Hirji cautious as COVID-19 rates slow
Medical officer confident everything has been done to prepare for reopening
In relative terms, Niagara’s COVID-19 situation is improving.
The daily rate of new confirmed cases is surely and steadily falling. The number of people who have recovered from a novel coronavirus infection is on the rise, while the number of active cases in Niagara drops.
Even at the local epicentre of the pandemic — three longterm-care homes with COVID-19 outbreaks — the rate of infection appears to be slowing down.
The data shows COVID-19 is loosening its grip on Niagara, even if it is by inches at a time. And yet Dr. Mustafa Hirji won’t prognosticate on what this data means, as Ontario prepares to wake its sleeping economy.
“It’s a difficult question to answer,” said Hirji, Niagara’s acting medical officer of health, when asked if current trends put Niagara in a good position to restart economic activity.
“I can say that I am confident that at public health we have done everything we can to prepare, but beyond that I really don’t want to speculate.”
Hirji has said that as economic and social activity increases, the number of new COVID-19 cases will likely rise. By how much, and where, is not something he is willing to guess at.
When fighting a pandemic, data is the Holy Grail. And buried in that data are indications of how important public
health’s case management and contact tracing is going to be.
There were only four new confirmed cases Friday. Two of them were connected to local institutional outbreaks. Another is a health-care worker who did not work with COVID-19 patients, so it is unclear where they contracted the virus.
The fourth is a person connected to an outbreak case who had previously tested negative.
“So this is someone who was tested when we were testing even asymptomatic cases in long-term-care homes,” Hirji said. “This person initially tested negative. Since then, they developed symptoms and have tested positive.”
He said that case demonstrates that a single negative test is not an “all clear” sign for anyone.
False negatives are possible if someone is asymptomatic, or someone who tested negative could subsequently be exposed.
That is why public health has ramped up its ability to do case management and why Hirji continues to ask anyone with even a single mild symptom associated with COVID-19 to contact public health for a testing assessment.
As society reopens, it will be up to public health to identify and follow up on new cases and pounce on outbreaks when they emerge to prevent the virus from spreading widely in Niagara.
As of Friday, there have been a total of 546 people infected by the novel coronavirus since the first case was found in a St. Catharines retirement home March 13. Of those cases, 114 are active and at least 53 people with the virus have died.
According to public health data, nearly 62 per cent of all local COVID-19 cases are women.
Of the 153 people ages 80 and up who have contracted the virus, nearly 75 per cent are women and around 61 per cent of the 130 cases in people ages 20 to 39 are females.
Hirji said he did not yet have enough information to explain why women in Niagara are being infected more than men.
It is also not clear if there is a gender difference in COVID-19 deaths, as public health hasn’t yet released mortality data beyond the total number of deaths.
However, Hirji said, releasing such data is possible. Public health is still working on providing a municipality by municipality breakdown of COVID-19 data, which he expects will be published soon.
Once that work is completed, he said, public health will look at releasing more morality information.