No matter what disease is out there, Dr. Nicola Mercer says if you want to protect yourself from getting COVID, it starts with personal responsibility.
“COVID-19 is going to be with us for many years, potentially forever,” said Mercer, medical officer of Health for Wellington Dufferin Guelph Public Health in a COVID town hall hosted by the University of Guelph.
“If you are waiting for COVID to be over before you can resume some of those loved activities or interactions, I'm telling you that we're going to have to learn to have those interactions or have those events in our lives in a different way.”
Mercer encouraged education institutions to continue in-person as disrupting them has serious and significant impacts. She said disengaged students, declined academic achievement, social isolation and deterioration in mental health are already evident in youth.
“We're getting very worried in public health in particular about the effects of these some of these things, the academic achievement things, These may be permanent, we may be impacting an entire generation of children and youth If we don't begin to go back to school and go back to educating our young adults and our young people.
“We have some very significant impacts that are cumulative and are not necessarily going to be easily corrected.”
Mercer said fewer long-term care outbreaks with the Omicron variant and results from Ottawa’s wastewater monitoring program indicate that we passed the Omicron plateau.
“I don't think that we're going to go down as fast as we came up, but it does look like we have plateaued,” said Mercer.
U of G’s president Charlotte Yates said the university decided to re-open school for in-person learning on Monday because it is trying to focus on a balance between health and safety.
“And that includes physical, emotional, mental health of many on our campus, and safety with the academic and research continuity at a time when we are figuring out how to manage the pandemic as it changes as Dr. Mercer advises COVID is not going away,” said Yates during the town hall. “And we need to find ways to continue to operate, to educate, to do our research, under new conditions.”
Mercer said there’s no reason for anyone not to be able to access a booster shot right now. “Almost every pharmacy has the vaccine and is looking for people to vaccinate. If we have a clinic and we have Stone Road Mall open up every single day, we still have Linamar running our own offices on Chancellors Way,” said Mercer.
She encouraged people to stay home if they feel sick. “This is the new normal. This is where we are going as a society and it's going to impact workplaces and it's going to impact our academic and educational institutions,” said Mercer.
She said just like recovering naturally from a cold doesn’t guarantee lifelong immunity to the cold, COVID works in the same way and so the booster shot will offer protection against the illness even if one recovered from COVID naturally.
