A new report from Southwestern Public Health takes a look at how the early stages of the pandemic affected the health and wellbeing of people living in Oxford, Elgin and St. Thomas.
SWPH - Southwestern Public Health has released a new report, going into detail about how the pandemic affected the overall health and livelihood of people living in Oxford, Elgin and St. Thomas.
Carolyn Richards, the Program Manager for Foundational Standards, says officials looked at data from 2020 and compared it to pre-pandemic data in order to create the report titled The Indirect Health Impacts of COVID-19.
“In this report we’ve taken a close look at mental health, substance use, violence, and the economy pre-pandemic, and during the pandemic. The more we understand these indicators, the better we can respond to them now and avoid indirect health impacts in future pandemic responses.”
According to the report, there was an increase of business bankruptcies in the first year of the pandemic. The average unemployment rate in the region was also 9 percent in 2020, but it reached anywhere between 12 percent to 17 percent from April to June.
The Health Unit says fewer people visited local emergency rooms during the early stages of the pandemic, but they did see an increase in the number people between the ages of 25 and 65 going to emergency rooms for opioid poisoning.
The St. Thomas Police Service responded to 2,200 mental health and substance abuse related calls in 2020. This is almost double the 1,300 calls were reported back in 2019.
Here in Oxford County, the Southwestern Public Health saw an increase in the number of sharps submitted through the local needle syringe program.
You can read the full report online here.
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