Ontario has reported a new case of COVID-19 in the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit’s jurisdiction — a woman in her 60s who recently travelled internationally.
According to the local health unit, the woman in New Tecumseth, Ont. is self-isolating.
“We’ve had three cases in Simcoe Muskoka that I’ve characterized as community acquired,” the local health unit’s medical officer of health, Dr. Charles Gardner, said in a conference call with reporters Monday.
“As this transmits in the community, we will get to the point where there are potentially many others in the community who won’t have an obvious link, and our ability to test them all is going to be very limited.”
People who can’t get tested for COVID-19 but are experiencing symptoms should isolate themselves while they recover, according to Gardner.
“The volume of testing has exceeded the capacity of the Ontario Public Health laboratory system to keep up with at this time,” Gardner said.
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“There is some lag of up to six days in getting the results back. They are working diligently with other hospital laboratories to build up the province’s capacity to be able to do testing more quickly.”
While there are no confirmed positive COVID-19 cases in Muskoka, it’s safe to assume there is some community transmission, Gardner said, and therefore everybody should be practicing social distancing and hand-washing.
“The models gave a worst case scenario of 50 per cent of the population affected at some point, like cumulatively, throughout the pandemic, noting that takes place over months to possibly a year,” Gardner said regarding forecasting possible cases in the region.
As of Monday, there have been 10 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the local health unit’s jurisdiction. Two of those cases have since passed away and were both in men in their 70s in Barrie, Ont.
The two men had close contact with one another, but the source of infection for one of the men has been labelled as travel-related by the local health unit.
According to the Simcoe Muskoka health unit, two of the local cases have been hospitalized — a man in his 40s in Barrie and a woman in her 30s in Bradford, Ont.
On Monday, Ontario reported 489 active cases of the novel coronavirus. Six people have died in the province. In Canada, there have been 1,558 confirmed cases of COVID-19.
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