Resident of Vision Retirement Home dies after testing COVID-19 positive

Thirty-six people have now died with COVID-19 in Lambton.

Statistics from Lambton Public Health show today a resident at Vision Retirement Home died. There are 29 residents and six staff who were COVID-19 positive there – the largest outbreak in Lambton right now.

There are also outbreaks at Village on the St. Clair, were 27 residents and 12 staff tested positive. Three people have died there. Twin Lakes Terrace is also still in outbreak with 17 residents and five staff at the long term care home testing positive for the virus. One person has passed away there.

It’s expected residents of long term care homes and high risk retirement homes will be getting their first vaccines in Lambton today. The province shipped 500 doses of Moderna to the community Monday. This morning, Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Sudit Ranade, says the teams were delayed this morning.

“We had been planning to go out early today to start those vaccines, but they’re just a little bit delayed. There’s one thing that we actually really needed to wait on which was confirmation that the cold chain had been maintained of the vaccines during the transportation to us.

“All of these vaccines have different storage requirements. And one of the things that you want to make sure, between the point of the vaccine is manufactured, and the point that it actually is given to someone is that that the temperature and other conditions around the vaccine were maintained throughout. So, as soon as we get confirmation that during the transport, the vaccine temperature was stable, and that it was appropriate for the storage, we can go ahead and start immunizing the people that we need to be immunized … you don’t want to go ahead and immunize people if you’re not sure about the status of the vaccine.”

Vision Nursing and Retirement Home’s website says it is one of the long term care homes which will get the vaccine in the first roll out. Public Health did not say which homes are the first in line for the limited supply received Monday.

Meantime; the outbreak at Bluewater Health’s general medicine unit is also growing, with another staff member testing COVID-19 positive. There are now two patients and six staff members ill. The outbreak is not impacting most of the functions of the hospital.

There were just six new cases identified in Lambton today according to public health. One hundred and 123 people are ill – that’s down 36 and another 44 people have recovered from COVID-19.

Ontario is reporting 1740 new COVID-19 cases today and 63 new deaths – 24 of those in long term care homes. There were 30,717 tests completed, with 36405 still waiting for results.