The Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit has changed the way it reports COVID-19 data for the City of Kawartha Lakes, Northumberland County, and Haliburton County.
Effective Monday (March 21), the health unit’s online COVID-19 dashboard now separates COVID-19 data from 2022 from historical data for 2020 and 2021, provides a year-to-date summary of COVID-19 data in lower-tier municipalities, and also provides the results of COVID-19 wastewater surveillance currently being done at municipal treatment plants in Lindsay and Cobourg.
In a media release, the health unit says splitting of COVID-19 data into current and historical categories aligns with the change in Ontario’s PCR testing eligibility at the start of they year, and also coincides with the timeline when the omicron variant became the main circulating strain of COVID-19 in the region.
In December, the Ministry of Health restricted eligibility for PCR tests only to at-risk people who live or work in the highest-risk settings or who may be at the highest risk of severe illness if they get infected with COVID-19, along with household members of staff who work in highest-risk settings and patient-facing health care workers.
“Given lab-confirmed COVID-19 case numbers are no longer a true measure of virus activity in the community due to limits on PCR testing eligibility, we are updating our COVID-19 dashboard to provide a clearer, more current picture of virus activity in our region,” says medical officer of health Dr. Natalie Bocking.
The health unit’s revised COVID-19 dashboard will continue to report key daily indicators including lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases and active cases, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, deaths, outbreaks in high-risk settings, tests completed, and percent positivity.
The reporting of the seven-day COVID-19 incidence rate and cases by immunization status has been discontinued.
“Due to current limits on PCR testing eligibility, these statistics represent only a small segment of the population and therefore not a true picture of COVID-19 activity in the area,” Dr. Bocking says.
With COVID-19 activity plateauing and slowly declining in the area, the health unit has also reduced the frequency of updates to Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (except holidays) rather than each weekday.
