A COVID-19 outbreak has been declared in a residence at the University of Waterloo, the school announced on Friday.
It says Waterloo Public Health informed the school of the outbreak at Claudette Millar Hall on Thursday.
People connected to the school tested positive on Dec. 4 and Dec. 7 but Waterloo Public Health did not put together a connection between the pair until Thursday.
A week ago, Waterloo Public Health announced that it was no longer doing contract tracing in lower-risk situations but the region’s top doc says that is not why it took so long to link the cases.
“Sometimes it takes a bit of time to actually link cases and determine that there is evidence of spread at a particular spread at that site,” Dr. Hsiu-Li Wang told reporters on Friday morning.
She says this is why some outbreaks are announced and come to an end in very short order.
“It hasn’t been 14 days or anything,” Wang explained.
“Just sometimes by the nature of the way that the cases arise and are linked together it’s not always immediately evident.”
This is the second time an outbreak has been declared at the school.
The first was announced on Nov. 9 and ended eight days later with four positive tests being linked to the outbreak.
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