By Cecilia Nasmith/Today’s Northumberland
COVID-19 has evolved a lot over two years, and the Haliburton Kawartha Pine Ridge District Health Unit announces changes to how it reports COVID activity in Northumberland County, Haliburton County and the City of Kawartha Lakes.
A new reporting process for its on-line COVID-19 Dashboard aligns with recent changes to testing eligibility in Ontario and follows similar moves by other Ontario health unit.
On Dec. 31, the Ontario Ministry of Health updated eligibility for publicly funded PCR testing, limiting it to only high-risk individuals who live or work in the highest-risk settings, as well as to health-care workers whose duties bring them face-to-face with patients.
Medical Officer of Health Dr. Natalie Bocking pointed out that these lab-confirmed case numbers are no longer a true measure of virus activity in the broader community. The Dashboard updates provide a clearer and more current picture of virus activity in the region.
The revised Dashboard will continue to provide such key daily indicators as lab-confirmed cases, active cases, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, deaths, outbreaks in high-risk settings, tests completed and positivity rate. Cases will also continue to be reported by county, and a new table will be added to offer a year-to-date summary of lab-confirmed cases by lower-tier municipalities.
Another Dashboard addition will be the results of COVID-19 wastewater surveillance that is currently being done at municipal plants in Cobourg and Lindsay.
A major change will be the separation of numbers for these indicators being separated into current data (since Jan. 1, 2022) and historical data (Jan. 1, 2020, through Dec. 31, 2021). This aligns with the change in PCR testing and coincides with the timeline when the Omicron variant became the dominant circulating strain in the HKPR region.
The reporting of the seven-day COVID-19 incidence rate and cases by immunization status will be discontinued.
“Due to current limits on PCR testing eligibility, these statistics represent only a small segment of the population and, therefore, not a true picture of COVID-19 activity in the region,” Dr. Bocking explained.
With COVID-19 activity plateauing and easing toward a slow decline, the health unit is also reducing the frequency of Dashboard updates to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (holidays excluded) rather than each weekday.
“We know the COVID-19 Dashboard is well used to access current data,” Dr. Bocking said in the press release.
“While the changes and look of the Dashboard may require some adjustment, local residents and community partners can be assured that the health unit’s revamped COVID-19 Dashboard will continue to highlight key indicators that provide reliable and up-to-date tracking of COVID-19 activity in the area.”
