Planning a big holiday party? 'Forget it' says Dr. Peter Juni as COVID-19 spikes in Thunder Bay

The Thunder Bay district has seen COVID-19 cases rise over the last few weeks, and now there are more than 100 active cases there for the first time since April.

Health officials reported 11 new cases on Tuesday, with 135 cases currently active. There have been 126 cases announced in the first seven days of December alone.

This weekend, officials confirmed four cases of the omicron variant in Thunder Bay and say they expect to confirm four more cases in the next few days. 

Dr. Peter Juni, the scientific director of Ontario's COVID-19 science advisory table, joined CBC Thunder Bay's Superior Morning on Tuesday to discuss the situation, especially as the holiday season quickly approaches.

• Listen to Dr. Peter Juni's interview on Superior Morning

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What was your reaction to omicron being found in the Thunder Bay area? 

Of course it's expected, so it's clear this thing pops up everywhere worldwide. Why would it not sooner or later in the Thunder Bay district?

The challenge is that Thunder Bay has been on the wrong trajectory now for quite some time, and we just see cases go up in general in Thunder Bay as well. So right now, in your public health unit, you're just above off 100 cases per one million per day on average.

That's typically a situation where you start to see public health units struggle with contact tracing, testing and management. Exactly at that moment, Omicron is coming or is identified, you probably want to do something to change the trajectory and to get things under control and make sure that the contact tracing system is not overwhelmed.

Q: What recommendations would you make for the Thunder Bay area?

I'm not entitled to make any recommendations to the local medical officer of health. But if I were them, well, I would use Windsor, Ont. as a model. This is always difficult to to to to make this first step. Even so, you know, it starts to be obvious something needs to happen.

Everywhere where you can't mask indoors, that's restaurants and bars, you choose to decrease capacity limits. That's really important. Remember, omicron also spreads relatively easily among the vaccinated. So even if you have vaccine certificates, you need to do something more so that this that this relationship between crowding and ventilation is in favour of ventilation.

Private gatherings, restrict visits, perhaps to 10 people per gathering. We don't want those super spreaders of omicron, you know, with 30, 40, 50 people somewhere in that in a situation like that privately.

Q: What about the holidays?

If you plan large gatherings during the Christmas holidays or December holidays, forget it, do small. You know you can meet with your extended family in summer. Not this Christmas. Not with omicron around.

That's the most important part. Just use your common sense. OK, we know how to deal with this. We have a lot of tools in our toolbox also against omicron. It's exactly the same as before. We just need to use them. And, you know, common sense is, of course, part of that. If you know exactly how you behave when things were still under control, do that or do it even a bit better. We can still have a lot of liberties, but we just need to be a bit reasonable and large gatherings is not the thing to do right now.

Q: Do you expect there to be restrictions across Ontario?

Right now, provincial wide is not indicated. Why? Because the variation is so big between [Thunder Bay] that starts to struggle and places like right now, the [Greater Toronto Area].

It's probably a combination of various factors, so we don't need to impose the same restrictions here yet.

In the past, we always had this light switch on and off. We needed to close businesses or open them again. That's not happening anymore. It's just about the restrictions placed already — capacity limits, masking, etc.