No symptoms required — some northern assessment centres now doing twice as many COVID-19 tests

People who don't have COVID-19 symptoms have been streaming through the door of the Elliot Lake assessment centre in the week since the province welcomed anyone to get tested.

Registered nurse Cindy Mathison says they're swabbing about 20 people a day, about double what it was before.

She says some patients are very clear why they want to get the uncomfortable test.

"Premier Ford told me I could get a swab and I want a swab," Mathison says.

"A lot of our swabbing too are for people that work away. As physiotherapists are opening up, they are requiring their patients to have a swab as well."

The 39-year veteran nurse says the Elliot Lake centre saw similar numbers in March when many winter sun seekers were returning to the retirement community at the start of the pandemic, but things have slowed down in the past few months — until the premier said that no symptoms were required to get a test.

"It was kind of sudden, I have to say, but we have a good assessment team here and everybody chipped in and we were able to manage the increase right away," Mathison says.

The Temiskaming Shores assessment centre is also swabbing about twice as many people since the change was made.

Temiskaming Hospital president Mike Baker says they haven't had a COVID-19 case in the area for the past month, but there was some evidence of community spread before that.

"So I would expect if we do more testing, we will see some uptick in positive cases," he says.

"And this will help us solidify our understanding of where we're headed and what's really in our community."

The Timmins COVID-19 assessment centre is reporting a slight increase in testing over the past week, while numbers have been pretty steady in Sudbury.

So far, some 35,000 people in northeastern Ontario have been tested for the novel coronavirus and 197 came back positive.