Caution still needed in Phase 2, Hirji warns
If Niagara residents are not careful, the region’s entering Phase 2 of the pandemic economic reopening could be the start of a return to the days of more restrictive lockdowns, says Niagara top health official.
While the business and political leaders rejoiced at Monday’s announcement that Niagara will join the next stage of reopening, Dr. Mustafa Hirji worried the data that showed Niagara was ready to move forward will convince too many people the threat of the novel coronavirus has passed.
“The virus is still out there and I am very concerned that people will take this as a sign that COVID -19 is done, and they will return to their pre-pandemic habits,” said Niagara’s acting medical officer of health. “The reason that our numbers are so low is that people were physical distancing, and using good hand hygiene and wearing face coverings.”
Hirji had actively lobbied for Niagara’s inclusion into Phase 2, writing a letter to Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, highlighting local pandemic data to make his case, including the region’s low daily case count, the end of large healthcare facility outbreaks and COVID-19 testing capacity.
But all the progress that has brought Niagara to the doorstep of Phase 2 could be undone quickly. Comments and photos on social media over the past week indicating many Niagara residents and businesses are not enforcing physical distancing and masking among customers and staff is giving Hirji pause.
“We don’t want to be like South Korea, which is a good example of how this can go wrong,” said Hirji. “There they got their numbers very low and almost completely reopened. Now, in the city of Seoul people essentially entirely returned to their pre-pandemic habits. That resulted in a wave of new cases and they have had to reimpose restrictions they had done away with. We don’t want that to happen here.”
Niagara has been poised for Phase 2 for weeks, with the daily case count in Niagara being in the low single digits and occasionally that number is zero.
Monday, the same day Premier Doug Ford announced Niagara was ready for Phase 2, there was only one confirmed new COVID-19 case — a case of community transmission with no identified source of infection.
The number of active cases also plunged again Monday, dropping to 32 from 46 on Sunday.
There are six people at the St. Catharines hospital being treated for COVID-19. To date, at least 61 Niagara residents with the virus have died.
Although Hirji said the local data, including the long-term trend that has flattened Niagara’s COVID-19 curve, suggests that staying under complete lockdown is doing more harm than good to the health of residents, it is not clear on what basis the province is making its reopening decisions.
The official Phase 2 document of the provincial government points to four “key public health indicators” used to determine which communities can reopen: virus spread, public health capacity, health care capacity, and incident tracking capacity.
However, the provincial health ministry attached no data to those indicators for Niagara or any other region of Ontario in the document.