The Quebec City gym has been linked to more than 400 cases of COVID-19, health authorities say

A Quebec City gym has now been linked to 419 cases of COVID-19 after staff and customers became infected and unknowingly carried the virus to supermarkets, homes and workplaces, the regional health authority said Wednesday.

A spokesman for the CIUSSS de la Capitale-Nationale said that as of Wednesday morning, 195 customers and staff at the Mega Fitness Gym, which authorities shut down last week, have tested positive for the virus.

Those primary cases are believed to have spread the virus to about 36 workplaces, including restaurants, supermarkets, offices, shops and construction sites, eventually infecting a further 224 people, the authority said in an email.

While the regional health authority has not confirmed any deaths related to the outbreak, the sister of a 40-year-old man who was a client of the gym told The Canadian Press on Wednesday via Facebook that her brother had died after contracting the virus. It is not clear whether his illness was related to the company.

Another gym customer said he was caught COVID-19 after exercising, even though he wore his mask all the time and kept his distance from others.

But Dominic Lelièvre said it was clear that some customers were not respecting the health measures. At one point, he said, he turned to his husband and commented on the lax wearing of a mask at the gym.

“They don’t wear them properly,” he told him.

“They don’t wear them at all,” replied Lelièvre.

While there were signs with the rules, plexiglass barriers, and hand sanitizer, Lelièvre said in a phone interview that there were hardly any workers on the floor to enforce the rules.

The 43-year-old began to feel tired in late March, which he attributed to the fact that after a few months of closing gyms, he started exercising again. When he saw the gym post about a COVID-19 case, he went for testing and got a positive result. His husband also became infected, he said, as did one of his two young children.

Although he is lucky not to have been seriously ill, his symptoms were fever, chills, loss of taste and pneumonia. “You go up the stairs and you are out of breath,” he said.

As the number of cases related to the outbreak has risen, so has anger towards gym owner Dan Marino. Marino defended himself on Facebook last week, saying he had followed all government health measures.

But that didn’t stop with accusations from people like Quebec Mayor Régis Labeaume, who described him as “irresponsible” and noted that Marino had been an outspoken critic of the government’s closure of gyms.

Gabriel Hardy, spokesman for Canada’s Fitness Industry Council in Quebec, said Wednesday that he believes the government’s decision to close gyms in Quebec’s red zones starting Thursday is linked to the Mega Fitness Gym outbreak, even though most gyms operate safely.

“There is one case in Quebec that has brought us all down,” he said.

The regional health authority said that while the gym outbreak is “significant,” it is not only responsible for the spike in Quebec City cases, which has prompted the provincial government to impose special lockdown measures on the region, including the closing of schools and essential businesses and a return to a 8pm curfew.

“We are faced with a situation where dozens of community-type outbreaks, coupled with a slowdown in adherence to health instructions, each fuel the rapid growth of new positive cases,” the health authority wrote in an email.

Dr. Gaston De Serres, an epidemiologist at the province’s public health institute, describes the gym outbreak as a “super spread” event that has clearly affected the entire city.

In an interview, he said gyms may have a higher risk because people breathe heavily and expel more drops. But while he can’t talk about the conditions at Mega Fitness, the degree to which people follow health measures is a more important factor, he says.

“I don’t think all gyms are necessarily equally dangerous, because I think the way people behave in different gyms can vary and make some fairly safe and others fairly dangerous,” he said.

Lelièvre said he understands the anger towards Marino and some customers who reportedly refused to be tested despite developing symptoms or exposure.

But he said he blames the situation on a combination of factors, including general societal complacency with security measures, an insufficiently strict owner, and variants of COVID-19 that spread easily.

“(The owner) is to blame, but he’s not alone,” he said. “The virus is everywhere.”

– With files from Caroline Plante and Jacob Serebrin from The Canadian Press

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