THUNDER BAY - After achieving more than 17,000 tests per day, the province once again fell back down in the number of COVID-19 tests being conducted daily, and Premier Doug Ford is calling out local health officers across Ontario for the decline.
“Some just aren’t performing. I’m calling them out right now,” Ford said during his daily media briefing on Tuesday. “They have to pick up the pace. When you have half of them exceeding expectations and then others that just aren’t even putting the work in as far as I can see. We need to hold these people accountable.”
Last month the province was conducting between 2,000 and 3,000 tests per day, which Ford said was unacceptable.
On May 1, the province was conducting up to 17,000 COVID-19 tests per day but just a day after that was announced, the number of daily tests dropped to 10,000.
According to Ford, there is a disparity among the 34 chief medical officers across the province, with some performing well in terms of how many tests are being conducted, while others are lagging behind.
“I’m disappointed in the chief medical officers in certain regions,” he said. “I’m not going to name them. They know who they are. Start picking up your socks and start doing testing. It’s frustrating as anything. They need to pick it up as simple as that. We will be speaking to them in the next few days and find out the reason they are not testing to the capacity that they should be testing.”
The province has conducted more than 342,000 COVID-19 tests. Ford said he will continue to push for more testing, particularly for long-term care residents, staff, and health care workers.
But he said there needs to be increased testing at the community level as well.
“There are other chief medical officers knocking it out of the park but half of them aren’t,” he said. “We’re going to have to get on the phone with them and find out what reason and what excuse for why they aren’t testing.”
Ford added that when things return to normal it may be time to review the provincial model.
“When this is over we need to review it,” he said. “We need to start looking at the Alberta model and have one person in control rather than 34 people in control.”
There are now more than 18,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported in Ontario with 1,446 deaths.
