Niagara can’t claim victory over virus yet

Region residents urged to keep up hand washing and physical distancing

Is Niagara’s slow growth of COVID-19 cases the calm before the storm?

Niagara’s acting medical officer of health Dr. Mustafa Hirji says he hopes not, but public health is bracing itself for the possibility.

The next two weeks are going to demonstrate how Niagara has done since the province started its reopening and a heat wave hit.

“As much as I think we’ve had lots of good news this week of low case counts and one day of zero cases, I do think we are heading into a couple of weeks where we’re really going to see if that’s sustained or if this was a little bit of calm before the storm,” Hirji said Friday.

Hirji said this coming Monday we’ll be two weeks out from the Victoria Day long weekend. Tuesday will be two weeks from when businesses started to be able to reopen a bit.

And by next Saturday, we’ll be two weeks out from last weekend’s great weather.

“We’ll be at the point where we might start to see some of the cases that might have been caused from increased transmission from what occurred on those dates,” he said.

“So we’re a bit bracing to see what’s going to happen in the next couple of weeks and to see if things start climbing again or we are hopefully able to keep things flat.”

Niagara’s active cases continued to drop Friday with only 36 confirmed people in the region currently battling the virus.

Another 541 people have recovered from it. At least 59 people have died while having COVID-19.

The total cases to date are 636, with only one new case on Friday. How the person got the illness is still being investigated.

Another outbreak at a longterm-care facility, Tufford Nursing Home, was declared over Friday as well.

Niagara public health is still investigating whether a recent wave of tests that triggered the outbreak declarations in longterm-care homes, including Tufford, were true cases or actually false positives.

Hirji said that hasn’t been resolved yet but they have reached a point at Tufford where even if they were true cases of COVID-19, they could say the outbreak is over.

“That’s good news and hopefully there will be a few more of those declared over in the coming days.”

There are still seven outbreaks, including one at Greater Niagara General Hospital, one retirement home and five long-term-care homes.

Hirji said he’s sure everybody has lock-down fatigue, but COVID-19 is still very much out there.

He said it’s been contained by restricting activity in society but as those restrictions are lifted, the infection can transmit again.

“It’s going to be really important that we do what we can voluntarily do to keep a lid on it so we don’t see significantly more infections going around,” he said.

He said that’s why public health has been pushing the message that everyone needs to keep practising physical distancing and hand hygiene, as well as wearing masks if they are in situations where they can’t keep a distance from others.

He said it’s more important than ever that people continue those measures to protect others and themselves.

“It’s one of these situations where because people have been so good about all of the physical distancing, hand hygiene, etc, that’s why we’ve seen those numbers come down,” Hirji said.

“Unfortunately, if we claim victory now and stop, those numbers will just go right back up. We need to take that as positive reinforcement, that what we’re doing is working and we want to keep that up.”