COVID-19 is, in many regards, an equal opportunity virus that infects without prejudice, not all of Ottawa’s neighbourhoods are identical when it comes to the illness’s spread and severity.
Ottawans report long waits to score appointments as province opens booking site to adults in designated hot spots Some reported hours-long waits and frustrating crashes as tens of thousands of people across Ontario likely even more spent the morning hours securing their spots.
Author of the article: Marco Vigliotti, Blair Crawford
Publishing date: May 03, 2021 • May 3, 2021 • 5 minute read • Asif Hameed poses for a photo outside his home in Ottawa Monday. Asif is a Carleton PhD student who managed to book his vaccine for Friday after a 2.5 hour wait online. There were 117,000 people ahead of him. Photo by Tony Caldwell /Postmedia
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We are seeing a new symptom in the pandemic generalized vaccine envy.
Ottawa Public Health, guided by the province, has chosen the first number of neighbourhoods where select groups of residents are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine in March months ahead of the general population.
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It is, relatively, a small demographic portion: those born before or in 1941 (80 or older this year) or any adult who receives “chronic” home care.
To define a neighbourhood, of course, one must put borders around it, meaning 80-year-old-plus residents on one side of, say, Alta Vista Drive, are eligible for the vaccine now but their pals across the street are not. (This is, in fact, exactly the case for a portion of the street.)
Posted: Dec 14, 2020 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: December 14, 2020
Samira Babour, 11, returns home after getting a COVID-19 test. I m so scared. I don t want to get my family sick. (Matthew Kupfer/CBC)
Families in Ottawa s Banff-Ledbury community are living closer to COVID-19 than those in other neighbourhoods, with fewer degrees of separation between known cases in a part of the city that s been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
According to the the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study (ONS), an interdisciplinary population health study administered by the University of Ottawa that utilizes data from Ottawa Public Health (OPH), the Ledbury-Heron Gate-Ridgemont area had the city s highest rate of confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Nov. 20.