With COVID-19 patients from other regions being transferred to Windsor-Essex, Windsor Regional Hospital is updating the way it reports COVID unit and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) capacity.
According to Hospital Spokesperson, Steve Erwin, the change comes after some questions about how full the local ICU really is.
"We recognize that the health unit numbers that come out every day focus on the local population," he says. "We were getting questions about how many COVID cases we have in our ICUs, so this provides the most accurate data we have on a daily basis."
Erwin, says there is now a chart on the hospital's website that will be updated daily.
"What it will provide for you is the number of out-of-town transfers who are also in the ICU and the local numbers that are in the ICU. So if you were to go there for today, you'd see that we only have six local individuals that are in our ICU."
Out-of-town transfers don't impact local numbers, according to Erwin, adding, those people are tracked by their local health units.
"We get asked quite a bit whether the out-of-town transfers effect our local numbers, the truth is they don't," he says. "They don't in terms of how the heath unit reports it and in terms of the hospital, we're able to separate the numbers and define what is an out of town transferred COVID-19 patient and who is a local patient."
As of 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, there are a total of 27 people in the hospital with COVID-19. Eighteen of them are local, six of which are in the ICU and the other nine were transferred from out of the region and are all in the ICU
COVI-19 and ICU admissions as reported May 25, 3 p.m. by Windsor Regional Hospital