The city of Cornwall in Eastern Ontario is slowly recovering from an outbreak of COVID-19 that has forced the suspension of elective surgeries at its community hospital, where infected patients have been admitted. As the rest of the province is on its way back to normalcy, sixteen patients with the disease occupied beds at the facility last week, more than all Ottawa hospitals combined.
The low vaccination rate is the cause, according to experts. A situation which in turn prompted the Eastern Ontario Health Unit, in a press release, then 75 doctors from the Cornwall hospital, in a letter, to sound the alarm. Although the area’s immunization rate is above the provincial average of approximately 84%, in some areas of Cornwall only 73% of residents got their two doses.
Seven patients with COVID-19 were still receiving hospital care as of October 27, a decrease from recent weeks, but a “considerable” number for the facility, noted chief medical officer Dr.r Lorne Scharf.
” It is not easy [pour des résidents] to see how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, ”agrees the doctor trained at McGill University. “If you are in the health care system like me, you see that COVID cases are more serious in unvaccinated people, that they spend more time in the hospital. To see it all unfold like an accident in slow motion, it hurts, ”he says.
The Dr Scharf wanted to explain to the population, through the letter he co-signed, the repercussions of such a crisis in the hospital. Patients and their loved ones “wait in pain” as their surgeries have been postponed, the letter reads.
The only words underlined there leave no doubt about the key message: “Please do your part and get vaccinated”. Especially that “the vaccines used in Canada are among the most studied, the safest and the most effective vaccines in history”, one indicates.
Incomprehension
Marc Bisson struggles to explain why some Cornwallians refuse vaccination. The general manager of the Center de santé communautaire de l’Estrie, in Cornwall, settled in the city 30 years ago. Its health center, which took part in the vaccination efforts by calling in thousands of patients, “hit a Gallic village”.
Some die-hards knocked him off his chair. Vaccine resistance reached him into his friendly Sunday morning hockey league. Of the 23 or so players in the squad, seven or eight, he said, refused to be vaccinated. The group has therefore not yet been able to return to the ice this year. The people who refused the vaccine in Cornwall “weren’t that ‘vocal’,” he explains. “So you say to yourself, ‘where are they from?’ “.
Interlocutors also sent “extremely harsh” messages to the receptionists of the Center de santé communautaire de l’Estrie when they were contacted at the beginning of the fall, as part of the second awareness campaign. to the center’s vaccination. Syd Gardiner, city councilor in Cornwall and president of the Eastern Ontario Health Unit, concedes that the municipality has “anti-vaccines.” “There’s no point fighting with them,” he said.
Lack of information
Marc Bisson and the Dr Lorne Scharf believes, however, that the lack of family doctors in the municipality – a problem in Cornwall before the pandemic – could have a role to play in the low vaccination rate: some residents had no one to turn to for a question. their questions. Amid the crisis at the hospital, a man went straight to the emergency room to have a conversation with Dr Lorne Scharf on vaccination. Due to lack of funding, some medical clinics have stopped seeing patients in person during the pandemic, explains Marc Bisson.
On October 20, the Ontario government presented a plan to reopen that will take place over several months, but which is coming too quickly for Cornwall, according to Syd Gardiner. The vaccine proof requirements, for example, could be lifted as early as January 17. “If I am someone who does not want to be vaccinated, I have just won my war”, affirms Marc Bisson.