Lambton County had more people in hospital with COVID-19 per capita than almost any other community in the province.

Lambton County Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Sudit Ranade, revealed the information during a Lambton County committee meeting Wednesday.

Public Health Ontario has been keeping data from all regional health units during the COVID-19 pandemics. One of the way they measure the hot spots in the province, is by looking at the number of cases, deaths and hospitalization per capita. And when weighed against the rest of the province, Lambton has been hit hard.

The data up to May 20 shows there are 130,964 people in Lambton and there have to date been 235 cases. Public Health Ontario says 38.2 per 100,000 people were hospitalized. That’s second only to Toronto where 38.7 per 100,000 were hospitalized.

Lambton also ranks in the top five of number of cases per capita. Peel Region has had 222.8 per capita, Windsor-Essex has 189.3, Durham has 183 per capita and Lambton has 178.7.

Ontario’s death rate per capita is about 20. Lambton’s is 14.5 per capita.

Ranade isn’t sure why that might be. “It’s important to remember that that is not an age-adjusted rate that is just a pure rate, so it counts everyone in the population.

“It’s unclear what the reason for that is, although if you rank any, any group, there’s always going to be someone at the top and someone at the bottom,” he told county councillors.

“Potentially, part of the reason for that is that we’ve had two significant outbreaks among an elderly population and so we know that they’re more severe and more also more likely to be tested.

“The other possibility is that we’ve been doing more testing and picking up more cases, but I don’t think that that’s true. There are lots of other jurisdictions that are doinghigh numbers of tests.”

Thursday, there were only five people in hospital with confirmed cases of COVID-19. Another 17 people were presumed to have the virus.