The Creemore
ECHO
Friday, April 17, 2020 Vol. 20 No. 16
www.creemore.com
News and views in and around Creemore
INSIDE THE ECHO
No Walk in the Park Forests, trails closed PAGE 7
Library Listing
Building goes on the market PAGE 8
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Pandemic brings nurse, son home
Some hope that curve is levelling
by Trina Berlo With the pandemic spreading over North America, a Canadian nurse just wanted to be home. “It’s a weird situation. It’s a weird time,” said Carolyn Davies Lightell, who is in her second week of quarantine at her family’s farm near Glen Huron. It is weird, but she is thankful to be in a place where she has been supported by a community of strangers. As a nurse, who has been living and working in Las Vegas for the past 11 years, Davies Lightell said the health care system in the United States is very different. She has a background in emergency medicine but has been working in the field of workers’ compensation. Once the pandemic hit, and workplace shutdowns started, no workers were getting injured so her employer started laying people off. Her family had been urging her to move back to Canada since her divorce last year, but her final decision to move was spurred by the pandemic. “I had this incredible homesickness and I just wanted to come back,” she said. After that, she and son Elijah packed up their cats, and necessities for the trip and hit the road. They drove north and crossed at Sweet Water into Alberta, in order to avoid the hot spots in the Midwest. “It was a lot safer for me to travel (See “Community” on page 3)
by Trina Berlo The actions of the community are helping to slow the spread of COVID-19, but Simcoe Muskoka’s Medical Officer of Health says we must keep it up to hold back potential “flood waters.” “It’s starting to look hopeful. It’s starting to look like it’s levelling out. By no means do I want any of us to be complacent,” said Dr. Charles Gardner during a media briefing Wednesday. “If it’s levelling out it’s because of the good work we’re all doing in physical distancing, in flattening the curve together in breaking the chain of transmission. I want this to be encouraging to people. We have some positive evidence here of an effect of everything that everybody is doing together.” As of presstime, the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit has 174 confirmed cases of COVID-19 including 77 recovered, 10 hospitalizations and 12 deaths. Gardner said he supports an increase in testing and sees evidence that assessment centres, including Barrie and Collingwood, are doing more. At this time there is a lot of attention on the province’s long-term care facilities. Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam says that nearly half of the country’s deaths from COVID-19 are related to outbreaks at seniors’ homes. Twenty-four of Simcoe-Muskoka’s cases are associated with an outbreak at a long-term care facility in Bradford West Gwillimbury. Gardner said there are no other COVID outbreaks of long-term care facilities with positive tests in Simcoe Muskoka. “While we do have a number of other facilities in Simcoe Muskoka that have outbreaks, testing to date has not been positive for COVID-19,” he said. “We are expanding our testing at all of those facilities in keeping with provincial direction. Now we test, not only those who are symptomatic, but any contacts they’ve had among staff or residents, whether or not they have symptoms.”
Contributed photo
Carolyn Davies Lightell and her son Elijah Lightell, en route to Clearview, where they are coming up on the end of a mandatory 14-day quarantine after moving home to Canada from the United States.
Fire hall opens after COVID-19 scare by Trina Berlo Exercising caution, the Stayner fire hall was closed for nine days while the department waited on COVID-19 test results for one of its firefighters. The station re-opened Saturday after the firefighter was given the all-clear. “The firefighter had suspected contact with a COVID-19 patient. The firefighter revealed that to his crew and platoon and that then created a chain reaction in that all of the members of
the station would have been potentially in contact with this firefighter and so the fire chief, out of an abundance of caution, closed the fire hall and asked all the firefighters to go home and selfisolate,” said Mayor Doug Measures. The individual was tested and was given the all-clear, resulting in the reopening of the station. Measures said it is a significant act to close a fire hall but Clearview was well-served by its other four stations.
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“We are very fortunate having firefighters that train across the entire community,” said Measures, adding there were no major events during that time. Note, the fire department is offering youth drive-by birthday salutes. E-mail creemoreffa@gmail.com or message the Creemore Firefighters Association on Twitter @creemore_ffa. For contact information for the other fire stations in Clearview, visit @CFES_FireChief.
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