MAXVILLE – Eastern Ontario Health Unit officials are at a Maxville long term care home today (Friday) as part of a two day exercise to retest everyone at the facility.
It comes after a resident at Maxville Manor, who initially tested negative for novel coronavirus, ended up testing positive this week. The positive test triggered an outbreak status on Wednesday (May 20).
“I’m not really worried. The individual patient actually got better and so I’m not really worried about that individual. However, our strike team went in yesterday and today we are testing and tomorrow (Saturday) were finalizing the testing as well,” Dr. Paul Roumeliotis told Cornwall Newswatch during his daily media briefing.
With the initial round of testing at long term care homes complete, Roumeliotis says they are now setting up for testing the region’s 35 retirement homes.
“We’re now looking at evaluating them. The protocol that we agreed with the ministry was that we are going to assess each one of them, identify the red-yellow-green type of thing, go with the reds first, test those, and then evaluate based on those if we need to test any others,” he said.
That’s to make sure there’s enough testing supplies to test the general public at assessment centers, since the health unit loosened criteria allowing anyone symptomatic to be tested, even with “mild” symptoms.
Testing numbers went from 7,135 to 7,238 Friday, an increase of 103. The assessment center and paramedic breakdown is: Hawkesbury 855, Cornwall 1,065, Winchester 479, Casselman 708, Rockland 490, Prescott-Russell EMS home visits 54 and SD&G EMS home visits 91.
The COVID-19 regional numbers didn’t change Friday, with 142 confirmed cases of which 81 are resolved: 15 in Cornwall (14 resolved), 22 in SD&G (20 resolved) and 105 in Prescott-Russell (47 resolved).
There are three people in hospital – all in Ottawa – two of those are in ICU.
The Ontario total Friday was 24,628 confirmed cases, an increase of 441 from the previous day and a bigger increase that those of previous days, which has Roumeliotis concerned. He sits on the Command Table that advises Health Minister Christine Elliott.
“We’re keeping an eye on that. That’s not the pattern that we want, we want it to go down.”