If exercising is on your New Year’s resolution list, know that it may be a little harder to do at city of Lawrence recreation facilities come Monday.

The city has announced it is temporarily suspending general exercise and free-play hours at its recreational facilities across the city as result of rising COVID cases in the community. The city hasn’t yet canceled other scheduled programs at the recreation centers, but it said programming would be limited and facility cleaning would be enhanced.

The city, however, will keep open its emergency winter shelter for the homeless in the Community Building in downtown Lawrence. However, the city said in a news release that it would add new precautions to those operations, although the news release did not detail those precautions.

As the Journal-World reported earlier in December, the city already had reinstated its mask policy that requires everyone older than 2 years of age to wear masks in city-owned buildings, and City Commission meetings shifted back to a hybrid format, with most of the meeting taking place on Zoom and other such platforms.

The city of Lawrence is enhancing its COVID protocols after the Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department increased the county’s threat level of COVID spread to code red, the highest of three threat levels.

County officials on Wednesday raised Douglas County’s threat level to code red after the number of active COVID cases spiked to more than 1,200. It wasn’t clear how much the omicron variant was affecting the increase in case numbers. Earlier in the week, the county was still only reporting one omicron case but had nearly 1,000 cases of the delta variant.

Thus far, though, the spike in COVID cases has not resulted in a spike in hospitalizations at LMH Health. The hospital was holding steady with about 15 COVID inpatients, which is about half the total the hospital routinely caring for during the height of the pandemic.

However, hospital leaders have said LMH is under strain as it faces workforce issues as some caregivers have to miss work due to illness or otherwise aren’t available to work.