Elective surgeries at Windsor Regional Hospital continue to ramp up after being reduced due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The increase comes as Windsor-Essex heads into the Red-Control Level of the Reopening Ontario Act Tuesday.
President and CEO David Musyj says the hospital dropped elective surgeries to about 40 per cent capacity when the second wave of COVID-19 hit and is now back up to around 80 per cent capacity.
"Since we started seeing the numbers of active COVID-19 cases in the community as well as in the hospital go down, we started to immediately ramp back up some of our day surgeries and inpatient surgeries," he says.
Musyj says the hospital started to increase services last week, but the move is connected to the end of a stay-at-home order.
"There's a direct correlation as we get into lower grades ... then most likely at the same time we're going to try to increase day visitations and other services as much as we can," says Musyj.
But he says we're still not out of the woods.
"We have to be very careful and cautious. The next month to 45 days is going to be telling as we see what happens with the variants, how they reproduce and what other mutations we might see in our region," he adds.
The hospital was declared outbreak free over the weekend.
Musyj says the goal is to have elective procedures completely restored by March 1.