Leamington hospital chief of staff concerned about community spread of COVID-19

Erie Shores HealthCare in Leamington said it's noticed a significant spike in people testing positive for COVID-19 at both the assessment centre and in the emergency department, adding that their concern goes beyond the agriculture sector.

This has caused the COVID-19 unit to go from 50 per cent capacity to 100 per cent capacity within the last week and it has hospital officials reverting back to regulations not seen since the early days of the pandemic.

Dr. Ross Moncur, the chief of staff and interim CEO at Erie Shores HealthCare, said the recent community spread of the virus is concerning.

"It may be more difficult to do some contact tracing and if it's more difficult to do contact tracing, then it gives more time for the cases to spread before others are aware that they may have been exposed to someone with the illness," he said.

He said many people who have checked in the emergency department have been quite sick, resulting in several ICU admissions.

"Hopefully this is just a blip on the radar that will not pan out to be the beginning of a trend, but we're not willing to live on hope. We're taking some extra precautions," he said.

Erie Shores has reverted back to Phase 1 of its visitor policy — re-implemented staff screenings at all entrances and moving all non-essential staff back to a work-from-home situation.  

Ontario's chief medical officer of health Dr. David Williams said people who showed up at Leamington's assessment centre within the last week needed to be hospitalized and two were very sick.

He said the increase in community spread in addition to the outbreak among migrant farm workers is worrisome.

He told CBC that a number of different approaches are being discussed at a provincial and local level.

"We're looking at mobilizing our ... [Emergency Medical Assistance Team] team that was down there and is still down there, but they could be utilized to support further both the health unit and the hospital services in measuring or dealing with any gaps and spaces," Dr. Williams said. 

Allocating resources

"We've added extra resources from the federal government to assist in the epidemiological analysis. Hopefully, we can contain it fairly quickly but we want to wait until the situation is assessed properly," Dr. Williams said. 

The province is also looking at ways to best allocate resources to the health unit, Erie Shores and Windsor Regional Hospital to deal with this increase of positive cases.

The province, in consultation with local officials, are also looking into conducting more intensive testing of certain subsections of the community.