Mississauga plans to maintain essential services even if 40 per cent of workforce is out sick

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, right, and Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie tour a mass COVID-19 vaccination clinic for Peel Region during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mississauga, Ont., on Monday, March 1, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie says that the city has a plan in place that will allow it to maintain essential and critical services even with up to 40 per cent of its workforce calling in sick.

Crombie told reporters on Friday morning that Mississauga remains in a “very stable position” despite an uptick in unplanned absences amid a worsening fourth wave of the pandemic.

But she said that there are plans in place to “redeploy staff from non-essential roles into essential roles if needed,” which could result in some services being scaled back or halted.

“We have a business continuity plan that allows us to prioritize and maintain essential and critical services, even if staff shortages were to get as high as 40 per cent,” she said. “While we hope we never get to that point, we are ready to scale up or scale down operations across the organization based on current available staff.”

Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Kieran Moore has said that employers across all sectors should be prepared for absentee rates between 20 and 30 per cent, as the Omicron continues to trigger an exponential increase in COVID-19 cases over the coming weeks.

During Friday’s briefing, Crombie said that there have already been some impacts on transit service due to unplanned absences with Miway being forced to cancel service on two routes - 101/101A Dundas Express and 107 Malton Express – and reduce service on another.

However, she said that the city’s emergency services have been able to continue their operations mostly unaffected through halting some training and redeploying some resources.

“I want to assure residents that all things considered our city and our frontline emergency services are ready and available to respond when you need them,” she said. “That being said they need our help to reduce non-emergency pressure on the system. So we ask that you only call 911 if you are experiencing an urgent and I mean urgent medical or fire emergency.”

HOSPITALS BEING STRAINED BY INCREASED ABSENCES

Crombie did not provide any specific data regarding unplanned absences, however in Toronto officials have said that approximately 13 per cent of workers are now calling in sick on a regular basis.

That is compared to an unplanned absence rate of about 3.4 per cent pre-pandemic.

The increase in absences due to positive COVID-19 cases or exposures is having a particularly pronounced impact on hospitals, which are also dealing with higher patient volumes.

Karli Farrow, who is the president and CEO of Trillium Health Partners, said during Friday’s briefing that about 350 workers were off due to COVID-19 as of yesterday and “that number continues to increase.”

She said that in order to address the staffing shortages Trillium has already redeployed about 150 staff “from other areas of the hospital, including places like surgery” and is also working with regional partners to help ease some of the pressure it is facing.

Meanwhile, Peel Region’s Medical Officer of Health Dr. Lawrence Loh says that the rapid spread of COVID-19 within the community means that we will increasingly find ourselves in a “a transition period” where the focus will shift to “preventing severity rather than infection itself.”

For that reason, he said that things like testing will become less important in the general community.

In fact, public health officials are now urging anyone with symptoms to assume they have contracted COVID-19 and to isolate for at least five days.

“While rapid tests certainly are important especially in those high risk settings more broadly in the community their utility is rapidly diminishing,” Loh said. “When you have a forest that is entirely on fire it is less important to try to figure out which trees are on fire and more important to try to protect those higher risk settings, those higher risk settlements that might be within that area.”