Niagara's Acting Medical Officer of Health is concerned the region could be in for a difficult start to the school year as COVID-19 cases are increasing.
Dr. Mustafa Hirji says Niagara may soon start to see the impact of the Delta variant on our hospital system.
"We've already seen a couple of weeks ago Niagara Health had nobody in the hospital with COVID-19. That's back up to, at least as of Friday, 5 people I believe. It's starting to creep up a little bit, and I think that you're going to see that accelerate in the next couple of weeks."
He doesn't believe there will be a nice, easy return to normal for students heading back to in-person learning as cases increase.
"We're not getting the kind of 'honeymoon' that we had last year where September and October cases were relatively low, which meant cases in schools were relatively low. I think we're going to start off with a much more difficult environment unfortunately, and there's going to be many more cases entering schools and many more classes having to be isolated."
He encourages all eligible students to become vaccinated as soon as possible. Niagara Region Public Health has teamed up with local school boards to offer pop-up vaccine clinics at some schools.