“We need to disconnect, this is our best path for the coming winter weeks,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during a press conference Friday in Ottawa. “We’ve seen the kind of impossible options that hospitals in other countries have had to face when they overflow, deciding who will get a bed for ICU and who won’t. Well, that’s not where we want to be.”
The vast majority of Canadians have been dealing with weeks of home orders, and yet the daily count of cases, at best, has risen to high levels.
More worryingly, government officials say Covid-19-related deaths are steadily rising and could soon exceed levels observed during the first peak.
“We have yet to see the kind of widespread and sustained declines in the daily count of cases that would indicate we are controlling the pandemic nationwide,” said Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s head of public health during a briefing on Friday.
Health officials on Friday launched a new model that showed the Covid-19 remains on a “rapid growth trajectory” across most of Canada.
Hospitalizations and the number of daily cases have already exceeded those of the first peak of spring. Earlier this week, the province of Ontario warned that one in four of its hospitals had run out of ICU beds.
Data released on Friday shows that Canada now has an average of more than 4,700 people treated in hospital on a given day, with nearly 20% of those patients in the ICU.
All this is happening despite the blockades that already exist in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Taken together, this means that more than 60% of Canadians are subject to home orders, with most shops and restaurants closed for anything other than pick-up or delivery.
Health officials on Friday called on provincial leaders to maintain strict measures with health systems at a critical and already overloaded point.
“If we lighten the measures too soon, the epidemic will resurface even more, so the measures need to be consistent and sustained long enough to suppress the growth of the epidemic to allow for lasting control,” Tam said.
The bad prognosis comes when Canada announced that it would receive fewer Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines in the coming weeks. The company announced a temporary slowdown in its European factories.
“Pfizer believes that by the end of March we will be able to catch up, so we will be on track with the total doses committed during the first quarter. This is unfortunate, however, we must wait for these delays and problems when the global supply chains stretched far beyond their limits, “Canada’s purchasing minister Anita Anand told a news conference on Friday.
Canadian government data reveals that just over 1% of Canadians have been vaccinated so far. Given the growing problems with vaccine supply, health officials say the release will be too slow to have a significant impact on infection rates over the coming months.
“This kind of issue is out of our hands,” Trudeau said, adding, “I want to be very clear, that doesn’t affect our goal of having enough vaccines available by September for all Canadians who want them.”