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March 17, 2022, marked the two-year anniversary of when Ontario declared a provincial State of Emergency as COVID-19 began wreaking havoc across the province and the world.
The State of Emergency forced public settings such as bars, restaurants, theatres, and indoor recreational facilities to close their doors.
Now two years later Dr. Kit Young Hoon, Medical Officer of Health for the Northwestern Health Unit says the health unit is doing an internal audit on its pandemic response.
“I know internally we’ve seen lots of great work coming out of our organization,” said Young Hoon. “Staff have stepped up and worked in realms and content areas that they haven’t worked in before.”
“I’m very thankful for the staff we have and how hard they’ve worked throughout this pandemic. Many people have had to give up vacations, work long hours, and work into evenings and weekends in order to respond to the pandemic,” added Young Hoon.
Included in the internal audit will be the health unit looking into some key topics and trends of the virus.
“Case rates, hospitalization rates, and death rates. At this point, our numbers are indicating generally our region has down well up to this point. Our case numbers have been relativity lower in all previous waves to this current Omicron wave.”
Currently, there are 258 COVID-19 cases being reported in the region with the majority being in Northern First Nation communities that are dealing with several outbreaks.
“We do need to be aware of that ongoing risk to those individuals and provide support and consider that in our overall evaluation.”
She noted that the epidemiology does suggest that the NWHU has fared better than other health regions in the province.
Vaccination rates within the health unit remain high as 97.1 per cent of those aged five and older have gotten one dose, 89.9 per cent are fully vaccinated, and 52.3 per cent have received their booster dose.
Communication was a topic Young Hoon thought improved throughout the pandemic with local media along with the public with providing up-to-date COVID-19 information.
The health unit staff went through a learning curve with implementing programming such as their COVID-19 hotline.
“That has answered a lot of questions that have supported many, many people over the past two years so they could get that individual-level support that they needed over the telephone.”
Moving forward Young Hoon said the health unit will be focused on recovering as an organization.
“What we need to do to support the community to recover and what are the health priority areas that we need to re-focus on.”
As of March 23, 2022, the health unit is reporting a 7-day test positivity rate of 16.2 per cent.