Chatham-Kent saw five new cases of COVID-19 reported on Wednesday afternoon with a new workplace outbreak.
Three more people recovered.
CK Public Health does not provide names of workplaces unless they were open to the public. The cumulative total has risen to 562 cases, 33 of which remain active.
The outbreak at Riverview Gardens, which saw two staff members at the long-term care facility infected with COVID-19, is still active. One staff member has been cleared, and there were no cases detected among the residents that CK Public Health was able to find “despite extensive search,” according to Dr. David Colby, Chatham-Kent’s medical officer of health.
Chatham-Kent will likely remain in the yellow zone this Friday, according to Colby. Two of the municipality’s neighbours, Windsor-Essex and Middlesex-London, are in the grey and red zones, raising concerns that individuals will try to circumvent their local guidelines by coming to Chatham-Kent for their needs.
“There has not been a readily apparent decrease in case numbers. There is a growing consensus among the medical officers of health that it may be time to reimpose a higher level of province wide sanctions,” Colby said.
“We’ve noticed that the ultimate sources of our cases have almost invariably led outside of Chatham-Kent not within Chatham-Kent. So, this is not a new problem for us, and it’s a matter of some concern that people attempting to circumvent their local control measures may see Chatham-Kent or Sarnia-Lambton as open for business.”
Vaccine update
The first few doses of the Pfizer vaccine arrived and were given out in Canada earlier this week. Colby said the early doses went to Ottawa and the Greater Toronto Area.
With vaccine plans “changing more than daily” there is still no word on when Chatham-Kent will see its first doses arrive, however, local players (Chatham-Kent Health Alliance, EMS, CK Public Health) will be having a meeting on Thursday to discuss roles and responsibilities for vaccine distribution.
“In the meantime, we are doing a lot of messaging on that vaccine hesitancy,” Colby said.
Hesitancy is coming from the speed at which the vaccine was created and approved, he added.
The Moderna vaccine is also expected to be approved by Health Canada any day now.
“The rapid time, relatively speaking, that it took to approve a vaccine in less than a year is not because corners were cut in the testing and approval process,” Colby said, adding that the Moderna vaccine was created in 48 hours.
“The reasons things happened fast was because of the urgency of the situation; decisions were made to perform the testing steps concurrently, instead of sequentially.”
