GREY-BRUCE – The Grey Bruce Health Unit is working with Kelso Retirement Home in Owen Sound to address a COVID-19 outbreak involving one staff member and five residents.
All six had been fully vaccinated. The health unit said all have mild symptoms. Dr. Ian Arra, medical officer of health, said that given the transmissibility of the Delta variant, this could have been much worse. Had no one been vaccinated, it’s likely all 108 residents would have been infected by now. However, with 95 per cent of the residents vaccinated, the risk of the disease spreading is significantly reduced, as is the risk of severe disease and hospitalization.
The health unit will be contacting those outside the retirement home who are considered at risk. The best thing everyone else can do is get fully vaccinated, and encourage those who haven’t been fully vaccinated, to do so, to protect themselves and others. There are drop-in clinics every day in Grey-Bruce. Check the health unit website for locations and times.
The Grey-Bruce area has 50 active cases of COVID-19, plus 113 active high-risk contacts. Four people are hospitalized locally with COVID.
As of Aug. 8, the health unit reported 17 new cases in the previous 24 hours – seven in Blue Mountains, six in Owen Sound, two in Meaford, and one each in Hanover and Arran-Elderslie.
The retirement home in Owen Sound is the only facility currently with an outbreak.
In Ontario, the case count is creeping up, with 325 new cases as of Aug. 8. Only days earlier, the case count was under 200.
