The local health unit has encountered a problem it only dreamt of in January.
There’s so much COVID-19 vaccine arriving in the region, it’s a challenge to administer it all.
“Earlier, the issue was supply, now the issue is keeping up with the supply,” said Dr. Charles Gardner, medical officer of health for the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit.
A majority of the health unit staff have spent the pandemic redeployed as case and contact tracers to manage local COVID-19 cases.
Now they’ve been redeployed again to support mass immunization clinics in Simcoe County and Muskoka, said Gardner during his biweekly media briefing.
“We’re pushed to the outer limit,” said Gardner. “We do anticipate by early August we will have reached all those who wished to receive their first or second dose.”
He anticipates the mass immunization clinics will be closed down after the summer as demand for vaccines decreases.
It will, however, be a busy couple of months until then.
“Between now and then we’ll be hard-pressed to keep up with the supply that’s coming,” he said.
He reiterated encouragement to Simcoe Muskoka residents to get two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine as quickly as they are able to.
The new cases recorded by the health unit in Simcoe-Muskoka are now about 80 per cent delta variant cases, which is a much more contagious strain of COVID-19.
“We do want to get as many people fully immunized as quickly as we can,” said Gardner.
But things are moving quicker than he and many others anticipated they would.
In March 2020, Gardner said he thought it would take until late 2022 for vaccine to arrive and be deployed.
“We’re well ahead of that,” said Gardner, noting the vaccine schedule has accelerated a couple of times since the first arrival of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine in Canada.
As of July 6, 41 per cent of the adult population of Simcoe County and Muskoka District has had two doses of COVID-19 vaccine, and another 35 per cent has had one dose.
“Our rates of disease are low overall in the province compared to some projections,” he said, attributing the low case rates to a combination of high vaccination rates and strong control measures.
“On the whole, we’re doing well,” he said.
In order to keep doing well, Gardner said caution, immunization, and continued compliance with public health measures will be required.
“We do want to be successful in moving forward and not having any setbacks, we need to be careful,” said Gardner.
He wants the province to remain in Step Two for at least 21 days before moving to the third step in the province’s Roadmap to Recovery.
“We need to take the time it takes to see the impact of each step before we move to the next step,” he said. “And personally, I would prefer that they take the full three weeks to do that.”
For information on booking a vaccine in Simcoe-Muskoka region, click here. You can also follow the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit’s Facebook page for notices about pop-up clinics and walk-in availability.
