Windsor Regional Hospital is preparing for a second wave of COVID-19.
Hospital President and CEO David Musyj tells AM800 News in-patients being treated for COVID-19 jumped from one to five overnight Friday with two winding up in the ICU.
An increase of four people being hospitalized by a virus in 24-hours may not seem like much, but Musyj says that's how things escalated in the first wave.
"Hospitalizations are trailing indicators, meaning, we start seeing an increase in positives in the community and within about a week or two after that we start seeing the hospitalizations go up," he says. "Now we're at that phase."
Windsor-Essex has seen daily cases creep back into double digits and the province has been close to or over 1,500 per day for most of the week. Musyj says that's alarming considering tests have been relegated to people with symptoms or close contact for more than a month.
"This is still being spread asymptomatically, so if we're testing symptomatic people and getting this many positives, it would most likely be even worse if we started testing asymptomatic people again," he added.
He says local numbers are likely to continue to climb along with the province if the community doesn't take physical distancing seriously.
"We eventually, just like the province when you're having 1,500 cases a day, you can only have so many 1,500's a day plus before it starts spreading all over the place," he says.
Musyj says the five patients being treated in hospital range in age from their 20's to their 70's.
Ontario broke another single day case record with 1,581 Saturday — if growth continues at the current rate, the province anticipates 6,500 new cases per day by mid December