The majority of the people who have died of COVID-19 so far in Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph died outside of a hospital, according to Public Health data.
“Locally, 65 of the 73 deaths have been individuals over the age of 65,” Dr. Nicola Mercer, local Medical Officer of Health, during a meeting of the Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Board of Health on Wednesday.
Latest data Thursday showed there have now been 80 deaths, 26 of those in Guelph and 20 in Wellington County.
People from every age group in the region have been hospitalized with COVID, said Mercer.
There were 69 people between the ages of 60-79 hospitalized with COVID, 14 of which died. For those 80 and over, there were 46 cases hospitalized with 16 deaths reported.
No deaths were reported for hospitalizations for any other age group.
“It’s obvious the older you are the more likely you are to have risk of serious illness and certainly you have a higher instance of dying,” said Mercer.
To date, four people under the age of four have been hospitalized, 18 people age 20-39 and 28 people age 40-59.
WDG Public Health surveyed 471 people who tested positive for COVID-19 to ask where they thought they contracted it.
Thirty eight per cent believed they caught it from a family member, while 31 per cent thought it may have been contracted from somewhere other than their household. The remainder of people where unsure of where they may have gotten COVID-19 from.
More than 50 people who responded believed they contracted it from their workplace, while a smaller percentage said it came from being in a car, school, health care facility, bar or place of worship.
Nobody responded to the survey to say they believed their COVID diagnosis came from either an organized sport, restaurant or gym.
Mercer noted the survey was self-reported and the results were not independently confirmed by WDG Public Health.
“So if you look at this it says no restaurant or gym acquisition reported, it doesn’t mean that we have had no cases in restaurants and gyms, what it means is this is where people think they got exposed to it,” she said.
