47 New Cases Of COVID-19 In Windsor Essex As Of Wednesday

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Last updated: Wednesday July 8th, 10:01am

The Windsor Essex County Health Unit has confirmed 47 new cases of COVID-19 as of Wednesday, bringing the local total to 1,725. They say 1,102 people locally have recovered.

Cases increased from 1,678 on Tuesday July 7th to 1,725 on Wednesday July 8th.

The Health Unit says 45 of the 47 new cases are workers in the agri-farm industry, 1 case is a healthcare worker, and 1 case is still under investigation.

There have been no additional deaths due to COVID-19 as of Wednesday and the local death toll stands at 68.

The Health Unit says Riverside Place, Devonshire Retirement Residence and Extendicare Tecumseh remain under outbreak.

Five workplaces are under outbreak. One manufacturing facility and two agri-farms in Leamington are under outbreak, and two agri-farms in Kingsville are under outbreak.

A workplace outbreak is declared when two or more employees test positive for COVID-19 within a reasonable timeline to suspect transmission in the workplace, according to the Health Unit.

Wednesday’s Agri-farm Cases

Dr. Wajid Ahmed, Medical Officer of Health says the new cases among agri-farm workers are from two agri-farms that already had workers with cases.  He says the workers with new cases were close contacts of previous cases who lived together.

“Unfortunately because of their living conditions and congregate living settings, each of these individuals have a close contact between fifteen and twenty, on average twelve to thirteen,” Dr. Ahmed said. “So that automatically puts them at a disadvantage of having a large number of contacts and one case can easily result in infecting all of them or a majority of them.”

The challenge has been to focus more on the prevention side and to ensure that it doesn’t get into that population to begin with,” he said. “And once it starts, it’s very difficult to contain it because of their close living arrangements.”

Dr. Ahmed says once the workers were identified as close contacts of previous cases, they were immediately removed from their accommodations and were isolated.

“During that time if they started to develop symptoms they were swabbed again,” he said. “And now a majority of them are coming back positive.”