FEAR OF SUPERSPREADERS AS LOCAL LOCKDOWNS LOOM
The hospitals can see it now, and it scares them: a crush of Christmas shoppers thronging malls and stores this weekend.
That's what will happen if Ontario announces Friday, two weeks before Christmas, that Windsor and Essex County will be locked down starting Monday.
“Aren't we just asking for two days of superspreader events?” asked Windsor Regional Hospital CEO David Musyj.
“It would be devastating.
The last thing our community can afford is two days of superspreader events.”
All the shoppers infected with COVID-19 during this spree will start showing up at the hospitals — you guessed it — on Christmas Day.
This scenario, the alarming jump in cases and the impact on the health care system have led the CEOS of all three local hospitals to call for the province to lock down this region Friday, effective immediately.
Here's the situation.
There have been 425 new cases since the province moved the city and county to the red level Nov. 30.
“Despite the restrictions from orange and now red, our case counts are not changing,” medical officer of health Dr. Wajid Ahmed told the daily public briefing Monday.
There were 128 new cases last weekend, 66 on Monday and 57 on Tuesday. There are 20 outbreaks.
Every day, dozens of new cases — 55 on Monday, 43 on Tuesday — are still being investigated because harried public health staff can't get to them all as quickly as they should to contain the spread.
Here's some context.
It took us 81 days to rack up the first 1,000 cases starting last spring.
Then we raced to 2,000 cases in 45 days.
It took us 114 days to get to 3,000 cases.
We're logging so many cases so quickly now that we reached 4,000 cases in only 25 days.
Erie Shores Healthcare CEO Kristin Kennedy called the numbers “startling.”
The high number of cases are squeezing every aspect of health care, from getting tests and results to contact tracing, hospital beds and health care staff. We've opened a third testing centre to handle the demand for tests and brought on more public health staff to do contact tracing.
There are at least 20 COVID-19 patients in Windsor Regional, where one floor is closed because of an outbreak. Nine patients are in the intensive care unit. Two people have died in the last 24 hours. There are another 65 patients with suspected COVID-19 waiting for test results. Meanwhile, 15 staff are off because they've either tested positive or are a close contact of someone who tested positive.
Hotel-dieu Grace Healthcare began accepting some new patients Tuesday after closing to new admissions because of an outbreak. Thirty health care workers and 14 patients there have been infected.
Erie Shores' 10-bed COVID-19 unit has been full for the last five to seven days. It had two ICU beds. It added a third. They've been full for eight days.
Hospitals here can't transfer patients to London Health Sciences Centre because of the outbreak there.
“We're looking at all different types of contingency plans right now,” said Kennedy, including adding more ICU beds “if we can't transfer people out.”
“There's a heightened level of anxiety right now,” she said. “We're doing town halls every day with staff just to update them and put measures in place to support them.”
The hospital's leadership is helping with patient care “so we can attempt to minimize some of the pressure they're having,” she said of staff.
“Our hospital system is at the edge,” said Musyj.
If Windsor Regional, which also operates two of the test centres, needs to reopen its field hospital, “that would be a push,” he said, because it no longer has as many staff available and it can't hire more because there aren't any more to hire.
And it's going to get worse. Warned one source, “It's going to get ugly in the next 24 to 48 hours, the numbers.”
So when the Ontario government reviews the case counts, the number of outbreaks, the per-cent positivity, staff capacity and other key indicators, as it is expected to begin doing Tuesday and Wednesday before making a decision Friday, it will have to, regrettably, lock down this region, immediately.
No one wants to do this. It will be another terrible blow to businesses forced to close again, this time at the height of their biggest season of the year.
But it shouldn't be a surprise. Ahmed has already warned we're heading for a lockdown.
This is the reality we're facing. We've allowed this to get out of control. We don't have the testing and contact tracing to contain it right now.
A lockdown will help contain it, and it will send a clear and critical message: This is serious, very serious.
It's not about just COVID-19 cases. It's people who suffer heart attacks, strokes and other severe illness and injury who also need hospitals.
It's not about just the staff who are down now because of COVID-19. It's about community spread that will inevitably hit more health-care workers. A surge can knock out 30 per cent of staff. Then who will care for us?
“If there's any chance for us to try to get ahead of this and try to keep the (health care) system afloat through the holidays, going to lockdown now seems to me to be the thing we have to do,” said Hotel-dieu CEO Janice Kaffer.
And then, maybe, we have “a chance at Christmas, or some semblance of Christmas,” she said.