Canada’s Nunavut: A vast territory with few people — and no coronavirus
Michael Patterson was concerned — then stumped.A resident of Pond Inlet, a hamlet of about 1,600 people in the vast, mostly empty Arctic Canadian territory of Nunavut, had tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The individual hadn’t been outside the territory, which had sealed itself off to most outsiders and enacted strict travel restrictions for residents.Within 24 hours, contact tracers isolated 20 people in the mostly Inuit community on the northeastern tip of Baffin Island who might have been exposed to the infected resident. Thirteen were swabbed for the virus. They tested negative.“We were a little bit confused,” said Patterson, Nunavut’s top doctor. So he had the original swab retested. Again, it was negative.The territory announced the false positive, the population of 39,000 scattered across an area slightly larger than Mexico breathed a sigh of relief, and Patterson revised the total number of confirmed covid-19 cases back down.To zero.More than a month after the false alarm, Nunavut remains the only state-level jurisdiction in North America not to record a single case of the virus that has sickened millions and killed more than 370,000 people worldwide. Every other Canadian province and territory and every U.S. and Mexican state has coronavirus cases.“There are still no confirmed
