Region sees first COVID death-free day in over a month
Cases are declining, but Hirji says it’s not time to reopen just yet
Every day, for 36 straight days, someone in Niagara with COVID-19 died.
Most often, multiple people — usually older people who were residents of long-term-care homes — were added to the local pandemic casualty list. From New Year’s Eve to this Wednesday, 193 Niagara residents with a novel coronavirus infection died. In total, at least 336 people with COVID-19 have died.
But on Friday, the local public health department registered no COVID-19 related deaths, a sign, perhaps, that Niagara is turning a corner on the worse period of the pandemic to date.
Dr. Mustafa Hirji, Niagara’s acting medical officer of health, said like Ontario, Niagara appears to be past the peak of the second wave, both in terms of new infections and new deaths.
However, Hirji said it is somewhat premature to start considering reopening the economy in the next week or two. The overall infection rate is still substantially higher than it was at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic and the new, more infectious variants of the novel coronavirus could quickly undo the progress made to date.
“I think the U.K. provides an instructive example,” Hirji said. “They did a four-week lockdown in November to December. The infection rate came down, though perhaps not as much as they would have liked. They reopened, and then two weeks later had to shut everything down again because their cases just got out of control very quickly. We want to avoid that.”
Deaths, as a metric of pandemic activity, tends to lag behind other indicators. Community cases rise, followed by outbreaks in long-term-care homes, which is then followed by rising death counts. The reverse is also true, Hirji said. A few weeks after cases start to meaningfully decline, the number of deaths each day starts to slow down.
Hirji said Niagara’s second wave appears to have peaked around Jan 8. But because of the lag time between someone becoming infected and suffering serious symptoms or dying, the local death rate continued to grow rapidly, becoming the third-worst rate in Ontario.
At the same time, the public
health department had begun to vaccinate all local long-termcare and high-risk retirement home residents that had not previously contracted the virus with the first dose of the twoshot Pfizer vaccine.
Clinical trial shows the vaccine produces a meaningful immune response to the virus 10 days after the first shot, with the second dose required within 21 to 27 days to provide more than 90 per cent protection from the virus.
The health department began the second round of Pfizer injections on Wednesday and Hirji expects long-term-care home vaccinations to be completed by Feb. 10.
Public health staff will then move onto the second round of doses for retirement home residents.
Hirji said vaccines should blunt the worst impact of the pandemic, but that the overall infection rate needs to come down substantially before it is safe to consider a broader reopening.
The provincial chief medical officer of health said this week that Ontario would need to see its ICU admissions drop by half
— or around 150 people — before reopening could be safely considered.
Hirji said science table modelling projects that kind of reduction in ICU admissions won’t happen until late February or early March — a timeframe Hirji said has a built-in safety margin for the province.
“To do something other than that would be to go against what the chief medical officer has just said,” said Hirji. “I think what he did say should be the plan right now.”