Government of NS photo
At the daily COVID-19 update, Dr. Robert Strang, Nova Scotia’s chief medical officer of health, said forty-three new cases were identified in the province.
He says this gives us a total of 517 confirmed cases and three deaths.
“Currently, we have ten individuals in hospital, four of those in ICU. Today, 124 people have recovered and can be considered to have their COVID-18 infection resolved. We’ve had 16,755 Nova Scotians tested, with negative test results.”
Dr. Strang says the QEII Health Sciences Centre’s microbiology lab completed 1476 tests in a single day.
During the press conference, he gave a modelling update.
Dr. Strang qualified the estimates by pointing out that modelling is just that, an estimate, not an exact prediction.
“We’re looking towards May, into June before we can start to think about relaxing things, in all likelihood but we will get there week by week and we’ll become more refined as we look at our epidemiology and we see how things are progressing.”
He says the the chief medical officers of health around the country are now looking at what they need to for when they start to relax and lift restrictions but he says that won’s be for several weeks.
Meanwhile, Premier Stephen MacNeil says we can’t make comparisons of testing numbers between provinces due to the diversity of populations.
During his final remarks at the update, he said they look at those numbers but their concentration is on Nova Scotia.
The Premier says precautions taken in the province are working.
“We are flattening the curve…and I want to thank you for doing that…but, as Dr. Strang has said, we haven’t reached the peak. The coming weeks are critical and we need to continue to see if we have new cases…but we will control the numbers. This is in our hands, so we have to continue to follow the protocols.”
He says we need to “wash our hands, keep our distances, we have to stay vigilant, and stay the blazes home.”
