Lambton's medical officer of health says he can only speculate as to why there's been no COVID-19 hospitalizations or deaths locally for over two months.
There were 58 hospitalizations and 25 deaths from the end of March to early June but none since.
Dr. Sudit Ranade said one theory is that a milder strain of coronavirus has taken hold.
"That one strain was severe and aggressive, but has sort of been replaced by a more dominant strain that is milder and less aggressive," said Ranade. "It's unclear as to whether that's true or not and that would need some sort of genetic testing done at the lab to identify different strains and see what's circulating. I'm hopeful that in conjunction with the province they might be looking at that kind of study."
Dr. Ranade said another possibility is that having moved to Stage 3 of the province's reopening plan, there's been a shift to younger age groups being exposed to the virus.
"And that's something that we saw across the country, so that it became sort of the 20-to-40-year-olds who were driving the new incidence of cases. And that population is less likely to require hospitalization and less likely to suffer mortality from COVID-19," he said.
There have been ten outbreaks in Sarnia-Lambton, the majority at long-term care and retirement homes that account for 16 of the area's deaths.
The last COVID-related death was reported on June 6, and there have been no hospitalizations since May 31.
There were 10 new confirmed cases from August 10 to August 16 bringing the total case count to 336, but Dr. Ranade said the current situation is very manageable. He said a lot of the recent cases are interconnected.
-With files from Colin Gowdy