There was only one new positive case of COVID-19 in the province yesterday, out of 427 tests completed at the QEII Health Sciences Centre’s microbiology lab.
Chief medical officer of health Dr. Robert Strang says this does not mean we can drop all the public health protocols that are in place.
“We have had a few good days in the past week with low numbers and that is good news…but I want to caution everyone against reading too much into any single day or any few days. We are in a long-term situation and we need to have sustained changes before we can make definitive conclusions.”
He says, from a purely public health perspective, a few days is not enough to make that decision.
“We’d like to see a trend of little to no cases and have that and have that sustained for a minimum of two weeks, ideally it would be 28 days. That’s simply is that two weeks or fourteen day is one incubation period and, ideally, we have two incubation periods.
We have had 34,204 negative test results so far, along with 1,020 positive results and 48 deaths.
864 people have now recovered, while nine are in the hospital, with four of them in Intensive Care.
The other two Maritime provinces are discussing opening up travel between them but have not mentioned Nova Scotia.
Premier Stephen McNeil says they have had the discussions but that is not in their plans until possibly late summer.
“We’re going to continue to focus on ensuring that we flatten the curve here when it comes to COVID-19, continue to work with our partners inside the province, the organizations that represent our economy, and continue to make sure that when we open up our economy, people understand the rules.”
He says the various business sectors must be ready for day one of opening before it is allowed.
The Premier also says some services that only serve a specific area only may be allowed to open if their zone is doing well but that does not include businesses that may bring in customers from other zones.
