VANCOUVER -- Two Coquitlam, B.C., pubs say they were not given a heads up by the Fraser Health Authority following possible COVID-19 exposures at their establishments.

They only found out through employees who discovered their workplaces were on a public exposures list.

As a result, Fraser Health is now promising to do things differently.

Taphouse Coquitlam operations manager Owen Coomer said his head chef received a text from someone they knew on Aug. 11 letting them know the pub was on Fraser Health's public exposures list.

The listing warned of a possible low-risk exposure 10 days earlier, on Aug. 1 between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m.

"I know that it's been a difficult time for everybody, but at the end of the day, I think that the first thing to do would be get in contact with the business as best as you possibly can and explain to them the situations at hand," Coomer said. "Give them kind of the procedures that they'd like for us to follow."

Coomer said the information came to light later in the day, and by the time he reached the right number at Fraser Health, the office had closed. He said the pub decided to reach out to customers on their own using information they'd collected for contract tracing.

"Personally we ended up calling everybody ourselves, because nobody got in contact with us," Coomer said.

At Charlie Hamiltons Pub on Pinetree Way, an employee also came across the list on Aug. 11, which was reporting a possible exposure at their workplace on Aug. 4 between 7 and 9 p.m. The pub said it also never heard from Fraser Health directly, and CTV News was told they also ended up contacting customers on their own.

In an email to CTV, Fraser Health says officials initially decided they didn't need to call the businesses, which is something they do when they're looking for more contact information. But then a decision was made to cast a wider net to try and identify people using the public list.

"We are now ensuring business operators are notified in advance of us posting a notification on our public exposures webpage," the email said.

While the policy change is welcome news, Coomer says they still haven't been given any information about exactly how that potential exposure happened.

"Even to this day, I haven't had anybody email or come in," Coomer said, and added they have no idea whether the potential exposure may have come from a dine-in customer, a food delivery driver or someone just coming in to use the bathroom, and therefore they don't know which employees may have come in contact.

Granted, the exposure is now more than two weeks old, but Coomer said they could have looked on their surveillance footage from that day, which he remembers as being not particularly busy, and done their own "detective work."

"Right now, I'm in the midst of having to deal with staff members that are like, 'Did I serve this individual? Am I exposed? Am I OK?' There's so many questions, and yet, I have no answers, and I still don't have any answers," he said.