Another author of this article, Dr. Rohit Vij, explained how this investigation unfolded.

My name is Dr. Rohit Vij.

I am a medical health officer at Vancouver Coastal Health Public Health.

And I serve as the medical director for Communicable Disease Control, uh, for our Vancouver Coastal Health region, which includes the Sea to Sky region of Squamish, Whistler, and, and Pemberton.

So when Vancouver Coastal Health was notified of these three pediatric cases in late September twenty twenty-four, uh, that had occurred amongst residents living within the Whistler region, we immediately recognized that this was unusual.

And in particular, when all three children had been hospitalized in August, and, uh, laboratory testing had identified them with this snowshoe hare virus, we sort of, um, really kind of jumped into action to really understand what was going on here, as this was a virus that we had not seen before within this region, uh, presenting this amount of severity and this clustering in time.

And so for the first part of our response, which was supporting the affected families and clinical teams, we worked really closely with our colleagues at BC Children's Hospital, uh, with our public health colleagues at the Public Health Laboratory at the BC Centre for Disease Control, and the different infectious disease specialists to better understand, um, the person demographics and the risk factors of our different cases.

They drew on practices from places where these infections are reportable, creating a working case definition and a short questionnaire to guide what information to collect.