The Windsor-Essex County Health Unit is reporting 35 new COVID-19 cases in the region along with one more death linked to the virus.
According to the health unit, the death was a 90-year-old woman from a retirement home.
Of the cases announced Monday morning, two are related to outbreaks, four are being blamed on close contact with another confirmed case, and 29 are still under investigation.
There are now 2,673 active cases in the community.
During the health unit's daily briefing, Medical Officer of Health Dr. Wajid Ahmed spoke about the recent case count fluctuation in Windsor-Essex.
"We are seeing a day to day fluctuation in the case counts and I'm sure many of you are wondering if this is an error," says Dr. Ahmed. "At this point, I don't have any official notification from the labs about any planned delays in reporting but it is possible due to the high volume, test results are prioritized in a different way leading to a day to day fluctuation in our daily case counts."
He says the health unit has looked at the data from the recent cases carefully.
"As we know, there are some delays in the lab to process some of those specimens," he says. "Right now based on what we know, we don't have any reason to believe that there is any intentional delay for all of these test results."
Dr. Ahmed says despite the fluctuation, the average for the past three days continues to show a decrease in local cases.
"We can still see some improvement so I'm hoping that over the time it will stabilize even if it's day to day fluctuation but some of the other indicator, what we are noticing right now, they're starting to show improvement," says Dr. Ahmed.
119 confirmed cases are in hospital with 18 in the Intensive Care Unit.
The region has now recorded 11,057 cases since the pandemic began with 8,128 listed as resolved.
There are 21 outbreaks at long term care/retirement homes along with 23 workplace outbreaks, three hospital and one community outbreak.
There have been 256 COVID-19 related deaths in Windsor-Essex.