Starting at midnight, the Sudbury district and Manitoulin Island will be back into the provincial Grey-Lockdown zone for an indefinite period as this area is now into its third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Penny Sutcliffe, the Medical Officer of Health for Public Health Sudbury and Districts, made the comment Thursday afternoon during an online news conference. She presented several slides showing the history of the virus case count in the past year.
"So this is rapid growth and you'll see from the graph on the side that we experienced our first wave. We then experienced our second wave and I would say certainly we are into our third wave right now," said Suitcliffe.
She recalled that it was as recently as September 16 that PHSD reported its 100th case but now the health district is now well over 800 cases.
This is the second time in the span of one week that the area of the Public Health Sudbury and Districts has been pushed into a more restrictive colour zone. Last week, the first week of March, Sudbury was in the Orange-Restrict zone.
This week kicked off with Sudbury being placed in the Red-Control zone.
The new restrictions begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday morning. Sutcliffe said no date has yet been set for when this local lockdown will end.
"There is not a predetermined date. It really is dependent on what we see. It's dependent on our actions, our compliance with the measures in the grey zone, and therefore when we can go to another zone," she said.
Sutcliffe added that if the district "does really well" she could see PHSD being moved to a more open zone.
She said there were many factors involved in why the area is seeing so many new cases and said she was especially worried about the Variants Of Concern, the name given to the coronavirus variants that have originated in the United Kingdom, in South Africa and Brazil.
"That is because they're highly transmissible and therefore cause much concern with regard to the public health" she said.
So far there are three confirmed cases of the B.1.1.7 virus which is from the U.K. Several other cases have "screened positive" but it takes time to take the screened cases and have them identified as confirmed cases.
Sutcliffe said the variants are the main worry for public health officials right now because they are so easily transmissible compared to the ordinary strain of COVID-19.
Sutcliffe was asked about the decision to move to Grey-Lockdown, considering that Sudbury has been there before (Boxing day lockdown), but the lockdown did not seem to have the desired effect. COVID-19 cases counts have been steadily rising every day since December 27, 2020.
"What needs to be done differently," Sutcliffe was asked.
"Well I do think the numbers have a different story now. If you look at the wave that I showed on a previous graph you will see that in fact we have had a tremendous uptick, a tremendous surge in cases since the end of February, to the last two weeks," said Sutcliffe.
"So in fact the lockdown, the measures at that point in time with the shutdown province-wide helped us. Now of course unfortunately we have more people interacting as we have gone into the orange zone, and the variants of concern," said Sutcliffe.
"So in fact the numbers have not continued to rise, at a steady rate. We have absolutely seen a real surge, particularly in the last two weeks and particularly concerning is almost 50 per cent of them in the last week have been variants of concern," she added.
Len Gillis is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter at Sudbury.com, covering health care in Northern Ontario. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the federal government.
