Hospital CEO hopeful better days ahead

By Mark Ribble

LEAMINGTON — Erie Shores HealthCare CEO Kristin Kennedy, is hopeful that better days are ahead in the new year.

But, she cautions, right now we are in for a few very stressful weeks.

Kennedy spoke to The Sun on Friday, moments after the province announced that Windsor-Essex was moving into Grey: Lockdown of the COVID framework.

She was among a group of area CEOs that were lobbying the government to take the area into grey.

“We’ve been strongly advocating for this,” she said. “The hospitals need a break.”

She said she expects that, if everyone follows health guidelines, the numbers will start to decline again after the new year. “Even if we get a week or two where numbers go down, that helps the hospitals immensely,” she said.

When asked if she was seeing a difference between the first wave and the second wave of COVID-19, Kennedy was quick to respond.

“Yes, they are significantly different,” she said. “In the first wave, we came to discover that the Agri-farm and Long Term Care sectors were primary targets of the virus.”

“The second wave is targeting the community — very randomly,” she added. “It’s also showing a larger scope of age — from 20 to 90.”

Erie Shores HealthCare CEO Kristin Kennedy.

And the co-morbidities and underlying health conditions that seemed to be present in most every victim in the spring, aren’t necessarily present in current patients.

Erie Shores HealthCare is currently under siege with COVID patients appearing on a daily basis and several local people have been moved to hospital in Windsor for further treatment. All is not lost, however, according to Kennedy.

She sits on the Vaccine Task Force and is hopeful that vaccines will begin to filter into this area within days.

“I think it will take at least six to nine months to get everyone vaccinated,” she said. “But once that happens, it should bring the numbers down considerably.”

Windsor-Essex, because of its current case status, will be a priority area, but vaccines will be issued to long term care residents and health workers first.

In the meantime, she expects the end of January will probably show us whether we did a good job over the holidays or not.

“Our plea to everyone is to keep your neighbours safe by sheltering in place,” she said. “I just hope people will adhere to this.”

If they do, she expects the numbers to gradually show some relief, which in turn takes pressure off the hospital ICUs and will allow the province to lift some restrictions.

If we don’t adhere, she expects the numbers will keep rising and we won’t see relief until much later in the spring.

In a nutshell, it’s up to us.

“If we can hang in there for the next four to six weeks, we may see some light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.