Outbreaks highlight potential risks for Niagara
Health officer warns residents not to become complacent about virus
Niagara’s COVID-19 case counts remain low at the end of June, but the region’s acting medical officer of health is focused on what the potential risk is going forward.
The world hit 10 million cases of COVID-19 on Sunday and Dr. Mustafa Hirji said each successive million cases seems to be coming faster and faster.
He said the first million cases took 100 days to get to, the next few million was 12 days and the last million only five days. “The outbreak around us seems to be growing. We are a little island among a few other countries where we’ve been able to bring things under control, but there’s definitely a lot of COVID-19 swirling around us,” Hirji said.
“I think that really highlights the risk that we’re going to have going forward.”
Hirji pointed to case counts in the U.S. which are starting to increase again. More than half the states have growing case numbers, with many seeing sharp jumps.
“I think that’s a really good example of what happens when you become complacent to COVID-19,” he said.
“Those states are all ones where they moved quickly to reopen the economy, didn’t pay attention to signs of infection slowly starting to build and that slow build has basically snow
balled into a rapid build now.”
Florida and Texas are reimposing restrictions on their economy, which is the risk Hirji said Ontario could face if it doesn’t remain vigilant.
Hirji said as services start opening up, people are spending more time outdoors interacting and there’s a possibility the infection is going to start transmitting again. The outbreaks at two nail salons in Kingston this week — they resulted in 21 people testing positive by Sunday — is a kind of early warning sign of what could be in store, Hirji said.
In Niagara, there was only one new case of COVID-19 Sunday and no new cases Saturday. The single new case was a close contact of a previous case.
“It feels like a lot of good news. We’re not seeing big numbers of cases here, but I think that belies the potential that things could change really quickly,” Hirji said.
“It’s really important that we don’t get complacent, we keep practising physical distancing, keep washing our hands and really be diligent about wearing a face covering if we can’t keep distance. And make sure we’re really watching how we feel and what symptoms we have so we get tested if we do have any symptoms.”
The total number of COVID-19 cases Niagara has had is 750.
Of those, 665 people have recovered and 24 people have active cases.
At least 61 people with COVID-19 have died.