The Kenora area has seen a major spike in COVID-19 cases in recent weeks. As of Tuesday, the Kenora Health Hub is reporting 53 active cases, which is a definite increase from five days ago when the area only had 20 cases.
Dr. Kit Young Hoon, Medical Officer of Health for the Northwestern Health Unit said in a media briefing Tuesday the spike in cases isn’t due to a single event.
“I think it’s just an increase in social gatherings and because people are indoors more because of the weather,” said Young Hoon.
She noted that the increase in travel during this holiday seen has contributed to some of the new COVID-19 cases, but not all.
“I don’t think that’s the only thing driving our increase in cases at this point. The increase in cases we’re seeing particularly in the Rainy River District, and the Kenora area does indicate there is the transmission of the virus within the community and it’s not primarily driven by travel-related cases,” added Young Hoon.
On Monday, the NWHU reported 46 new cases, which was the most reported in one day since February 13, 2021, when 40 new cases were found.
The region's top doctor did want to reassure the public the Omicron variant has not been discovered in the region.
“We don’t have evidence of the Omicron variant that’s leading to this increase seen in Kenora.”
She did add some insight on the two types of testing procedures used to detect the new variant strain.
“One test is not particularly accurate but it’s easy to do and we get the results in a matter of days. So those test results don’t indicate the Omicron variant but they’re not as accurate,”
“The whole genome sequencing test takes about one to two weeks to get those results so we may not have all of those results as of yet. At this point we are still working with incomplete information,” she says.
On Tuesday, 11 new COVID-19 cases were discovered in the NWHU catchment area to put the active case count in the region up to 102.