Hundreds of Niagara residents are continuing to get tested for COVID-19 each day, many because of their line of work, but it’s the people with symptoms who public health staff want to see get swabbed the most.
Coughers, sneezers or snifflers — even people who don’t think too much about their symptoms — are encouraged to go through testing so public health can keep tabs on the virus.
“That’s the group we want to get tested,” said Dr. Mustafa Hirji, Niagara’s acting medial officer of health.
Niagara had no new cases of COVID-19 reported on Monday. There were seven cases over the weekend, including two people who got sick through community transmissions that have no known source and five people who had contact with previously known cases.
Getting tested with or without symptoms can affect results.
Hirji said one of the cases reported on the weekend was someone who was tested before they had any symptoms. The day after they had their test taken, symptoms started to develop.
Because the patient got the negative test result back the same day symptoms developed, they disregarded them for several more days. At that point they got re-tested and results came back positive.
“There’s a lot of talk going around about how if you’ve been in contact with someone you should get tested and in many cases that’s not going to show anything until you actually have symptoms,” Hirji said.
“You aren’t reliably going to have a positive test, even if you might have COVID.”
Hirji said people can test positive before they develop symptoms, but it’s more reliable when symptoms are present because of the way testing was designed.
There are no restrictions on how often people can be tested but public health isn’t recommending people go repeatedly without good reason as turnaround times are already slower than it would like.
Hirji said there are about 750 to 1,000 tests being done each day in Niagara at the assessment centres, in long-term care homes and retirement homes, by primary care givers and inside hospitals.
There have been 916 cases of COVID-19 among Niagara residents since the start of the outbreak, with 817 people recovered and at least 64 deaths. On Monday there were 35 active cases.
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