WINDSOR, ONT. -- Only 13 Windsor Regional Hospital staff have tested positive for COVID-19 since the global pandemic began.
The hospital has more than 5,000 staff and physicians between the MET and Ouellette Campus.
“We might be heroes but we don’t have immunity super powers,” says Windsor Regional Hospital vice president of critical care Karen Riddell.
Riddell says many staff feel safer working inside the Intensive Care Unit because of stringent safety protocol.
“We can pick it up in the community just like anybody else so we all have to practice physical distancing, wearing masks and staying home when you’re sick,” she adds.
Riddell says the vast majority of those 13 cases came at the beginning of the pandemic.
“People coming back and they had been exposed in the community,” she said. “There was travel history and things like that.”
WRH president and CEO David Musyj says positive results for staff members slowed down dramatically over the last two months, but anticipates more infection in the future.
“It’s going to happen again,” says Musyj. “We’re going to have staff, who are going to get positive in the community, guaranteed. That’s going to happen. The issue is when they come to work even if they are asymptotic positive, wearing that PPE, that protects them from spreading it to others.”
At Thursday’s hospital board meeting, Musyj also credited the low staff infection rate to ongoing efforts to reduce patient harm.
So far in 2020, there have been eight weeks of “zero patient harm” reported inside both hospital campuses, compared to six weeks in all of 2019.
