Ontario’s Minister of Health is congratulating residents of Hastings Prince Edward on transitioning back to the green zone of the provincial COVID-19 response framework, but is issuing a reminder that the work isn’t done.
Christine Elliott spoke to Quinte News on Wednesday and says the decision to move our area back to the less-restrictive zone of the framework was based on a few factors.
“It’s about the numbers, of course, but it’s about hospital capacity too because we didn’t want our hospital system to be overwhelmed with large numbers of cases. It’s about the variants of concern as well, because we’ve seen them in a number of the other public health unit regions, but not in Hastings and Prince Edward Counties.”
Elliott credited the work of the community here for keeping those case numbers low, but says that work isn’t done.
“This isn’t a reopening. We still are requesting people to continue to follow those public health measures they’ve been following so closely for about a year now, in terms of the physical distancing, wearing a face mask and frequent hand washing, those elements continue to be very important.”
When asked by Quinte News if our area’s low case counts would have an impact on how or when we get more vaccines, Elliott says the province is continuing to stick to its roll out plan of starting with long-term care homes and vulnerable residents.
“We’re going to continue to follow that up when we get to the next phase, but of course, we’re still waiting for shipments of vaccines. As soon as we receive them we want to get them into people’s arms as quickly as possible and we can scale up very quickly to mass vaccination clinics when we do receive large quantities of vaccines, which should happen in the next several weeks.”
As far as concerns of people travelling from other areas, Elliott praised the local health unit for putting a Section 22 in order in place, which prohibits people from outside of HPE from booking restaurant, accommodation, or service appointments.
She says that’s a key in continuing to keep the area safe.
