TORONTO – Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath wants to know why Premier Doug Ford isn’t sending a ‘whole bunch’ of vaccines to Thunder Bay.
Health Minister Christine Elliott responded, saying more vaccines will be delivered. But she stopped short of providing a timeline.
“We have sent significant resources in there to help them deal with that. We have provided 20 assigned provincial case managers that have gone up there. They’ve asked for 10 more, they’re going to do that,” Elliott said, adding she’s also spoken to federal health minister Patty Hajdu, who also happens to be the Liberal MP for Thunder Bay-Superior North.
“The federal government is doing what they can to provide some isolation housing, but we are doing the case and contact management,"
Elliott said 92 per cent of the cases detected are being contacted within 24 hours, while pointing out that case numbers, based on the provincial database, are going down. According to the Thunder Bay Public Health Unit’s daily numbers, there have been 562 cases confirmed in the first 11 days of March, including 45 more cases on Thursday.
While there were only 30 cases on Monday, there were 58 announced on Tuesday and 46 the past two days, giving the District of Thunder Bay 423 active cases. That’s down from an all-time high of 470 on Sunday.
The district remains in Grey-Lockdown and on Wednesday the Thunder Bay Public Health Unit announced a recommendation to keep schools closed to in-person learning for an additional two weeks. Students have been out of the classroom since March 1.
Elliott said her government is doing what it can to help bring Thunder Bay’s case count under control.
“We’ve also funded the hospital by another $2.7 million to create 30 new beds. But we are containing it. It’s coming under control. We know there are significant resources that are still needed to help them and they will be receiving additional vaccines as well,” Elliott said.
“Right now the important thing is to stop the spread of this and to make sure that we can keep this contained and get these numbers down even more and put them into another framework when they’re ready to do so.”
Horwath said local MPP Judith Monteith-Farrell has been ringing the alarm bells about what’s been happening in Thunder Bay, where COVID-positive prisoners were being released from local correctional facilities, leading the virus to start its spread in the city’s more vulnerable populations.
“All we got from this government was another failed slogan. This time it was called an emergency brake. It was never a plan. It was just a slogan for the government. We have a crisis in Thunder Bay. We have not had the kind of response necessary. We didn’t hear that vaccines are going to pharmacies yesterday,” Horwath said.
“We didn’t hear Thunder Bay on the list of hot spots that was announced. How can it be, that since February there’s been a crisis unfolding in Thunder Bay and weeks later the government has not sent the vaccines necessary to get the virus under control in Thunder Bay.”
Thunder Bay Mayor Bill Mauro says he expects to speak to Elliott on Friday about the vaccine and hot spot situation.
