New provincial health data reveals that COVID-19 is starting to put more pressure on hospitals, including Kingston General.
Data on the Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Public Health website shows the local situation for COVID-19 is worsening.
Hospitalization rates related to the virus are reaching levels not seen since January, when the province was in the full grips of the Omicron wave.
KFL&A Public Health data shows that in late August and early September, COVID-19 hospitalizations began a slow climb before stagnating to around 10 people hospitalized in mid-September.
“Numbers are now rising after they were really showing an extremely slow decline over the summer time. if people want to call it an eighth wave, they can,” said Dr. Gerald Evans, an infectious disease specialist with Kingston Health Sciences Centre.
Now, however, there have been between 20 and 25 people hospitalized locally with the virus for over a week.
That’s nearly double January’s numbers, with the difference between now and January being that the intensive care unit admissions haven’t yet caught up.
In a Twitter post, Dr. Evans said, “Latest reported numbers now show COVID-19 hospitalizations in Ontario are exceeding the number we saw during the 1st omicron wave in January 2022.”
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He added that “in Ontario we’ve never really come out of the 7th wave.”
“Some of these viruses can be really reduced in their transmission by lots of just common sense measures. Wash your hands, be careful when you’re around lots of people in crowded situations, if you’re sneezing or coughing do it into your sleeve, not into your hand,” Dr. Evans said.
The situation is also causing some concern in the Leeds, Grenville, Lanark Public Health Unit region as cases and hospitalizations have climbed there as well, reaching levels not seen since the spring.
There are currently nine people in hospital there with over 200 new positive high-risk cases in the last week.
This comes on the heels of the Thanksgiving long weekend, for which case data will likely not show up until late this week or early next week.
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