`People should not go out,' Ahmed warns of COVID spike
Although Windsor and Essex County avoided a move into a provincially-mandated lockdown Friday afternoon, COVID-19'S impact on the region is worse than it's ever been.
In summarizing the last week's local pandemic numbers, medical officer of health Dr. Wajid Ahmed said the community is “hitting a point which we have never hit,” even during the worst of the first wave of infections that swept through the county's large migrant farm worker population.
“People should not go out, period,” he said, echoing the guidelines for the “red zone” status under the province's COVID-19 Response Framework. “If 90 per cent of the people or 95 per cent of people are following that, we are winning, because when we are staying home, even if someone is infected, we're not spreading it further. That's the key message.”
The Windsor-essex County Health Unit reported 65 new cases of COVID-19 Friday, the region's highest single-day case increase of the second wave and the third-highest of all time. Since March, 3,864 local residents have tested positive.
Approximately 1,000 of those cases were reported since Nov. 1
Roughly 25 per cent of recent cases have no epidemiological link, Ahmed said, meaning those individuals do not have a known exposure source, like a household contact with COVID-19 or exposure through a known workplace outbreak. In other words, a quarter of the region's cases are being attributed to community spread.
The other most common infection source is household contact.
“When someone is infected, they are potentially infecting pretty much everyone else in their house,” Ahmed said. “Maybe, yes, you are healthy. Maybe you can recover from the virus, but some people cannot. ... It's something to be mindful of in terms of our responsibility in our activities when we are not at home.”
The case rate for Windsor-essex is currently 73 per 100,000 population, far exceeding the 40-case threshold that landed the region in the “red zone” with tightened restrictions on social gatherings, among other things.
Wastewater COVID-19 surveillance being performed by a team of University of Windsor researchers shows the prevalence of virus indicators in wastewater — shed by residents in fecal matter — is “clearly surpassing the active cases, so in the next couple of weeks we may see more cases,” Ahmed said.
Last week, approximately 6,500 COVID-19 tests were completed in Windsor-essex, with about four per cent of those tests coming back positive.
To deal with the increased demand for testing, Erie Shores Healthcare is expanding its testing capacity and adding 50 additional appointments to its schedule, Ahmed said. That announcement comes one day after the top public health doctor expressed his concern over a days-long wait for testing appointments in the region.
In an email to the Star on Thursday, ESHC spokesperson Arms Bumanlag said those in need of a COVID test had been waiting three days to get in, a situation similarly reflected at Windsor Regional Hospital's test wait times. ESHC'S assessment centre tested roughly 36 per cent more people in November than it did in October, when it's daily average was 90 tests. On Monday, 160 people were swabbed for COVID-19 there.
Roughly 41 per cent of lab results are currently available within 24 hours of the swab being administered, and about 82 per cent are available within 48 hours.
The most recent estimated median case reproduction number, or “R0,” is 1.07, “which is good from a number perspective,” Ahmed said, but “we are still seeing 60-plus cases every day, which is quite a lot.” Each COVID-19 case is infecting almost two other people.
“Ideally, we'd like to see the median R0 going down, less than one. That would show us the cases are starting to decline in our community. That's not happening, but maybe with some of these restrictions in place, we may start to see that number going down.”
As for conversations about moving Windsor and Essex County into a full lockdown, Ahmed said the WECHU would like to see the results of the red zone restrictions implemented on Monday before recommending the province take further action.
“As difficult as it is right now, we don't want people to go out. We don't want people to have any gathering, any kind of event,” Ahmed said.
“Even if the businesses are open, if I am someone who is at risk, if I'm not going outside, I am preventing those risks.”