Adam Prudhomme
Editor
KFLA Public Health’s acting medical officer of health Dr. Hugh Guan held his final local media Skype update before Dr. Piotr Oglaza assumes the fulltime role next week.
Guan took over on an interim basis following Dr. Kieran Moore’s promotion to Ontario’s chief medical officer of health earlier this year.
Guan noted the KFLA region saw seven new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, which brings the active case count in the region up to 42. Based on the province’s former rating system, KFLA would be in the ‘yellow’ caution zone.
Across the province there are about 150 people in an ICU due to COVID-19, a number that has remained stable in recent weeks, trending slightly down.
“All in all as a community and as a province we’re doing quite well in terms of our fourth wave,” said Guan. “Thank you to everyone for flattening the curve, especially during this fourth wave. It’s been six or seven weeks since the beginning of schools being back in and post-secondary as people do a lot more indoor congregation. Given the fact that we continue to flatten the curve speaks quite well moving into the fall and winter. Good news on lots of different fronts.”
Though the number of actives cases has risen slightly in the last week, Guan says the majority of them can be linked to three outbreaks, which tends to skew data for the whole region.
“It’s very up and down,” Guan said of daily case rates. “It’s almost a paradox in the sense of good case and contact management means that you discover more cases. We can think of the flip side, if you don’t test you’re not going to find cases therefore you’re not going to have high numbers. Part good case and contact management, part good outbreak prevention is finding cases. It’s almost expected if we do have an outbreak, we will see a surge in cases like that. In terms of how frequent outbreaks are, they’re not that common. When it happens it can look like a surge in cases but really they’re all pretty much contained.”
On the vaccination front, 88.4 per cent of KFLA residents aged 12 and older have received one dose while 83.7 per cent are fully vaccinated.
“It continues to be a slow but steady increase over the last few weeks,” Guan said of the vaccination rate. “We continue to see, based on that first dose rate, lots of first doses going into arms which is a good news story.”
Commenting on the news that Pfizer had submitted data to Health Canada regarding vaccinations for ages 5-11, Guan estimates its possible they could be implemented by the end of 2021.
“We generally expect turnaround times for Health Canada to look at the data and for provinces to approve different schedules and all that around the six-eight week mark,” said Guan. “Hopefully we can get word and get the (ages) 5-11 vaccination for COVID started before the end of this year. I’m hopeful for that, but it’s dependent on federal and provincial timelines.”
Meanwhile, influenza vaccines are slowly being rolled out across the province, starting first in high-risk settings such as long-term care homes and hospitals.
“I would check in with your family physician or your local pharmacy to see when it’s available,” Guan said regarding flu shots. “It is a little bit of a staggered release based on provincial supply. I highly recommend the influenza vaccination, as again, influenza vaccination is one of the best things we can do to protect against influenza and we really don’t want that double wave in the winter. I think we’ve flattened the COVID wave but we really don’t want to see an influenza wave on top of that. Our ICUs, although they’re steady, there’s still 150 some odd COVID patients within them so as you can imagine they’re pretty full from COVID. We really don’t want to have influenza adding to the burden on our healthcare system.”
With Halloween just over two weeks away, Guan had some safety tips for the ghosts and goblins that may be going door-to-door.
“Please wear appropriate masks and face covering, some of the Halloween masks are not good in the sense there might be holes in them which don’t really act as masks,” he said. “Avoid huge gatherings of individuals going out trick-or-treating, if they’re family units or very close families that are together anyways, that’s perfectly reasonable. Just limiting interactions as much as possible. Trick-or-treating is generally ok, as long as they are transient interactions for the most part. Especially if you’re sick, please don’t go out trick-or-treating.”
For those looking to book a vaccine, visit https://www.kflaph.ca/en/healthy-living/covid-19-vaccine.aspx.