Hospital workers must be vaccinated

St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital, in a statement issued Thursday, Aug. 26, announced that given the rising number of COVID-19 cases requiring hospitalization both locally and across Ontario, current staff and physicians must be fully vaccinated against the virus or submit to daily testing before each work shift.

Any new staff, physicians or contractors hired by the hospital as well as students and volunteers will have to be fully vaccinated.

That means they’ve received at least two doses of vaccine 14 days prior to starting at the hospital.

“Most of our staff and physicians (89.3 percent) have already received two doses,” the hospital said.

STEGH stated that experts had concluded that Ontario was now in the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, fuelled by the highly contagious Delta variant.

“This wave is being referred to as the wave of the unvaccinated.”

STEGH Vice-President of Corporate Services Tonya Sheldon said, “The highly contagious SARS-COV-2 Delta variant accounts for most of Ontario’s current cases. This variant is significantly more transmissible than anything we’ve experienced since the pandemic began.

“Our priority at STEGH is to protect our patients and our teams. Other variants are likely to emerge, particularly in the partially or unvaccinated population.

“The move toward a mandatory vaccination policy will help us to maintain clinical care capacity in the hospital and continue to reintroduce services that were paused during previous waves of the pandemic.”