THUNDER BAY - The city is where it needs to be in terms of COVID-19 testing say public health officials and increased testing is expected to continue in long-term care facilities.
“We certainly have been at the testing level we want to be,” said chief medical officer Dr. Janet DeMille. “A few weeks ago, the Premier did want to see a substantial increase in testing and at that time the threshold in testing in terms of the symptoms people needed to have was relaxed so we were able to really increase our testing.”
On Tuesday, Premier Doug Ford said some local chief medical officers were not conducting enough tests after the number of provincial tests being conducted on a daily basis dropped from 17,000 to 10,000 per day.
“I am quite pleased with the level of testing that is being done,” DeMille said. “We do want to make sure we are testing and doing testing of the population at different locations to monitor what is happening with respect to COVID.”
The threshold for testing was eased several weeks ago, with people exhibiting even minor symptoms able to be tested. Asymptomatic people are still not tested because if there are no symptoms, the test may not pick up the virus, according to DeMille.
“The challenge is that if you test somebody who doesn’t have any symptoms, they could actually be incubating the virus and they may develop symptoms over the next couple of days, but the test won’t necessarily be positive because you won’t pick up a virus that is incubating,” she said.
Testing is also increasing significantly in local long-term care facilities. With long-term care homes seeing outbreaks across the province, including a staff member testing positive at Hogarth Riverview Manor, the provincial government is calling on all staff and residents in long-term care in Ontario to be tested.
“We’ve certainly done well,” DeMille said. “Out of the total number of residents, 70 per cent we have the results back but we anticipate that most of the residents have already been tested. For staff, we have it that over 50 per cent of all staffing has been tested.”
Shane Muir, community para-medicine coordinator for Superior North EMS, which has been assisting long-term care facilities with testing, said the process has been moving along very smoothly so far.
“We were able to get a lot of testing done, more than 1,000 tests,” he said. “It turns out we did have a positive, which we were able to quickly react on and isolate and ended up saving the potential for a lot of health care system dollars and a lot of lives saved.”
Muir said they will be reaching out to private homes in the coming days to assist with testing, along with emergency child care centres.
“I think Thunder Bay has really ramped up their testing and probably handling the COVID-19 situation better than a lot of cities right now in Ontario,” he said. “I think we’ve been really on track with testing numbers and things are working very well for us and our initiatives.”
Superior North EMS also conducts at home testing for people unable to visit the assessment centre at the Thunder Bay Regional Hospital. According to Muir, they have been conducting between 40 and 50 at home tests per day.
In the Thunder Bay District there are 76 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 10 cases listed as active and 65 resolved.
DeMille said they are paying particularly close attention to cases where the cause of infection is not known, but she remains optimistic that the numbers are trending in the right direction.
“Those numbers are very low and there haven’t been very many recently, so I think it really bodes well for the picture here,” she said. “It is going in the right direction.”
There could also be a possible backlog in test results, particularly in long-term care facility tests across the province, which could mean more positive cases being announced.
“I’m a little bit cautious that that could be happening,” DeMille said. “But overall, I’m feeling very encouraged by our situation.”
