Due to limited vaccine supply, only one mass vaccination clinic — at the Lindsay Exhibition — will be available next week through the provincial booking system for residents in Kawartha Lakes, Northumberland, and Haliburton.
“We not receiving the supply that we’d like to see to meet the demand,” said Dr. Natalie Bocking, medical officer of health for the Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit, during a virtual media briefing on Wednesday (April 21) — her first since assuming the role three weeks ago.
Dr. Bocking added the focus of the health unit over the next week will be on mobile teams to provide follow-up clinics in retirement homes and other congregate care settings, as well as reaching people with the highest-risk health conditions and those who are homebound with mobility issues.
“Of the vaccine supply we do have, we need to be able to reach some of the priority populations that were identified in the provincial framework,” Dr. Bocking said.
While seven mass immunization clinics have been established in Cobourg, Campbellford, Lindsay, Fenelon Falls, Haliburton, and Minden, only the Lindsay Exhibition drive-through clinic will be booking appointments next week. The other clinics will not be available in the provincial booking system because the health unit doesn’t have enough vaccine.
“We had made a policy decision that we would not offer appointments in the provincial booking system unless we had confirmed vaccine,” Dr. Bocking said. ” We didn’t want to be put in a position where we would have to cancel actual appointments that had been made if our tentative vaccine supply did not come through.”
“Over the next couple of weeks, there will be fewer appointments in those mass immunization clinics because we have less supply overall,” she added.
Dr. Bocking also provided an update on the status of the pandemic in the health unit region, noting that 291 new cases have been reported in the last 14 days — representing 19 per cent of the total of 1,534 cases in the region since the pandemic began last March.
“In the last two weeks, approximately 13 to 14 per cent of (cases) have been found to be variants of concern,” Dr. Bocking said, noting that this rate is less than the provincial average of 69 per cent. “We are not seeing in our region the same proportion of variants of concern, but we are seeing it.”
The majority of those cases are the B.1.1.7 UK variant, according to Dr. Bocking, with 30 per cent of the cases in the last 14 days among people under the age of 20.
“Over the last week, our crude rate per 100,000 people has ranged from between 65 to 88 or 89 cases,” Dr. Bocking said. “If we weren’t in a provincial shutdown, that would put us in the red zone.”
Prior to the shutdown, the health unit had been in the ‘yellow-protect’ level of the province’s COVID-19 response framework.
Dr. Bocking sounded a note of optimism as the number of new daily cases has slowed, with a test positivity rate at just over three per cent in the last 14 days — far less than the provincial positive rate that reached a high of 10.5 per cent on April 19.
“It seems to have plateaued a little bit,” Dr. Bocking said, referring to the number of new cases. “We’re now seeing on average about 20 new cases per day,” she said, adding that she is hopeful the numbers will decrease as a result of the latest public health measures.
There are currently eight outbreaks in the health unit’s region, six of which are at schools. Around 14 per cent of cases are associated with outbreaks, Dr. Bocking said, with most a result of community transmission.
In response to a reporter’s question asking how there could be outbreaks at schools, which have been closed since April 9th, Dr. Bocking pointed out it can take 14 days for symptoms to develop. An outbreak will be declared if at least two students were infected while they were in school.
