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Mennonite community 'co-operative' in COVID-19 tracing from funeral: public health

Elgin County public health officials are confident they have a handle on the situation after as many as 70 people may have been exposed to COVID-19 after attending a funeral for a woman who tested positive for the virus.

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Elgin County public health officials are confident they have a handle on the situation after as many as 70 people may have been exposed to COVID-19 after attending a funeral for a woman who tested positive for the virus.

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Southwestern Public Health issued an alert Wednesday after members of Aylmer’s Mennonite community attended a funeral service late last week for a 64-year-old Aylmer woman, who was a member of the community’s Old Colony Mennonite Church.

“The good news is we still have only one case, which is the deceased,” Dr. Joyce Lock, medical officer of health, said Thursday. “The other good news is that people have been in touch with us and so we are following up contacts.”

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The woman died on July 1, the same day she was admitted to Tillsonburg District Memorial Hospital. She tested positive for COVID-19 in a postmortem diagnosis.

She is the fifth coronavirus death in the health unit’s jurisdiction, which covers Oxford and Elgin counties and St. Thomas.Lock said the Aylmer Mennonite community has been helpful as the the health unit works to monitor, trace and contain the virus.

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“They’ve been quite co-operative and we continue to get more contacts coming in,” Lock said. “We have staff people who work with that community regularly and we even have staff who speak Low German so we use that staff like we always do.

“We are hoping that this will not go much further.”

Lock said there is no current mandate for wearing face masks, but the 50 to 70 people who attended the funeral service complied to physical distancing.

“They didn’t keep track of exact numbers, but it was definitely within the (30 per cent) capacity limits,” Lock said. “It is quite a large church so there was ample capacity for people to physically distance.”

Funeral attendees have been asked to self-isolate for 14 days and Lock said the health unit will work with the congregation closely over the next couple weeks, but the group had been following health and safety guidelines closely.

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“Their objective is to keep their community and the rest of the community healthy and safe,” she said. “I think with the strong community support we are getting, we’ll get this all sorted out.”

The health unit is also working to determine how the woman contracted the coronavirus, but Lock said that won’t be easy.

“We’re trying to piece together the puzzle,” she said. “Sometimes to the best of our ability, we just can’t quite figure out who was the person who passed it on. Some people have very mild disease and they don’t actually know they are spreading the virus — sometimes it can be as mild as a runny nose.”

Lock said every member of the larger community should remember that COVID-19 is still among us.

“Every single citizen has to carry on keeping their guard up and making sure that they at all times adhere to physical distancing, that they stay in their own social bubbles, that we wear a cloth mask when we are indoors or where we can’t stay six feet apart and that we practise really good hand hygiene many, many times a day,” she said.

“We also need to make sure that we wash all of those high-touch surfaces frequently with some solution that kills germs.”

pvanderhoeven@postmedia.com

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