The Interim Medical Officer of Health for Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge says he continues to support Ontario’s stay-at-home order as a way to prevent the transmission of not only COVID-19, but influenza as well.
During his weekly media briefing Dr. Ian Gemmill noted that the local COVID-19 cases numbers in that area have been dropping substantially and that cases of the flu nationwide are minimal as well.
He says while the restrictions are difficult, they are certainly effective, comparing it to putting your thumb on a garden hose.
“When there’s no control it just spills out. With these restrictions, we’re putting our thumb on the end of that garden hose to keep the cases from happening and the transmission occurring and that’s the difference with restrictions in place. But we all know that once we relax these restrictions the case counts will rebound, when you take your thumb off the house it’ll start all over again.”
Gemmill added that the restrictions aren’t sustainable for much longer and the only way to stop numbers from jumping is to reduce the impact to the vulnerable population, which means getting more vaccines.
“We have a real opportunity to reduce the number of susceptible people so that the virus will naturally decrease in transmission. Now, right now, there is a shortage of vaccine, but it’s not going to last forever. As I like to remind people, two months ago there was no vaccine and now we’ve got 700 doses into the arms of residents of some of the long-term care homes.”
Dr. Gemmill says the overall effort to vaccinate residents across the area’s long term care facilities is going well and will continue, as more shipments of vaccines come in.
He says if the vaccine delivery plan goes as scheduled, they’ll have another 1,000 doses in the HKPR area by next week.
