“We’re getting there,” says Lambton’s medical officer of health.
Dr. Sudit Ranade made the comments asked when the COVID-19 pandemic will be over. Ranade was speaking with reporters Tuesday about how the restrictions around the virus are changing. It’s was expected Premier Doug Ford would be announcing Wednesday the end of masking mandates by the end of March.
“It is a reflection of the fact that two years later with a highly vaccinated population and the less severe variants floating around that there’s more tolerance for people to do the things that they used to do,” Ranade says. “We have to approach that gradually; some people are ready to just go full steam ahead and some people are not quite there yet.”
Ranade also cautioned people to “recognize that because it’s a global pandemic, and the situation is changing, or could change, that the things that we can do now may not be the things that we can do six months from now. Just remember it, you don’t have to get upset about it or worry about it, but just remember it. …We’re still in a global pandemic, and that hasn’t fully resolved itself yet.
Ranade says should a new variant appear which is resistant to the current vaccine, that would be a problem. But, he added, the world is moving toward the end of the pandemic because so many people have been exposed. Ranade expects the virus to continue circulating like the flu.
Currently in Lambton, 9,914 people have tested positive for COVID and 126 have died from the virus. There are two active outbreaks – on at St. Francis Advocate. Seven people are in hospital with the virus and just two are in the intensive care unit as of March 5 according to health unit data.