“Canada continues to face an incredibly serious situation with this third wave, cases are growing rapidly in many cases, in many places, the number is higher than they have been so far and many hospitals are far too thin,” he said. -Minister Justin Trudeau said during a press conference Friday in Ottawa.
He said the situation was particularly dire in Ontario, with Toronto now noticing broken records and hospital beds filling up.
Ontario broke several pandemic records on Friday for daily cases, hospitalizations and intensive care admissions.
“There is every reason to believe that we are now in the last stage, although the hardest part of this pandemic is not the time to give up, not even for a second,” Trudeau said, adding. what is, hopefully, the very late stages of this pandemic for all of us. “
There has been a 35% increase in hospitalizations and a more than 20% increase in ICU hospitalizations in the last week alone, public health officials said. More worrying is the 38% increase in deaths in the last week, they said.
The situation is particularly serious in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province.
“You notice that our hospitals can no longer function normally, but they are exploding,” said Dr. Adalsteinn Brown, co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Board, Ontario. “We set up field hospitals and separate critically ill patients from their families by helicoptering them to the province for care, our children’s hospitals now admit adults as patients. This has never happened in Ontario, Canada before. ”
Based on new pandemic projections, the demand for acute care is expected to increase in the coming weeks, no matter how many restrictions are implemented, Brown said.
Strict strict lock-in measures in Ontario
Late Friday, Ontario extended its state of emergency and home stay order until at least May 15.
The province has said it will also restrict interprovincial travel and raise checkpoints to implement that mandate, while ordering the closure of non-essential construction from Saturday.
All outdoor recreation activities, such as golf courses, playgrounds, basketball courts and football fields, will be closed. And even outdoor gathering with people who do not live in the same household will be banned. Internal meetings between households have been banned since the beginning of this month.
All of Canada’s largest provinces are struggling to contain the effect of variations, especially in the low-income pockets of Canada’s largest cities.
“The relative risk of these variants compared to the older version of COVID is much higher, higher for admission, higher for intensive care and higher for mortality. And it affects younger populations, much less than the inoculum or virus load. which causes the infection very quickly, “said Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer, during an update Friday in Toronto.
Trudeau resounded with the fatigue of millions of Canadians who have gone through many months of blockages and restrictions, revealing that he had an argument with his 13-year-old son on Friday morning, telling him that public health measures are still needed.
“Xavier is 13 years old and he misses his friends, he doesn’t want to go to school online, he wants to go out and play basketball with his friends, he wants to have the normal life that, honestly, we all want right now,” “But the reality is that we know that the best way to go about this is for each of us to abide by local public health rules. ”