Memorial Park COVID-19 outbreak - Sudbury's longest running - is declared over

A COVID-19 outbreak that has spanned several months in Sudbury is now over.

Public Health Sudbury and Districts first declared the outbreak among people living in Memorial Park on Sept. 27, 2021. It was declared over on Jan. 1, 2022.

Public health nurse Ginette Cyr said that day marked two weeks of no new cases.

She said it was a difficult outbreak to manage because people without homes move around more. She said they're also harder to find to communicate with, and find isolation especially challenging.

"It's not as easy as if you have a long-term care facility, let's say, or you have infection prevention control staff just dedicated to dealing with outbreaks and cleaning," she said. 

"We don't have that availability when we're dealing with people with homelessness."

Cyr said isolation is hard on everyone, but more so for the vulnerable population.

"If you're used to walking 10 kilometres every day and then all of a sudden you have to stop," she said.

"All of that for isolating for 10 days, that's hard on anyone regardless of where you're living or what your situation is."

Cyr said with many people moving indoors to warming centres and shelters due to cold weather, there is screening, sanitizing and other protective measures to prevent any more outbreaks.

The City of Greater Sudbury had rooms reserved at a motel for people from the park to isolate in. 

Public health states that an outbreak may be declared in a community setting if "there are two or more cases of COVID-19 in a 14-day period that have some link with each other."