Niagara doing well on COVID-19 testing: Hirji

Medical officer of health urges people with mild symptoms to get tested

Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s insistence that public health units pick up their socks and increase COVID-19 testing are “unfortunate,” says Niagara’s acting medical officer of health, because the province is doing better on testing than many people realize.

“I think the premier may have been responding to that perception (that there isn’t enough testing in Ontario),” said Dr. Mustafa Hirji on Wednesday.

“We are doing better than many other countries.”

On Tuesday Ford said some public health units were not doing enough testing — a vital component to any attempt to reopen the Ontario’s shuttered economy. While Ford admonished public health agencies, he declined to say which ones he believed were not pulling their weight.

Hirji said he does not believe Niagara is one of the regions Ford was talking about.

“There is a lot of excess testing capacity in Niagara right now,” said Hirji. “That is why we are continuing to ask anyone who has even a mild symptom to contact us to get tested.”

He said Niagara has more capacity to conduct tests than there are people identified as needing a test.

The exact number of COVID-19 tests conducted in Niagara is not known, in part because public health is not reporting the data. Hirji has said Ontario’s Ministry of Health has asked public health units not to report testing data. He also said the testing regime in Niagara is somewhat decentralized, with clinics and family doctors doing some testing as well.

While positive test results must be reported to public health, that a test was done is not. As a result, public health does not have complete testing data.

Niagara Health, however, does the bulk of local COVID-19 testing — processing between 200 to 400 people a day — and publishes its data daily.

As of Wednesday, 8,834 people have been tested by the hospital system, with 382, or 4.3 per cent, testing positive. Provincially, more than 376,000 tests have been done, with about five per cent of them being positive for COVID-19.

Hirji said it is logistically impossible to test all of Niagara’s 450,000 residents. And even if it were possible, he said it would not be the pandemic shield some people think it is.

“It can create a false sense of security. If someone tested negative they could think they are safe, when they are not,” he said, noting a test does not protect anyone from future infection.

Rather, he said, there needs to be enough testing capacity so that public health can monitor the spread of the virus in the community as the economy reopens. That testing will allow public health investigators to track down possible linked cases and pounce on outbreaks before they get worse.

Hirji said Niagara Health has the ability to ramp up testing further if necessary, and public health has expanded its case management team eightfold. The unit has also brought in medical students as volunteers to help with some of the less onerous aspects of case management, such as followup calls with people who have tested positive.

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases jumped by 11 in Niagara Wednesday, bringing the historical total to 540, with 142 of them still active.

Hirji said the cases were the result of local outbreaks but, unlike over the past two weeks, only a few were connected to ongoing COVID-19 outbreaks in three long-term-care homes. Most of Wednesday’s new cases were connected to outbreaks at Greater Niagara General Hospital and at two Community Living group homes in St. Catharines.