COVID-19 wastewater data indicates slight increasing trend in cases

COVID-19 wastewater surveillance data in Simcoe Muskoka reveals a "slight increasing trend" over the past three weeks, but the former president of the Ontario Medical Association says he doesn't feel it's cause for concern.

While it's "important" to follow wastewater trends, Dr. Sohail Gandhi said it isn't the most significant factor.

"The two most important numbers continue to be the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 and the number of people in ICU with COVID-19, and those numbers continue to decrease," Dr. Gandhi noted.

The Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit said samples collected in Barrie and Midland show small proportions of the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron.

The health unit said a "sharp peak in wastewater signal" was found in samples collected in Collingwood but noted the difficulty interpreting the patterns "as wastewater samples are only collected once per week in Collingwood."

Still, Dr. Gandhi said that learning to live with COVID-19 means people could become infected, but "most of those cases are very short-lived, they are two to three days of a flu-like illness, and then people get better."

The health unit reports 14 people with COVID-19 are currently hospitalized in the region, three of those are in the ICU.