The Vice President of Critical Care at Windsor Regional Hospital is expressing concern over recent COVID-19 admissions to the ICU.
Speaking on AM800's The Morning Drive, Karen Riddell says four people have been admitted over the last few days and all of them were brought to the hospital in a critical care situation and have since been ventilated.
She says what that tells her, is that people are sick in the community and waiting too long to seek medical care.
"If you've got symptoms, please seek medical care, follow up with primary care in the community," she says. "If your symptoms are serious please present to the emergency department and don't wait too long so that we can prevent the serious impact of COVID-19 from resulting in an ICU admission."
The majority of cases presenting to the ICU are people in their 40s and 50s according to Riddell.
"Which is not offside with what we've seen in our community with the younger population outside off the issues we had in long-term care so again, we all have to pay attention," she says. "None of us are immune to this disease so we all have to be careful with what we are doing out in the community and help prevent that spread."
Riddell says the field hospital at St Clair College is still available should it be needed.
"Right now we are running at quite high capacity at Windsor Regional [Hospital], we're about 95 per cent overall capacity, in the ICU itself, we're running between 80 and 90 per cent capacity in our unit."
In Windsor-Essex, 27 per cent of cases are in people between the ages of 20 and 29, 24 per cent of cases are between the ages of 30 and 39 and 16 per cent are between the ages of 40 and 49.