Community spread is confusingly persistent

The person-to-person spread of COVID-19 in the community is stubbornly persistent and hard to pinpoint, says Ontario’s chief medical officer.

“It is still perplexing to me we are not making major headway going down,” Dr. David Williams told a news conference Friday as the daily number of cases from community transmission remained stuck in the 200 range and total deaths from the outbreak exceeded 1,600.

But with public-health units across the province struggling to trace the cases of about 2,000 more Ontarians testing positive every week, nailing the sources of infection is a challenge.

There is a backlog of 6,727 cases awaiting investigation — fully 34 per cent of the province’s official tally since late January.

That’s where the nitty-gritty details will be found, perhaps in a cluster of cases that emanate from a party or a store, Williams said.

“We want to get down to that kind of intense case contact management to look at those areas,” Williams said. “We need to get to that kind of granularity.”

He said 55 per cent of all new cases appear to be community transmission of some sort, with the rest mostly in nursing homes.

He repeated a plea for people to keep two metres apart, wash their hands frequently and wear a mask or other face covering in close quarters where physical distancing is difficult — particularly with garden centres and hardware stores opening this weekend and other retailers with street entrances authorized to allow curbside pickups starting Monday.

“Be disciplined … or we’ll be in this plateau for quite a while,” warned Williams, who has set his threshold for recommending a further easing of restrictions on store openings and other measures at community spread numbers “well below” 200 cases daily.

A Star compilation of data from regional health units at 5 p.m. Friday showed another 417 new confirmed or probable cases were recorded in the previous 24 hours, pushing the Ontario total to 20,948.

There were 58 more deaths, pushing that total to 1,648. At least 1,150 of the deaths have been in nursing homes.