The sixth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Thunder Bay District Health Unit (TBDHU) may not have been as bad as predicted.

Looking at the data now available, Medical Officer of Health Dr. Janet DeMille told Acadia News Monday that the number of cases isn’t escalating.

“Last week I thought we were stabilizing in terms of the case count, and my hope is that we’ll see a more convincing downward trend this week or next,” DeMille noted. “This wave of Omicron (BA.2) has been much less impactful than the previous wave in January (BA.1). I don’t have any indication that are indicators are as high as they were previously, which is a good sign.”

DeMille stressed that COVID-19 is still around and that not everybody is getting a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) COVID-19 test done, which does make data collecting challenging.

Regardless of the variant, the protection measures are the same:

Stay home if you are sick
Using rapid antigen tests
Masking when indoors
Improving ventilation and using higher grade filters

When discussing hospitals, DeMille mentioned, “There is still a lot of pressure on them, not only the ones in Thunder Bay but ones in the District as well. I also saw that some of the outbreaks that we were following up on, they were overall less worrisome than what we have dealt with in previous waves.”

As of Tuesday, five of the 32 patients at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC) admitted for COVID-19 require Intensive Care.