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Six people have died of COVID-19 in Ottawa over the past week, with signs indicating that as the summer holidays begin, the city is seeing the start of a new pandemic wave likely fueled by new, highly contagious sub-variants of Omicron.
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The previous wave ended just a few weeks ago, in the spring, but even then transmission continued in the community.
Now, test positivity rates, case numbers and hospitalizations are rising in Ottawa, signaling that COVID-19 is against spreading more rapidly, as is the case in much of the province.
“And yes. It’s officially another wave,” Dr. Abdu Sharkawy, an internist and infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto Health Network, tweeted Tuesday after posting a graph showing the exponential growth in cases of COVID-19. COVID-19 in most public health units in Ontario.
The data released by Ottawa Public Health on Tuesday was a snapshot of COVID-19 in the community over the last seven days.
As of Tuesday, 493 new lab-confirmed cases were added to the tally and 17 patients in Ottawa hospitals with active COVID-19 infections, two people in intensive care. A week earlier, there were 10 COVID-19 patients in the hospital with active infections and one in intensive care. There were six new outbreaks and a total of 14 ongoing outbreaks in institutional settings.
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In total, there were 62 confirmed COVID-19 patients in local hospitals over the past week: 25 due to the virus and 37 not admitted due to the virus.
Since hospitalization and serious illness are generally lagging indicators of COVID-19 in the community, the deaths reported this week were likely people who had been infected before the latest wave.
The positivity rate of people getting tested for COVID-19 in the community has also increased sharply in Ottawa in recent days. Only a small minority are receiving PCR tests now, such as those who work in high-risk settings, but the positivity rate from those tests is one way to measure the growth of community transmission of COVID-19.
On June 20, Ottawa’s test positivity rate was 8.9 percent. By July 4, it was 16.1 percent, according to the Ottawa COVID-19 Testing Task Force.
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The UK and elsewhere have seen strong waves and a surge in hospitalizations in recent weeks fueled by Omicron’s BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants, which are fast becoming dominant in Ontario.
The growing transmission of COVID-19 comes at a time when most mask mandates have been lifted and many hospitals are struggling with critical staffing shortages, including two hospitals that have temporarily closed emergency departments in Perth and in Clinton, Ontario, in the southwestern part of the province. It has prompted calls for the provincial government to extend eligibility for the fourth dose of the vaccine to anyone over the age of 18, rather than leaving it restricted to people over 60, indigenous peoples and their families, and vulnerable populations, and reinstate the mask mandates in all health settings. .
Many hospitals have kept mask mandates in place, but some, including Almonte General Hospital and Carleton Place and District Memorial Hospital, no longer have staff at the doors actively screening visitors.
Hospital visitors must still be fully vaccinated and must bring proof of vaccination. President and CEO Mary Wilson Trider said hospitals are monitoring the process and public health guidelines and will adjust plans if necessary.
