In the last 27 days, 24 people from Lambton County have lost their lives to COVID-19.

Lambton Public Health is reporting Wednesday that three more people died of the virus.

In all, 106 people have now died of COVID-19 during the pandemic in Lambton.

The county is not alone in the growing death toll because of the virus. The province reported 89 deaths from COVID-19 today, six yesterday and the rest over the last 21 days.

In Ontario, 11,160 people have died of COVID since the pandemic began – 954 people in January.

And while the numbers are grim, Lambton’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Sudit Ranade, says it is time for people to shift their thinking from trying to avoid getting the virus to calculating what is an acceptable risk for them.

“When you’re when your existing interventions are less effective, and you have a
virus that’s more transmissible, you have to accept a certain amount of transmission,
you have to accept … that we’re going to mitigate only the highest risk consequences
as opposed to worrying about transmission everywhere,” says Ranade.

And he admits that’s going to be a huge shift in thinking for some.

Ranade says people were told “if we just kept doing it, if we just kept going, that we would somehow escaped ever being exposed to this virus. And because that is no longer a realistic possibility, people are going to experience that sense of loss. What did I do all of this for?”

Ranade says those sacrifices were necessary when there wasn’t a vaccine. Now, he says, the vaccine will reduce the risk for a large number of people and we’ll need to concentrate our resources on the most vulnerable from here on in “because Omicron is forcing it, we don’t really have a choice about it.”