TORONTO -- A Toronto hospital is planning to open an assessment and screening centre for people with signs and symptoms of COVID-19 at an East York medical building in late March.

The Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto will open the centre inside a building located just across the street from its campus, and will have a physician, nurse, and some support staff present.

“The idea of the assessment centres is to really create additional capacity outside of the hospital but close to emergency departments,” Mark Fam, the vice-president of programs at the hospital, said.

“What we want is for patients to be able to get assessed, and if they need to come into the emergency department for additional care, they can do so.”

He said if patients don’t need additional care they will be able to go home and get their results virtually, instead of “potentially overload(ing) hospital emergency departments.”

The screening centre will be located in an isolated space within a medical building at 840 Coxwell Avenue. Fam said centres are also expected to pop up in North York and west Toronto.

The centre will have its own, separate entrance, to help protect people who use the building for other services, including students attending the adjoining public school — R.H. McGregor Elementary School.

UPDATED: Learn more about plans underway to open a #COVID19 Community Assessment Centre in East Toronto in mid-March. Thank you to our partners for their continued collaboration, enabling us to move quickly to respond to the evolving COVID-19 situation: https://t.co/k2MHGgQwHd pic.twitter.com/KLC9NNSNip — MGH / TEHN (@MGHToronto) March 9, 2020

“I think what’s important to know for COVID-19, as we’ve seen around the world, is that it’s really more of a droplet infection, so it’s not airborne, it’s not kind of out, going into the vents,” Fam said.

“It is very much a droplet precaution, so you’d have to be quite close to someone to be getting it.”

CTV News Toronto spoke to a number of parents Monday afternoon, and none expressed any concerns about the school’s proximity to the screening centre.

“I feel good about it. I think they’re being proactive and I think it gives us a little bit of safety,” one mother told CTV News Toronto.

Fam said the city and province want to make sure the assessment centres are open before there is widespread community transmission of COVID-19.

“We’re planning to scale it up as the need arises. We’re planning to see 20 to 30 patients a day at first, [and] up to potentially 150 patients,” he said. “It really depends on what the community need is, so across the city, we’re thinking about how to scale these centres up.”

He said that officials want to make sure they are ready.

“We’re fortunate in Toronto to have really good pandemic plans to be ready for that, so we’re getting everything ready just in case,” he said.