Chatham-Kent’s medical officer of health is defending his stance not to release the locations of positive COVID cases in the municipality.
Because of Chatham-Kent’s large geographic area, some residents have been wanting to know which community self-isolating patients are living in.
However, Dr David Colby insists that kind of information being made public could cause more harm than good.
“When you say it is in a community that’s very very small, people tend to overreact to that,” Colby says. “The answer is that we have to do the things that keep us safe all the time. The advice that I’ve been giving from the get-go is that if you can’t physically distance, wear masks but don’t use masks as an excuse not to physically distance.”
Dr David Colby says there’s no way to definitively say there are no active cases in any given part of the municipality, simply because of the limitations of current testing.
“Early on, we didn’t have access to testing so we just had people isolate for two weeks, I’m sure some of those were positive,” Colby says. “We’re starting to get some data in from surveys of blood tests that can check for antibodies to see how many people actually have been infected, because that’s still largely unknown.”
Colby says just because you don’t know about potential positive cases in any given community doesn’t meant they don’t exist.
