Five new COVID-19 outbreaks declared in seniors homes
New outbreaks declared after results of provincewide long-term care home testing completed
Two years.
That’s how long people should expect to live with COVID-19 before a vaccine is available, said Niagara’s acting medical officer of health.
While there are vaccines in development, Dr. Mustafa Hirji said it is unrealistic to expect the magic injection that will permanently end the novel coronavirus pandemic will arrive in a few months.
Concerned that Niagara residents — exhausted by the COVID-19 lockdown, the slumbering economy it created and welcoming the arrival of better weather — will try to go back to their pre-pandemic routines, Hirji took to Twitter Saturday to offer a cold dose of reality.
“We’re going to live with #COVID19 for two years at least,” he wrote. “We need to avoid high risk activities, embrace low ones with diligence around #PhysicalDistancing and #HandHygiene.”
“We cannot go back to normal at this point,” he said in a Sunday interview. “There will be a temporary normal that we are going to have to adapt to for a while.”
Hirji made his plea for continued infection control measures
as his public health department declared five new COVID-19 outbreaks at long-term care and retirement homes.
Those outbreaks at West Park Lodge and Tufford Nursing Home both in St. Catharines, Kilean Lodge in Grimsby, Crescent Park Lodge in Fort Erie and Albright Manor in Lincoln triggered two days of significant growth in new pandemic cases in Niagara.
Saturday saw 14 cases, while there was 15 on Sunday, most of them connected to the outbreaks, or community cases linked to long-term care employees.
On Monday, there were only five new cases confirmed, returning to the trend of singledigit case growth seen over the previous week.
Hirji said said the residents and staff at the homes with novel coronavirus infections were all asymptomatic. Because true asymptomatic infections are relatively rare and the results were all processed at the same laboratory, public health is following up with the lab to better understand the results. However, given the volume of cases, he said that many false positives are unlikely unless there was a significant problem at the lab.
He said the tests were done as part of a new provincial government directive to test all residents and staff at all Ontario long-term care homes. In Niagara and across the province long-term care and retirement homes have been hardest hit by the novel coronavirus.
Although more cases from other homes and new outbreak declarations are possible in the coming days, Hirji said most of the test results from all Niagara homes have been processed with proportionally few positive results.
“That does give me some hope that we won’t find many new cases, but that is really hard to predict,” he said.
There are also ongoing outbreaks at three long-term care homes — Seasons Retirement Community and Royal Rose Place in Welland and Lundy Manor in Niagara Falls — that have been locations of the most serious local outbreaks to date. There have been few new cases in those homes over the past week. here are also outbreaks at St. Catharines hospital and
Greater Niagara General Hospital in Niagara Falls.
The weekend cases represent the biggest two-day jump in the number of cases since April 24 and April 25 when 29 new cases were confirmed. For most of the past week, the newly confirmed case count was in the single digits each day.
Hirji said the new infections demonstrate COVID-19 is not gone and Niagara residents should not become complacent about physical distancing, hand hygiene and other infection control measures which have helped to significantly reduce the region’s infection rate.
The long weekend cases bring Niagara’s historic total of COVID-19 cases to 612, with 112 of them still active.
At least 58 people with the virus have died in Niagara.