Almost 60 City employees infected with COVID-19

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on January 8, 2022.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

City administration has plans in place to deal with the fifth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
City council, acting as the Lethbridge Emergency Advisory Committee on Friday, heard presentations from Emergency Preparedness manager Luke Palmer and Director of Community Services Mike Fox before going into a special closed meeting.
Fox told council that 59 City employees, the majority of them in transit and the police, have COVID-19. He said about 90 per cent of City employees are vaccinated and 10 per cent aren’t or haven’t disclosed their status.
A lot of the latter are following the rapid test protocol, he said, that was put in place by City policy.
“As a City we’ve had a cross departmental team relating to our contingency plans and monitoring COVID in the organization. And we’ve named it the COVID-19 response team. There are people from all across the organization involved in it so we get all different perspectives,” Fox said.
After the meeting Fox said transit, EMS, fire and police – the front line people dealing with the public every day – are the departments usually hit the hardest by COVID-19.
“It’s easier to transmit when you’re actually dealing with people. When you have staff working at home or different places like that, there’s not as much chance. And they also have the largest workforce,” Fox said.
Before a driver shortage forces changes to transit routes, he said “we would start notifying the public that ‘hey in this area, cases are high and these are some of the actions we are taking to make sure that we can still serve the community’.”
Fox added the transit manager has a comprehensive plan in place to scale down or scale up operations as needed.
“We monitor open cases in the city on a daily basis. Today we are sitting at 59 cases of open cases and we monitor it by department continuously every day,” Fox told council.
Three areas in the City are mandatory for vaccination including the Enmax Centre, the airport and Fire/EMS. Rapid testing is not an option in those areas, Fox said.
Palmer said the “Omicron variant continues to spread quite rapidly. The province has been gradually sharing the data that’s coming out there” adding “the one thing that we currently don’t have is confirmed modelling for the long-term impacts of what this wave will look like so for the most part, the information we do have is on the assumption of what Alberta Health is forecasting.
“The predominant model that’s coming out, and it’s being backed by other researchers as we’re all experiencing this globally, is a rapid spike followed by a rapid decrease.”
Palmer added a caveat to that, saying “knowing that COVID is ever-changing we can’t assume that will be the default scenario but we are working around that” to see what another wave would look like in terms of impacting city services.
He said the number of hospitalizations in ICU in the last couple weeks have remained quite steady “and being managed by Alberta Health at a fairly good rate at this point.”
More than 80 per cent of city residents are vaccinated but “vaccine is not a silver bullet approach; it is not going to eliminate transmission. It’s basically looking to decrease the severe outcome” of COVID-19, Palmer told council.
He said the City is waiting to hear about the dissemination of the 10 million rapid test kits the province has purchased, adding they’ve been tough to come by here.
After the meeting, Palmer said “the point of today’s update (is) really getting council together for the first time as the emergency advisory committee.
“It’s great to connect with council ultimately to get a feel for how they can support us but ultimately to get information out to the community so the residents are aware of what’s going on in tandem with what Alberta Health is providing the community, as well.”

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