Orange is the new Yellow

Jeff Green | Dec 19, 2020

Kingston Frontenac Public Health confirmed on Friday afternoon, that the region is moving into the Orange zone on the Ontario colour coded COVID-19 protection zones as of Monday, December 21.

It takes some checking to determine the difference between the Yellow and Orange zones in the Ontario pandemic colour coding system.

Aside from restaurants and bars closing at 10pm instead of midnight, a restriction to 4 to a table as opposed to 6 to a table in restaurants, and some extra limitations at indoor gyms, there are not that many.

Indoor private events are limited to 10 people, and outdoor events to 25, which is the same as yellow.

In Frontenac County, there are very few, if any, businesses and public services that will be directly affected by the change from yellow to orange.

In terms of caseload, as of Friday there were 7 active cases among the population of South Frontenac, 1 active case among the population of Central Frontenac, which puts the two townships at 29 per 100,000 and 22 per 100,000 respectively, lower than the rate in Kingston, which is driving the numbers in the region. There are no active cases in North Frontenac and Addington Highlands.

If the colour coding system seems bit confusing, that's because it is. That lack of clarity comes from a provincial government that is scrambling to figure out how to deal with the second wave of COVID-19.

In fact, the caseload numbers marking the separation between the yellow, orange and red zones changed only a couple of weeks ago.

Under the old rules, KFL&A would have still been in the yellow zone now, only bordering on orange, with a weekly caseload of 37 cases per 100,000 people, but under the new rules we are deep in orange, after flirting with the red zone earlier this past week.

But as residents, we don't need to over-react to the colour coding. It is only telling us that the risk of contracting the virus is higher now than it was before, but the social behaviours that we all have learned over the last 9 months make that risk low for us as individuals. Those who are vulnerable need to be more careful, and those who are less vulnerable don't want to become part of a chain of infection that exposes those who are more vulnerable.

We can all live through this and wait for the vaccine program to roll out next year.

The fly in the ointment is Christmas, and we have decisions to make about that.

The big number is 1.

People who are facing Christmas alone, who don't want to be alone, shouldn't have to face that.

How families can manage making sure that isn't happening without taking too many risks is up to them.

But we all have a civic responsibility to avoid spreading the virus, and we all know it, so we should act accordingly.

Multi-family gatherings, even if they stay under the 10-person limit for indoor events, represent a level of risk for all of us.

Families will weigh that risk and make their own decisions how to respond to it.