COVID-19: Buses mobilized to transport double-booked patients at city vaccine sites; Ottawa reports 64 new cases

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Shuttle buses were pressed into use at two Ottawa vaccination sites Tuesday to transport patients who had been double booked by the province for COVID-19 vaccinations.

In a memo to council, Anthony Di Monte, head of emergency services for the city, noted that data entry problems with the provincial booking system created double bookings at the Eva James Memorial Community Centre and the Ruddy Family YMCA-YWACA for March 23-25.

The city does not have access to the “back end of the provincial system” so the glitches were not realized until the bookings were already made.

Temporary clinics were set up at the François City Recreation Centre in Orleans and the service expanded at the Nepean Sportsplex.

However, many residents showed up at the original vaccination sites, unaware that the location had changed.

The city deployed shuttle buses to transport the patients to the new sites.

“Residents are not required to use the shuttle but still need to to go to the Ewa James Memorial Community Centre first,” Di Monte said in the memo.

“Staff recognize the situation is not ideal for our seniors,” Di Montre writes. “Daily discussions are ongoing to identify and address any issues as quickly as possible.”

“If you have not received a phone call or email to reschedule your appointment, please proceed to your appointment as planned.”

“The city is aware of ongoing provincewide issues with the … booking system and is providing feedback from residents to the province as they work to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.”

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Latest COVID-19 news in Ottawa

Ottawa Public Health is reporting one new death and 64 new cases Tuesday.

There have now been 16,252 confirmed cases in the city and of those, 15,040 are considered resolved. There have been 457 deaths.

There are 755 active cases and 25 patients in hospital, with four of those in ICU.

Ottawa remains firmly in the Red (Control) zone of the provincial framework, with a weekly average 55 cases per 100,000 population, and an average 3.9 per cent test positivity rate over the last seven days.

Updated vaccination numbers were not immediately available, and as of the latest update, Ottawa had administered 92,293 of the 97,170 total doses it has received.

There are 21 confirmed cases of B.1.1.7 (UK) variant in Ottawa and two known cases of B.1.351 (S. Africa), according to provincial figures.

There were two new outbreaks reported by Ottawa Public Health. The University of Ottawa Heart Institute reported three patients and two staff had contracted the virus, while one more school was added to the childcare and schools category. There are 25 ongoing outbreaks in the health care category and 12 in the childcare and schools category.

Two more community outbreaks were also reported, for a total of five ongoing outbreaks.

Daily case counts continue to rise in Ottawa-area regions, with 15 new cases in the Eastern Ontario region, which includes Cornwall and Alexandria, one day after 39 new cases were confirmed.

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Dr. Paul Roumeliotis, medical officer of health for the region, said the rising numbers mean the region will likely be moved to the province’s red zone.

“Our rolling average of (daily COVID-19 cases) is now in the (Red-control zone),” Roumeliotis said in a briefing, after confirming 71 new cases added for the Eastern Ontario Health Unit over the weekend. “Obviously we’ll be put in the Red zone if this is a situation that continues (this week).”

In fact, the doctor said he might have to get proactive about going to Red-control, saying he’ll possibly contact the ministry in the coming days.

“We might have to do (move out of Orange) earlier than next week,” he said.

There are 227 active cases across the region; of the latest cases, 24 are in Cornwall and Roumeliotis indicated many of those are related to institutional outbreaks. There are 30 new cases across SDG, and a higher percentage of those are related to close contact with other cases. And, 17 of the new cases are in Prescott-Russell.

Another 13 cases were confirmed in Leeds, Grenville and Lanark, which joined Ottawa as a designated Red (Control) zone in the provincial framework on Monday. Three new cases were identified in Hastings and there was a net subtraction of one case in Renfrew County, according to provincial numbers.

Latest COVID-19 news in Canada

Health Canada is devising a warning about a rare possible side-effect of blood clots from the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine but is still certain the inoculation is safe and effective against COVID-19.

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The department’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Supriya Sharma, said Tuesday the plan for a warning comes on the heels of a similar move in Europe last week but doesn’t change Health Canada’s analysis that the vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks.

“We were observers at that European Medicines Agency subcommittee meeting, we’ve looked at the data as well,” she said. “And so we’re in the process of making similar changes to the information for Canadians.”

The European Medicines Agency last week amended its authorization of the vaccine to say there is no overall increase in the risk of blood clots after getting the vaccine but added a warning that a small number of patients had developed rare blood clots in the brain after getting it.

At the time the EMA couldn’t say if the clots were related to the vaccine. German and Norwegian scientists have since said in a very small number of patients the vaccine is causing an extreme immune response that is leading to the clots. It is a treatable condition, they said.

The EMA reported 18 cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, out of about 20 million people who received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe, the United Kingdom, and India, and seven cases of another type of clotting disorder related to very low platelet counts.

Meanwhile, Dr. Theresa Tam said Tuesday there are signs of “better days ahead,” but also “cause for continued caution” with rising infection rates, rising prevalence of variants of concern and “shifting severity trends” across the country.

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There have been more than 938,000 cases and 22,700 deaths in Canada since the beginning of the pandemic, with a further 15 per cent increase in daily cases over the past week, Canada’s chief public health officer said.

There is an average 3,600 new daily cases in Canada, and the increased infection rates are having an impact on severe outcomes, Tam said.

Hospitalization rates and deaths that were once “lagging” indicators in Canada have now levelled off or increased over the past week, Tam said.

There are an average 31 deaths each day in Canada, and there are now more than 2,100 patients in Canadian hospitals, with about 580 in critical care.

Nearly 5,500 variants of concern ave been identified across Canada, with the B.1.1.7 (UK) variant accounting for 90 per cent of those.

“As the number of new variant cases continues to increase, they account for a greater proportion of COVID-19 cases across Canada,” Tam said.

“We’re all tired of the tricks and turns of this virus, but we have progressed and met each challenge along the way,” Tam said.

The accelerated vaccine deliveries offer “much cause of optimism for better days ahead,” Tam said, as the spring weather arrives across much of the country.

Latest COVID-19 news in Ontario

Ontario is reporting 1,546 new laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases and nine related deaths Tuesday as the province has now surpassed 300,000 people fully immunized from the virus.

Another 50,659 Ontarians were vaccinated in the past 24 hours, with the province having now administered 1,603,699 total doses.

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According to the latest update, 301,043 people are now fully immunized with both vaccine doses.

Ontario’s hospitalization rate is rising sharply with 868 patients currently in hospital (another 55 patients in the last 24 hours), and 324 people in intensive care.

That’s an increase of 26 patients in critical care over the past 24 hours, with 193 of those patients requiring a ventilator.

Ontario’s test positivity rate is also rising sharply, with 32,556 tests conducted over the past 24 hours with a 5.7 per cent positivity rate.

That rate has been over five per cent for the last several days, the first time it has exceeded that level since Feb. 1.

The majority of Ontario’s cases — including those involving highly-contagious variants of concern — continue to be identified in the Greater Toronto Area, where Premier Doug Ford has said the province will focus its pharmacy-based vaccination efforts.

There were 465 new cases reported in Toronto Tuesday, with 329 in Peel and 161 in York region.

There were another 19 cases of B.1.1.7 (UK) variant confirmed in the past 24 hours, with 1,359 known cases of that strain now in Ontario.

There was a net subtraction of one case of B.1.351 (S. Africa), and there are now 47 known cases of that strain in the province, and 37 known cases of P.1 (Brazil), including one new case added to the database Tuesday.

Ontario’s family doctors say they want to be more involved in the province’s COVID-19 vaccination effort.

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The Ontario College of Family Physicians says a recent survey found 60 per cent of vaccine-hesitant respondents were more likely to get immunized if a family doctor endorsed and administered their shot.

Dr. Liz Muggah, president of the group, said it’s in the public interest to have family doctors more involved in giving out the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Moderna shots, which have less stringent storage requirements.

Some family physicians in the Greater Toronto Area and a few other regions are offering Oxford-AstraZeneca shots to patients aged 60 and older as part of a pilot project.

There have also been calls for family doctors to be more involved in helping vaccinate seniors who can’t access mass immunization sites.

Health Minister Christine Elliott says more vaccine supply will be sent to primary care physicians in the future, though she did not provide specifics.

Last COVID-19 news in Quebec, Outaouais

Quebec Premier François Legault joined Outaouais health officials Tuesday to ask residents in two regions to reduce their contacts after a recent rise in cases.

Legault says Outaouais residents and people in Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean need to be careful if they want their regions to remain orange zones.

The premier says the province is stable but the next few weeks will be crucial in the fight against a third wave of COVID-19 driven by a rise in variants.

The Centre intégré de santé et de services sociaux de l’Outaouais (CISSSO) said in a message late Monday the region risked being moved into Quebec’s more restrictive Red Zone, if residents don’t change their habits. The Outaouais is now in the less-restrictive Orange category.

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“The number of daily cases is increasing significantly in the region due to community transmission,” the agency said in a news release Monday.

The number of daily cases has been increasing for the past four weeks, with an average of 37 cases per day over the last seven days. There were more than 150 new confirmed cases from Friday through Sunday.

There are 286 active cases of COVID-19 in the region.

“Despite the fact that we are on the orange level and that this level allows certain activities, we must limit our non-essential social contacts as much as possible,” CISSSO cautioned.

There were 50 new cases of COVID-19 in the Outaouais Tuesday, as health officials urged residents to bear down on COVID-19 safety measures because the area is losing “room to manoeuvre” in the face of fast-rising case counts.

There have been 6,957 cases in the region since the pandemic began.

There was one new death reported, bring the total to 171.

Across the province, the number of new cases fell to 656 on Tuesday, but hospitalizations and the number of variants of concerns continued to rise.

There are now 704 confirmed variant cases, up from 542 Monday, the province reported. The number of presumed cases jumped by 50 to reach 3,423.

Four new deaths were reported, one over the last 24 hours.

Hospitalizations rose by six, to 519, with 113 people in ICU.

The government reported 26,040 additional vaccine doses were administered, bringing the total to 993,102. The province has received 1,296,055 doses of vaccine.

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Testing and vaccines

Where to get tested for COVID-19 in Ottawa:ottawapublichealth.ca/en/shared-content/assessment-centres

Brewer Ottawa Hospital/CHEO Assessment Centre: Monday to Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and Friday to Sunday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
COVID-19 Drive-thru assessment centre at National Arts Centre: Open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The Moodie Care and Testing Centre: Open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
The Heron Care and Testing Centre: Open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Ray Friel Care and Testing Centre: Open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Ottawa COVID-19 testing data: For more info

Ontario vaccination portal:covid-19.ontario.ca/book-vaccine

If you cannot reach the centre online or need assistance, try the Call centre: 1-888-999-6488. The Vaccine Information Line is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and is capable of providing assistance in 300 languages.

Vaccine eligibility in Ottawa:secureforms.ottawapublichealth.ca/vaccines/COVID-19-Vaccine-Screening-Tool

-With files from Postmedia and The Canadian Press