Starting Thursday at 12:01 a.m., all of Ontario except for two small agricultural towns on the southernmost tip of the province will move to Stage 2 of reopening, as officials target Essex county’s large migrant farm worker population for mass COVID-19 testing.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said that the City of Windsor and Essex County can move to Stage 2 on Thursday, but the towns of Kingsville and Leamington, home together to about 49,000 people, will remain in Stage 1 as they host a large portion of the roughly 8,000 migrant farm workers in Southwestern Ontario.

“These outbreaks at our farms are a new challenge,” Ford said.

He urged migrant workers to submit to testing and to rest assured they’ll be taken care of if they fall sick.

“No one will lose their job if you have COVID-19, no one will be sent home for COVID-19 – and if you test positive for COVID-19 and you need to isolate you are eligible for WSIB and if you have worked here last year and have a social insurance number, you may be able to apply for the CERB,” he said.

The move came as Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens and other leaders in the region complained that Ontario’s reopening plan was singling them out for additional economic pain.

Ford and Health Minister Christine Elliott said local health officials will send mobile testing units to large farms and encourage anyone concerned to go to an assessment centre and get tested.

Ontario Chief Coroner Dr. Dirk Huyer said roughly 1,000 farm workers in the region had been tested so far, with most infected workers showing no symptoms.

The Province will also develop a new guidance for asymptomatic COVID-19 positive workers, allowing them to return to work, provided they are kept away from other workers and housed separate from uninfected workers.

Chief Medical Officer for Ontario Dr. David Williams said those workers would also have to wear masks while they work, and would need to be retested after 48 hours.

Ford said that after more testing in the area is completed, the remaining two towns could move to Stage 2.

“We’ll be able to reopen Kingsville and Leamington very shortly, once these numbers come down.”

Windsor-Essex added 37 new cases of COVID-19 in the past two days, and has a total of 489 remaining active cases.

Essex NDP MPP Taras Natyshak said the hospitals and public health officials in his riding have been asking for help from the province and the federal government for weeks.

“The local public health officials and local hospitals – they exhausted themselves to a critical level to do the testing and the tracing,” he said.

He called the current situation, where the residents of some parts of his riding fear migrant workers and farmers as possible carriers of COVID-19, and the entire area now lags behind the rest of Ontario, regrettable and entirely predictable.

“This was predictable, we knew that congregate living settings and working conditions were a vector for transmission.”