Ottawa adds 54 COVID-19 cases, receives 1st Moderna vaccine shipment

Ottawa has received its first shipment of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, Mayor Jim Watson announced Friday.

Watson tweeted Friday afternoon that the new shipment will be put to use in Ottawa retirement homes starting Sunday. The city has received 40 trays of Moderna’s vaccine, enough for 4,000 doses, staff confirmed in a later memo.

News of the Moderna delivery comes the same day Ottawa will finish the second round of coronavirus vaccinations in local long-term care homes using the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

While Moderna had been approved late last year and distributed in Ontario since January, Ottawa had so far received none, as the doses were originally prioritized to help vaccinate long-term care home residents in harder-hit areas of the province.

The Moderna vaccine is being stored at a secure city facility. Previously, the city had kept vaccine doses at the Ottawa Hospital, which was equipped with deep-freeze storage equipment necessary to keep the Pfizer-BioNTech doses preserved at temperatures as cold as -90 C.

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But the Moderna vaccine can be kept for up to a month in regular fridge-freezer temperatures of -20 C, according to the city’s memo.

The city has established a centralized vaccine supply and distribution centre at another municipal site, the memo stated.

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Ottawa has now administered 28,567 doses of the vaccine, according to OPH’s COVID-19 dashboard.

Meanwhile, OPH reported 54 new cases of the novel coronavirus locally on Friday.

There have now been 13,539 cases of COVID-19 in Ottawa since the start of the pandemic, with 438 of those cases now considered active, down from the day before.

The seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases also dropped slightly to 46 per day.

No new deaths related to COVID-19 were reported on Friday.

There are currently 28 people in hospital with COVID-19 in Ottawa, with five now in the intensive care unit.

Three new coronavirus outbreaks were added to OPH’s dashboard to end the week, but the number of resolved outbreaks is outpacing new additions. The number of ongoing outbreaks in Ottawa dropped to 28 as of Friday.

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