Peterborough Public Health‘s medical officer of health says Ontario’s stay-at-home order should be extended to help tackle continued high case counts of COVID-19.
The provincial stay-at-home order is set to expire on May 20, however, Ontario’s COVID-19 case counts are still averaging about 3,000 daily.
“I do think we need to see those numbers come down before we open up,” Dr. Rosana Salvaterra said during Friday’s media briefing. “I don’t want to see a repeat of what happened in February, especially with the variants of concern.”
Salvaterra says Ontarians need to “sit tight” in order to avoid a potential fourth wave of the pandemic.
“We don’t want a fourth wave — we want to come out of this and stay out of it.”
She also says she is in favour of reopening schools “as soon as it is safe to do so.”
“Kids need to be in the classroom for their mental and emotional well-being,” she said. “We certainly saw last time in Peterborough we were able to open up the classrooms and allow students to go back as long as we kept everything else locked down.
“If it means keeping the lockdown on longer in order to allow students back in the classroom, I would certainly be in favour of that.”
The health unit as of Thursday evening reported 68 active cases of COVID-19 in its jurisdiction (Peterborough city/county, Curve Lake First Nation and Hiawatha First Nation).
Most of the health unit’s new cases are the B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in the U.K., which is “more transmissible” and “more challenging to control,” Salvaterra says.
“The public health measures work when they are applied,” she said. “We just need to hang in and be patient and do this for a little bit longer in order to get to a point where we all enjoy a little more normalcy back.”
Regular samples of area wastewater give a “participatory notice of increases or decreases in cases,” Salvaterra says, noting that local data indicates a potential change in the current downward slide of active cases.
“We may expect more cases emerging over the next few days,” she said.
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