1 new case of COVID-19 in N.L., as Health Department warns of outbreaks at 2 work camps in B.C.

There is one new caseof COVID-19 in Newfoundland and Labrador, the province announced Tuesday, nudging the active caseload up to 29.

The newcase is a manin the Central Health region between 20 and 39 years old. According to the Department of Health the case is travel-related the man is a resident of the province who returned home from work in Alberta. He isself-isolating andcontact tracing is underway.

To date, 70,780 people have been tested, including 278 since Monday's update.

There have been no new recoveries since Monday,and one person is in hospital due to the virus.

The Department of Health also issued an advisory forrotational workers about COVID-19 outbreaks at Coastal GasLink's 7 Mile Lodge and Little Rock Lake Lodge sites in British Columbia, as people from Newfoundland and Labrador work at the sites.

Rotational workers who have returned to Newfoundland and Labrador from the sites in the last 14 days must isolate themselves from household membersand call 811 to arrange testing. These workers must alsocomplete the full 14-day self-isolation period, regardless of their test result.

• COVID-19 outbreak declared at Coastal GasLink accommodation sites in northern B.C.

Public Health said it will not be issuing a daily release or updating its COVID-19 data hub on Dec. 25, Dec. 26 orJan. 1.

If there are new cases reported on those dates, the data will be rolled into the next media release.

Monday's briefing was the last for 2020, Premier Andrew Furey announced. Briefings will start again the first week of January, but if something significant happens over the holidays, the Department of Health says Furey, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Janice Fitzgerald and Health Minister John Haggie will make themselves available for an update.

'Much work' underway in Labrador for vaccines

Cartwright-L'Anse au Clair MHA Lisa Dempster said "much work is happening behind the scenes" to come up with a plan for rolling out vaccinesin Labrador.

The only vaccine currently approved and being administeredin Canada is from Pfizer-BioNTech. Because of that vaccine's storage and transportation restrictions, it can onlybe given out from a single delivery point.

In N.L., that's at the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's, where there is an ultra-low-temperature freezer available for storing the vaccine.

More ultra-low freezers are on order, with the next destined for Happy Valley-Goose Bay when it arrives, but those freezers are on order for many other jurisdictions, as well.

Until more freezers arrive, people need to be in St. John'sto receive the vaccine.

Dempster said the plan for Labrador hinges on the pending approval of a vaccine from Moderna. That vaccinehas fewer storage restrictions and is considered more stable, needing to be stored at 20 C rather than 70 C, like Pfizer-BioNTech.

"I think most now know the instability of Pfizer being able to be moved, where we have to bring the folks to Pfizer, but with Moderna, we will be bringing Moderna to the people," Dempster said.

Meetings are underway to determine which communities will get the vaccine and when, Dempster said, adding that when Moderna is approved, vaccine rollout will be "quite a different ball game" than it is currently.

"We're expecting the first vaccines to come in possibly between the end of December and the middle of January, and we're hoping maybe even in the first quarter of the year that we can have the Indigenous communities done," Dempster said.

"The isolated communities that are Indigenous are priority, make no mistake about it."

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