Last year around this time was one of the worst weeks for COVID-19 case counts and hospitalizations, and now a few weeks out from the holidays local health officials are concerned they could see a similar spike.
Acting Medical Officer of Health Dr. Shanker Nesathurai says they're worried about the potential for increased burden to the health care and hospital systems.
"We're concerned about that in part because the holidays are in fact associated with people congregating and having more human to human interaction," he continued. "We are monitoring the number of people who are currently admitted to hospital as well as the number of people in the ICU and the number of people who end up on ventilators."
He says that's one of the important metrics to assess the burden of illness of the community.
Dr. Nesathurai says another thing to consider is that before the pandemic the healthcare system and the hospital system was resource constrained.
"And was challenged to meet all of the clinical service demands of the community. COVID has added an additional burden to a system that already was crunched from a resource allocation perspective," he added.
He says the impacts from a potential uptick in COVID patients in hospitals would be far reaching.
"We're not only worried about the burden of COVID-19 to the hospital, and the burden on the healthcare system, but also the fact that other important services that people need are being crowded out by COVID related hospitalization and COVID related clinical demand."
As of Monday morning, the Windsor Essex County Health Unit is reporting that 67 confirmed COVID-19 cases are in hospital, with 15 of those in the Intensive Care Unit.