Local leaders who asked for the province to take the lead on ending COVID-19 outbreaks in the agri-food sector have their wish.
The province's Emergency Medical Assistance Team arrived this week to handle the rising number of COVID-19 cases in county greenhouses and on farms.
"The intention of the team is to give us short-term support," said Kingsville Mayor Nelson Santos. "Operationalizing, like our shelter, our isolation locations, and incident management support, which is the critical piece where we're responding to outbreaks and putting resources where they are needed."
Over the past week, the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit has reported 240 new cases of the virus, 133 of them in the agri-food sector.
Santos said the team will find a way to speed up the testing of farmworkers. That will likely boost the number of positive cases in the short term but will help identify workers so they can self-isolate.
"Whether it's going back to mobile testing. We need to have that consideration still on the table. The assessment centre, we're trying to reactivate that with scheduled appointments with different farms," said Santos. "Our goal is to have upwards of 500 tests a day."
There are drawbacks to mobile testing.
"A lot of the farms that we have are smaller farms, and employees may only range from six to 20 at the most," explained Santos. "Trying to mobilize visits to those farms takes a lot of time, effort, energy for that to only get maybe a dozen tests."
The assessment centre is at Leamington's Nature Fresh Farms Recreation Centre, and it is expected to reopen Friday.