Adam Prudhomme
Editor
As the province begins to slowly re-open and ease COVID-19 restrictions, Public Health units across Ontario continue to monitor case counts in search of any potential relapse.
KFLA Public Health medical officer of health Dr. Piotr Oglaza met with local media via Skype on Wednesday to talk about the local COVID-19 picture. He says the numbers continue to be encouraging, but lifting restrictions could affect those numbers.
“On Monday Ontario began easing COVID-19 Public Health restrictions which allowed many local businesses to re-open, subject to capacity limits,” said Oglaza. “Socially, gathering limits have also increased from five people to now a maximum of 10 indoors and from 10 to 25 for outdoors. What’s important to note is currently our COVID-19 indicators are stable. We’ve also noted that severity in local cases is decreasing and some of the indicators such as wastewater and high-risk case surveillance suggest that transmission or disease activity is also decreasing. At this point it is too early to fully access the potential impact of lifting of some of these measures and how this lifting of restrictions may impact our community COVID-19 activity, but we will continue to keep the community informed of any changes in the disease activity.”
As of Tuesday there were 13 local people in hospital due to the virus, six in the ICU and three on a ventilator.
When asked about a World Health Organization report about the worrying number of increase in deaths related to the Omicron strain of the virus, Oglaza said that’s not occurring locally.
“With the vast majority of the population protected with two doses (of COVID-19 vaccine) and a large proportion of the population also protected with the third or the most vulnerable even with the fourth dose, the individual risk for these people who are immunized are much lower and that’s something that thankfully is the experience locally that we see that protective impact of the vaccine even with just the two doses, we’ve already seen impact on disease severity with Omicron and that’s something that’s really important of note locally but unfortunately we know that’s not the case for many parts of the world where vaccine uptake is lower,” said Oglaza.
Commenting on a report indicating that Ontario’s Omicron activity has already peaked, Oglaza said KFLA numbers support that theory.
“I do believe that based on our local surveillance we see that cases are certainly stabilized at the lower level so that peak possibly was even ahead of the provincial one,” said Oglaza. “In terms of what we see with Omicron is we’re not seeing a rapid downward trend. We are seeing more of a stabilizing level of disease activity and that’s something that may persist and we’ll be watching if there is a continued downward trend but after the peak that we’ve seen mostly likely late last year or early this year, we are seeing a downward trend and stabilization. We don’t see a rapid return to low disease baseline activity that we had in the summer months.”
The numbers continue to be encouraging for the region, but the pandemic isn’t over just yet, either.
“There’s still an underlying level of risk in the community, we still need to be vigilant,” Oglaza added.