Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre has first admitted patient with COVID-19

The Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre has its first patient admitted for COVID-19.

Kennedy said the hospital is constantly revising its plan on how to deal with a potential influx of COVID-19 patients. Currently, all presumptive cases as well as confirmed cases will be admitted to negative pressure isolation rooms throughout the facility.

"As the numbers increase we are looking at what we call a hot cold zone, or hot zone that will be dedicated to one ward initially, and it will go to two wards."

Kennedy said all of the current presumptive cases at the Health Sciences Centre are in isolation rooms, however, there are 22 negative pressure rooms available, so the hospital is converting other rooms to perform the same function.

"We haven't decided what the trigger is yet," Kennedy said, referring to how many cases the hospital would have to have admitted to when it has a COVID-19 dedicated ward.

"But, as you can appreciate, the plan changes depending on the numbers coming through the door."

"As you can well appreciate, we don't have a hundred negative pressure rooms, so we still prefer for best care of our patients toactually do the care for them in a negative pressure room. If the numbers increase, which we are making more (rooms), then we will put everybody onto one floor."

Kennedy said starting Friday, anybody who presents to the emergency department will also notice a different treatment.

"As of most likely tomorrow, we're going to make the whole emergency department a hot zone," he said, meaning anybody who comes in would be treated as if they had COVID-19.