There has been another COVID-19 related death in the Central Zone of the province, raising the total to 59.
The woman, in her 80’s with underlying medical conditions, was not a resident of a long-term care home.
Dr. Robert Strang, chief medical officer of health, also updated the number of positive cases, with two more identified but only one more in the total, due to a false positive test at Northwood long-term care home in Halifax.
“The testing that is being done by the lab is very accurate but no test is perfect.That means there’s always a small chance of a test to have an inaccurate or indeterminate result, so that’s why you see that the number has gone up by one, for a total number of positive cases to a thousand fifty-two, even though we’re reporting two new cases today.”
Northwood is now the only long-term care home in the province with active cases of COVID-19, eleven of them residents and four are staff.
There have been 38,999 negative test results so far and seven people are in the hospital, three of them in the ICU, while 976 people have now recovered from their infections.
There have been some questions about daycare for the province’s essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Premier Stephen McNeil says they did not close smaller daycares that had five or fewer children and have not had a lot of requests for help with childcare.
“They seem to have been organically dealt with through, whether it’s support from communities or smaller daycare centres that were looking after the children of our frontline healthcare workers.”
He says Dr. Strang is continuing to work with the daycare sector about opening up on June eighth, a date they are optimistic about.
Meanwhile, a second wave of COVID-19 will happen according to every expert…but will provinces be prepared?
Dr. Strang says the Nova Scotia Health Authority has done an excellent job of anticipating what was needed for equipment and Public Health will depend on them again.
“We didn’t get anywhere close to needing that capacity, fortunately, and that is a testament to the effectiveness to what we did in terms of the COVID response but also how all Nova Scotians kind of really took to heart the need to adopt all the measures that minimize the spread of COVID-19.”
He says they will follow the same plans in the case of a resurgence while the Premier added that the province will continue to focus on stockpiling PPE, especially from sources within Nova Scotia.
