Days-long wait for COVID-19 tests concerning to health unit officials

A COVID-19 outbreak on the seventh floor of Windsor Regional Hospital's Ouellette Campus is having an impact on appointment wait times for coronavirus testing at the hospital's assessment centre.

While a small number of sameday appointments were still available Thursday morning, by roughly 2 p.m. the next open time slots were on Sunday — and there were only four of them left.

Having potentially COVID-positive people wait several days for a swab is “concerning,” said medical officer of health Dr. Wajid Ahmed on Thursday. It also gives the infected high-risk close contacts of those cases more time to unknowingly expose others and spread the disease further.

The lab turnaround for test results is roughly 24 hours, local health unit CEO Theresa Marentette said, much quicker than the days-long wait experienced during the first wave of infections when lab facilities were overwhelmed. However, the Windsor-essex County Health Unit's case managers and contact tracers have been stretched so thin lately that it sometimes takes them three days to make contact with positive cases, let alone reach out to their highrisk close contacts to tell them to self-isolate.

Getting test results to the WECHU “in a timely manner” is “critical,” Ahmed said.

At the moment, anyone tested for COVID-19 must self-isolate until they receive their results, which can currently be accessed online within a day or two. Anyone who tests positive must continue to self-isolate and will receive a call from the health unit with further guidance.

That call also includes an interview — which can last for an hour — where the person with COVID-19 gives a public health nurse a list of everyone they've come into contact with while infectious.

That information “allows us the ability to do contact tracing and contain the disease,” Ahmed said.

“If we're getting the information late, that means the contacts ... have spread it to other people and it just has a ripple effect throughout the system.”

Windsor Regional Hospital is monitoring the wait times for COVID-19 tests, according to hospital president and CEO David Musyj. It's also assessing the need to open its second assessment centre at Met Campus.

The big issue for the hospital now is staffing, Musyj said, with 90 employees on the seventh floor of the Ouellette Campus — where an outbreak was declared over the weekend — unable to work on any other units until the outbreak is rescinded. Those staff are caring for 30 patients on a 60-patient unit, he said.

“The other units have to pick up shifts on their own,” so it feels like 200 staff are impacted, Musyj said.

“We will monitor hour by hour and make decisions for next week

shortly. However, staffing caused by (the) outbreak is an issue.”

Earlier this week, the province announced it would send 28 additional workers to help the health unit tackle an increasingly heavy load of COVID-19 case management and contact tracing.

The difference made by those additional bodies should be evident in roughly a week or 10 days, Marentette said.

Although the health unit has been able to, on average, contact 70 to 97 per cent of close contacts within 24 hours and 80 to 98 per cent within 48 hours, reduced staff on weekends has recently posed a problem.

Last weekend alone, 89 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed, each needing to be notified by public health of their positive status, and each with a varied number of potentially infected close contacts who don't yet know to self-isolate. The large weekend case increases caused a backload that took days for a strained compliment of health unit staff to get through.

With more staff available to perform case and contact management, Ahmed said some pressure should be alleviated from the assessment centre. But the best way for residents to help out the health care system is by keeping their number of close contacts as low as possible.