Reaction to the news of the impending lock down has been mixed across the province.
The health unit in Ottawa for instance doesn’t believe it’s fair the whole province gets locked down, as they have worked to reduce the spread of the virus.
However, Chatham-Kent’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. David Colby, is on board.
“It’s a good model to preserve the business activities in each jurisdiction to the maximum possible, but the difficulty is the numbers were not responding to that system Ontario-wide,” Dr. Colby says. “The other tension it created was the fact that adjacent jurisdictions could be in wildly different levels of restrictions.”
Dr. Colby also says he has noticed a big uptick in traffic locally and fears an influx of shoppers and visitors from hot spots, like Windsor or London could have a huge impact on our municipality, and not in a good way.
“I’ve lived in Chatham for most of my life. This week we saw traffic gridlock, and I’ve never seen that in Chatham before, and I’m really hoping the influx of people from adjacent jurisdictions in higher levels of restrictions with less opportunity to do their Christmas shopping and go out to dinner and so forth, does not have consequences.”
As it stands, Chatham-Kent currently has 40 active cases of COVID-19. The province-wide move to the Grey-Lockdown level of restrictions goes into effect at 12:01am on December 26th.