Vaccines remain ‘mainstay of our response’
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Norfolk and Haldimand’s medical officer of health shared educated guesses this week about the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic and the prognosis for the local area returning to some semblance of normality.
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Tuesday, Dr. Matthew Strauss told Norfolk and Haldimand’s board of health that the current, Omicron-variant phase of COVID-19 should be spent some time in March. There will be widespread community exposure and infection, Strauss said, but so far Omicron has been light on fatalities.
“This wave is quite unstoppable,” Strauss said. “It may be slowed down by some of the measures the province has put in place. I’m sure we don’t want everyone to get Omicron all at once.
“There is broad consensus between officials at the Ministry of Health, the Chief Medical Officer of Health, Public Health Ontario, the Ontario Science Table, and my medical officer of health colleagues across the province that Omicron will reach us all.
“I hope we all don’t get infected, but I anticipate we will all be exposed – hopefully not all at once – but over the coming weeks and months.”
Strauss had bad news for those who were led to believe that mass vaccination was our ticket out of the pandemic.
At this point, Strauss says those who are double-vaxxed for COVID-19 enjoy no protection against infection from Omicron while those who are double-vaxxed and have recently had a booster enjoy about “30 per cent protection, for a few weeks.”
Strauss divided case histories locally and elsewhere between those involving “transmission and infection” and instances involving “hospitalization and death.”
While our current suite of vaccines is not effective in preventing transmission and infection, Strauss said they are “high 80 per cent” effective in preventing hospitalization and death.
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“High 80 per cent is still terrific, and they (vaccines) are still the mainstay of our response,” he said.
With regard to COVID-19 fatalities in the local health district, Strauss said there was “a lull” over Christmas. Over the past two weeks, Strauss said there has been a handful of deaths in hospital and institutional settings. None, he added, involved individuals who didn’t have a pre-existing vulnerability such as old age.
Strauss noted that Ontario was registering more than 20,000 cases of Omicron a day this month when the province threw in the towel on testing. Omicron was spreading so rapidly that there were not enough test kits, individuals to administer them, and lab technicians to keep up.
“The silver lining when you’re dealing with something that transmits eight times faster is that the curve is going to go up eight times faster and it’s going to come down eight times faster,” Strauss said.
“I think we’ll be talking about the pandemic that was – as opposed to the pandemic that is – probably not next month but the month (March) after. It’s going to be a difficult few weeks. If there is a silver lining, I think it will be over soon. ”