Bluewater Health says COVID-19 testing is being ramped-up in Sarnia-Lambton.
Communications Chief Julia Oosterman said thanks to increased availability of testing kits across Ontario, the hospital is able to respond to the province’s commitment to increased testing.
"The Sarnia clinic is more than doubling its capacity, our community paramedics program, they're going to ramp-up their testing protocols and opportunities as well, and then the third thing is we're opening another brand new assessment centre in Petrolia. And it was initially announced that it was going to be opened next week, but in fact, it opened today [Thursday]."
Petrolia’s clinic is located in the parking lot of the Central Lambton Family Health Team (CLFHT) on Glenview Road and is staffed by members of the CLFHT.
Oosterman said the existing Sarnia testing site, which opened March 14, had seen 471 of patients as of Thursday morning, and has been increasing services based on referral demand.
She also said the Community Paramedic Program, operated by Lambton County EMS, had completed 60 home tests for patients who are unable to come to the more traditional clinics.
Lambton Medical Officer of Health Dr. Sudit Ranade said you're going to see notices about expanded testing opportunities and an increased focus on testing in the coming days.
"Ideally, if we had all the tests in the world, we would definitely want, at a minimum, for anyone with symptoms to be tested even if those symptoms are mild. Now we have enough tests to be able to potentially do things like that, and so we can expand access and we can make sure that people in vulnerable settings are tested as soon as they have any symptoms."
During his daily briefing Thursday, Premier Doug Ford announced the province had met its initial testing goal.
"Last week I promised by today [Thursday] we'd be testing 8,000 people a day," said Ford. "Well, today we're at over 9,000 COVID-19 tests. We've hit our first target, and we're going to keep ramping-up our efforts until we hit 14,000 tests per day by the end of this month."