Some scary-sounding words are being thrown around this week.
Pandemic. Outbreak. Emergency.
This week, the County of Simcoe and Tiny Township declared states of emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which will now afford those municipalities greater powers to deal with the situation.
“It gives us some technical and legislative benefits by announcing an emergency. For example, it gives the Warden additional authority to make decisions without necessarily having to go to council. Obviously, all this happens within the law,” said County of Simcoe Warden George Cornell.
A state of emergency declaration takes place under Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act, which promotes the public good by protecting the health, safety and welfare of people in times of emergencies.
The County of Simcoe has an emergency management plan, part of which includes a pandemic plan. A Community Control Group is formed as part of that plan through the County of Simcoe which includes experts county-wide including Dr. Charles Gardner from the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit.
“The group met yesterday and unanimously recommended declaring the emergency,” said Cornell. “This allows the organization to have that flexibility and additional authority to make those kinds of decisions in response to the emergency.”
The recommendation came from the group as they saw many residents were not aware of how serious the situation could become.
“There were some concerns that members of the community were not really taking this seriously,” he said. “By declaring an emergency, we would hope that heightens folks’ awareness and helps them understand that, no, this is a very, very serious situation. These are extraordinary circumstances. We need to take action now to help flatten that curve.”
The county can now also mandate certain building closures or change hours of operation.
“If we don’t take that action we risk having so many cases occurring at the same time that we’ll exceed the capacity of the health-care system,” he said.
The declaration also means the county can alter some of the regular processes they previously had in place to be able to make decisions and implement them faster.
“Another example is if we require additional volunteers to help us in this time of extraordinary circumstance, we can bring on those volunteers and through a declaration we can provide those volunteers with WSIB protection, and alter our normal process,” he said.
“We are at a very critical point here in the County of Simcoe... where we absolutely have a number of cases, but we have an opportunity to control the number of cases, and we do that by individual responsibility in terms of following the guidelines,” said Cornell. “We will get through this, but I firmly believe the best way to do that is to work together to support each other, and most importantly to follow the guidelines from the health professionals.”
