Health officials in Prince Edward Island did not report a new COVID-19 patient on Wednesday, after three straight days of adding to its total case count.
P.E.I. Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Heather Morrison said that health officials have completed 1,321 tests for COVID-19 since a medical worker at Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s emergency department tested positive late Sunday.
The health-care worker, who is a male in his 40s, tested positive after a patient of his was diagnosed. The woman in her 80s lives alone, and is currently at home self-isolating.
At least 500 hospital staff were tested out of the 1,321 completed tests. Contact tracing from the medical worker at QEH identified 101 patients. Seventy-six of them have been tested, 16 are scheduled to be tested Wednesday, while six are out of province.
Morrison said officials have still been unable to reach three patients, but messages have been delivered to each of them.
The health-care worker travelled outside the Atlantic Bubble and arrived in the province on July 2 on WestJet flight 654 from Toronto to Charlottetown. He tested negative before going to work on July 4. He was work-isolating, meaning he had to be in isolation while not at work, and wearing personal protective equipment while he was.
There are currently nine active cases of COVID-19 in P.E.I. Five of them are linked to a cluster connected to a man who travelled to Nova Scotia; two of them are part of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital cluster; and the other two cases involve essential workers who travelled outside of the Atlantic region.
Before July 4, when the first of the nine cases was identified, the province hadn’t identified a new patient since April 28. By May 8, it had no active cases since all 27 of its patients recovered.
There have now been 36 total patients in P.E.I. throughout the pandemic.
