All of a sudden, a very ill wind is blowing through

Jeff Green | Dec 13, 2021

Many people in Frontenac County are still awaiting the arrival of Hydro crews to bring back power after a windstorm swept through on Saturday, and the news is worse on the COVID front. A spike in cases of the Delta variant has hit communities in the region hard over the last few weeks, but things have gone from bad to worse over the last five days.

On Wednesday, Kingston Frontenac Public Health (KFLAPH) announced that a single case of the Omicron variant had been detected in the region. On Friday, they said they were investigating over 100 possible Omicron cases. Storrington Public School, the location of an outbreak last week, was closed to in-person learning over the weekend as was a number of other schools in the Limestone Board/ the board sited staffing issues due to isolation requirements as the reason for the closures. And COVID case(s) have been identified at Granite Ridge Public School in Sharbot Lake, although the school remains open at this time.

Queen's University, which has identified a suspected Omicron outbreak in its residences, has cancelled in-person exams, and students in residence are being encouraged to go home, which might only spread the variant further. Alarmingly, all students in residence at Queen's are double vaccinated.

On Sunday night, KFLAPH confirmed cases, suspected to be Omicron cases, stemming from the McKinnon Brothers Holiday Market on December 4 and 5, and asked everyone who had attended to self isolate and seek testing. Thousands attended that event. This has overwhelmed the testing capacity in KFLAPH. Spots are not available at the main testing centre today as of early this morning, leaving KFLAPH scrambling to create new testing capacity, immediately. Without testing, the COVID notification module on the KFLAPH site, which has been the local reliable source of information about case and testing rates since the start of the pandemic, will no longer function. We will no longer know how many cases there are in the region. We might already be in that position.

What does this mean?

It means that there is no way to know who has COVID, so all public exposures have become risk exposures. Given that the news from across the world is seeing the same thing that has happened at the Queen's residences, the Omicron variant can penetrate double vaxxed individuals with apparent ease, although early studies indicate that those with booster shots may have 75% protection.

Since the booster shot program for the 50 and over population is just ramping up today, and for those 12 and over it is scheduled to start on January 4th, the Omicron wave will already certainly have washed over our region and extended across Ontario well before the booster program can stop it.

Hopefully, early reports that Omicron is a milder form of the virus than previous variants have been will turn out to be accurate. But it will likely still threaten vulnerable populations.

Over 22,000 KFL&A residents, roughly 11% of the population, have already had booster shots. Hopefully the most vulnerable in our midst, particularly those in long term care, are in that number.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this is how it looks this morning.

One more thing. In Nova Scotia, testing kits are available for free, almost everywhere. If we had that system in Ontario, people would be able to screen themselves, and only book testing at the public health testing centres if they had a positive test. This would mean that our ability to track the virus would not be compromised in KFL&A. This is on the Province of Ontario, not on KFLAPH, which has essentially been left to deal with this latest outbreak on its own from the start.