COVID-19 Cases Hit Record Levels in Kingston, Frontenac, Lennnox and Addington – Kingston | The Canadian News

New COVID-19 cases continue to rise in Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington, with most of them in Kingston.

Joe Quattrocchi, the owner of Quattrocchi’s specialty foods, says home delivery has doubled at his store.

“In the last two to three weeks people have been calling or sending us their orders online,” Quattrocci said.

Active cases have exceeded 200 and the infection rate is 71.3 per 100,000 during the last seven days.

Dr. Gerald Evans, treating physician in infectious diseases and internal medicine at Kingston General Hospital and Hotel Dieu Hospital, attributes the high numbers to low exposure to the virus during the first three waves and a small population of unvaccinated people.

“We have a lot of people who haven’t been vaccinated yet who are still susceptible to this infection because we’ve had such low infection rates before,” Dr. Evans said.

“This is history repeating itself and it’s one of those infamous drawbacks of actually doing it, really well at first; sometimes it comes back to bite later.”

Last week, KFL & A Public Health confirmed that half of the region’s cases are the result of community spread, with no known traceable source.

There may be some good news locally on the COVID-19 front in the coming weeks, according to Dr. Evans.

“The percentage of tests, while still high among people getting tested here, there are other things that we look at that tell us that those numbers may have peaked and may be declining,” Dr. Evans said.

“So that’s my hope for a holiday gift for the community, is that by the time the days of late December roll around, let’s hope we are in much smaller numbers than we are (are) now.”

According to KFL & A Public Health, of the 203 active cases in the region, 13 are hospitalized, eight are in the intensive care unit and five are on respirators.

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