal now is."

Others say that since the outbreak they feel discriminated against by employers and in the community due to their connection to JBS, which employs more than 2,500 people.

"When the virus arrived, my boss asked to us to stop work. We were expecting them to ask us back to work but they are not allowing it because our husbands are working in JBS," said another Filipino woman.

The couple and their four children have all tested negative for the virus so far. She works in a food store and says she needs the income.

"They think you are a carrier of the virus," she said. "Because of my husband."

Others find people crossing the street to avoid them and giving them a wide berth around town.

"We feel we are really treated differently because our husbands are at JBS," she said. "We feel the feeling of being discriminated. You can feel the racial discrimination also, they know you're a Filipino and working in JBS and they think you're carrying the virus."

"Life now is very much different from when this virus came," she said. 

CBC News agreed not to identify either woman due to their concerns they might face reprisals for speaking out.

The city's mayor, Barry Morishita, says socio-economic and cultural issues played a big part in the spike there, rather than the meat plant itself. He says multi-generational housing, large families and people sharing accommodation were all factors, as well as community spread.

There have been smaller outbreaks in Brooks at Orchard Manor, Agecare Sunrise Gardens, McDonald's and No Frills.

"I don't think we did as good a job as we should have done and hopefully we learned something from that," said Morishita, already speaking about the outbreak in the past tense.

"It was such a fluid situation that sometimes it did become hard to deal with," Morishita said. "There were a couple of times you get overwhelmed with the constant pressure to respond and the lack of ability to respond."

"No one's really ever gone through it at this extent so there was a fear of what that meant to our hospital system and individuals," he said. "You feel a little bit helpless watching the numbers go up."

The Brooks Health Centre is the main hospital, providing 24-hour emergency services, acute care, maternity, labour and delivery, surgery and continuing care, along with diagnostic and lab services. 

In the end, the hospital wasn't overwhelmed. 

"We only had a handful of people that were hospitalized. We have a younger population. We fared fairly well and that was never a stress point through the whole thing," Morishita said.

Cases that did need ICU were moved to other facilities outside of the city, including Medicine Hat and Calgary.

Alberta Health has recently opened two testing facilities in the city to screen residents with no symptoms who could be asymptomatic.

"The virus didn't choose Brooks, it just moved where it moved to. As we come to understand what happened, I think we'll come to understand Brooks isn't a community to avoid because of it," said Morishita.

Businesses in Brooks like that message.

Some were worried about the future here long before COVID-19 struck facing new economic lows.

The city, like Calgary, is waiting a little longer than the rest of the province to get going again, with a slower phased-in reopening. Hairdressers remain closed and restaurants are still not allowed to run dine-in service until at least May 25.

"Downtown's been quiet," said Sandy Haberman-Melvill, owner of the Steaming Cup coffee shop in downtown Brooks. Elsewhere, there are more signs of life. Further down the road, customers line up neatly outside at a garden centre. 

"I'm not sure people were taking it seriously until the numbers crept up," she said.

Haberman-Mevill shut her doors in March as the numbers started to rise. She has spent the weeks since renovating the coffee shop and running down a list of maintenance jobs, including refinishing the 100-year-old floorboards.

"I didn't want to become a gathering place and I didn't want to police people," she said.

"We'll see more soft openings, I think. I don't think it's that onerous to wait another 10 days to open," said Haberman-Melvill of the delayed relaunching in Brooks.

"They did say this was anticipated, and a number of businesses I've spoken to did say "I don't see Brooks opening.' So I think generally in Brooks that's what people are feeling," she said.

"There will be some casualties, but people are still working their businesses and want to reopen when it's safe," she added.

The city's Chamber of Commerce says some businesses were thrown off by the delay in reopening while the rest of Alberta, excluding Calgary, got back to some form of business last week.

It's been a frustrating few weeks, adding to the pain some were already feeling.

"We definitely were in a recession here. We were watching the government cuts being implemented and how that might impact the community and economy, and then COVID-19 came and kicked our butts," said Margaret Plumtree, executive director of Brooks and District Chamber of Commerce.

"The biggest thing is to keep on promoting shopping locally and to be responsible with shopping. We were going to have a local trade show but that's now been postponed," she said.

Plumtree says the chamber has created a website called eBrooks as a way for businesses to post products and promote delivery services and business news.

She says the community pulling together and shopping local can be part of a wider push of goodwill and positivity in the community as residents try to move on from the outbreak and get the local economy moving again.

Brooks has been on the receiving end of all sorts of donations and help from neighbouring communities and cities in the past couple of months.

Groups like Action Dignity and the Centre for Newcomers based in Calgary have been delivering food packages to families in isolation or facing financial struggles, along with the Calgary Filipino Association and others. There were donations from companies like PPE Medicine Hat and video messages of support for JBS workers from the Alberta Cattle Feeders' Association.

Others have found creative ways to support first responders including a driveway art piece by Brooks artist Cyrstal Hancock, which featured a nurse and an RCMP officer and a message of thanks.

"I heard about a lot of people making messages in their windows and sidewalks and did what I could do on mine," said Hancock.

"I just want other people to go out there and also say thank you," she said. "We'll get through it, we always do."

In front of her house, meat plant workers and their families enjoy a leisurely afternoon walk around the lake, stopping to take photos and enjoying the view, all wearing masks.

"You have to figure out new ways to do things," said Hancock.

Joshua Argue, a corporal with the Brooks RCMP detachment, is a neighbour and the inspiration for Hancock's artwork.

"It absolutely blew me away. It was an honour, humbling. It's not just about front-line workers but anyone working through this," said Argue.

"Brooks is a special community. We come together and support each other because we are isolated out here. What we have here is each other and that's what gets us through this," he said.

As the production line at JBS revs up once more and Brooks as a community tries to move on and away from being a COVID-19 hot spot, people here say it is that community spirit that will be vital in the weeks and months ahead.

"There has been an incalculable amount of community spirit. People stepping up and helping, everything from messages to donations, helping with PPE, delivering food and we've had interesting and heartfelt contributions from outside of the community," said Morishita.

"We've managed to hold our community together and come out even stronger."