Niagara’s new COVID-19 cases mostly linked to hospital outbreaks
They’re not out of the woods yet, but Niagara’s long-term care homes struck by COVID-19 are starting to see their situations improve.
The region had 12 new cases of COVID-19 over the weekend but none were in retirement or long-term care homes.
“Things are looking better with the longterm care homes now,” said Dr. Mustafa Hirji, Niagara’s acting medical officer of health.
Since the COVID-19 cases began, there have been a total nine outbreaks in long-term care and retirement homes. Five out
breaks are over with minimal cases coming up. Hirji said a sixth is very close to being declared over as it has not had additional cases since an outbreak was declared.
The other three — Seasons Retirement Community and Royal Rose Place in Welland and Lundy Manor in Niagara Falls — which has lasted a long time, are moving in the right direction.
“We’re seeing very few cases from them now so we’re hoping we’re on the path of having some of those declared over in the next week or so,” Hirji said.
But he cautioned that there were two previous points of time that public health thought everything was going well and at the last minute, before an outbreak was declared over, a new case popped up.
“We’re not counting anything here until it actually happens.”
Outbreaks in the hospital system made up the majority of the total dozen cases on Saturday and Sunday.
Hirji said 11 of the new cases involved people who had close contact with previous confirmed cases and most of those were linked to current outbreaks at St. Catharines and Greater Niagara General hospitals. One case was a community transmission, though it is suspected the person may have caught it from someone in their household who was not previously tested.
Niagara has had a total of 558 confirmed cases since March 13. Of those, 390 people have recovered and 113 cases remain active. Fifty-three people with the virus have died.
Without the institutional outbreaks, Hirji said Niagara’s COVID-19 cases have been climbing in low single digits on most days.
“What we’ve seen is that we’ve finally been able to get a better handle on the long-term care home and retirement home outbreaks and support those homes to better manage the outbreaks so we’re not seeing those cases anymore,” Hirji said.
He said the hospital outbreaks are concerning but the hospital system has fairly sophisticated infection control so he’s hopeful it will get those cases under control pretty soon.
There are still a small number of community transmission cases, which have no known source of infection.
“That always has the potential that it could start to multiply, so that’s one of the reasons why we’re really encouraging anybody with mild symptoms to come forward and get tested so we can make sure we’re trying to capture all of those,” he said.