Windsor Regional Hospital (WRH) is at a crossroad when it comes to COVID-19 yet again.
President and CEO David Musyj told the board 28 patients are currently being treated for COVID-19 in hospital as of Thursday night.
Musyj says COVID-19 admissions have plateaued, but they're still hovering in dangerous territory at the tail end of a second lock-down.
"Things are steady and things are a lot better, yes they are, but that's compared to what we were facing in December and January [in 2020] so it's not quite where we want to be," he says. "When we were done wave one our numbers for a period of time were zero."
Chief Operating Officer Karen Riddell says the current average means the hospital is still an outbreak away from being overwhelmed.
"We're waiting for the other shoe to drop at this point and really watching what the potential projections are with the variants and hoping that we can keep things under control here in Windsor-Essex and keep moving in the right direction," she says.
Musyj says only two of the 28 patients in hospital have come from long-term-care homes — that's down from the previous average of more than 30 percent and shows prevention measures are working.
"If you directly relate it, it shows that vaccines are helping with that," he says. "There's all sorts of other things occurring, but as we talk right now there's only one home in outbreak."
Windsor-Essex still has a 2.5 per cent positivity rate when it comes to testing, and that's too high to start celebrating, according to Musyj.
He says experts are projecting a third lockdown will be needed to avoid another wave of COVID-19 as new variants take hold throughout Ontario.