Huron Perth Public Health's Medical Officer of Health says transmission of COVID-19 among residents in long-term care facilities continues to be a problem and she attributes that, largely, to the vulnerability of residents.
Dr. Miriam Klassen says when they're able to identify a positive case in a staff member through surveillance testing, they can put outbreak measures in place quickly and that effectively limits transmission.
But she says, once it gets into the resident population, that seems to reflect a transmission that happened earlier.
"Once it gets into the resident population, that seems to reflect a transmission that happened earlier, within that 14-day period. And often it already happened to more people than you realize and then you're kind of playing catch-up," said Dr. Klassen.
She adds long-term care homes are carefully screening people coming in.
"Long-term care homes are doing very careful screening of people coming in. They're doing twice-daily screening of residents. All the staff are having tests once a week. They're doing the hand hygiene. It's just a very vulnerable population to this virus," Dr. Klassen summarized.
And the vaccine will be a key factor moving forward.
"Even two weeks after the first dose, there's a fair amount of immunity. Now, we don't know how long that would last. You have to have the second dose as well," said Dr. Klassen. "The immunity starts to be significant around two weeks after the first dose. So the sooner they can get that, the better."
