“Canada continues to face an incredibly serious situation with this third wave, cases are rising rapidly in many cases, in many places, the figures are higher than they have been so far and many hospitals are too cramped,” he said. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during a press conference Friday in Ottawa.
He said the situation was particularly dire in Ontario, as Toronto now saw records broken and hospital beds filled.
Ontario on Friday broke more pandemic records in daily cases, hospitalizations and intensive care admissions.
“There’s every reason to believe we’re now on the final stretch, even though it’s the hardest of this pandemic, this is not the time to let it go, not even for a second,” Trudeau said, adding : “This is the time for us to dig deep into what we hope will be the later stages of this pandemic for all.”
There was a 35% increase in hospitalizations and a more than 20% increase in ICU admissions in the last week alone, public health officials said. More worrying is the 38% increase in deaths last week, they said.
The situation is particularly dire in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province.
“Note that our hospitals can no longer function normally as they burst their seams,” said Dr. Adalsteinn Brown, Ontario’s co-chair of scientific advice. “We are setting up field hospitals and separating critical patients from their families by helicopter across the province to care for them. Our children’s hospitals now admit adults as patients. This has never happened in Ontario, it has never happened. in Canada before ”
Based on new pandemic projections, the demand for acute care is expected to increase in the coming weeks, regardless of how many restrictions are put in place, Brown said.
Strict blockade measures were extended to Ontario
On Friday afternoon, Ontario extended its state of emergency and its request to stay home until at least May 15th.
The province said it would also restrict interprovincial travel and raise checkpoints to enforce that mandate, ordering non-essential construction to be closed from Saturday.
All outdoor recreational activities such as golf courses, playgrounds, basketball courts and football fields will be closed. And it will even be forbidden to meet outdoors with people who do not live in the same house. Indoor meetings between homes have been banned since the beginning of this month.
All of Canada’s largest provinces are poised to contain the effect of variants, especially in the low-income pockets of Canada’s largest cities.
“The relative risk of these variants compared to the previous version of COVID is much higher, higher for admission, higher for ICU and higher for mortality. And it affects younger populations with much less inoculum or load of viruses that cause infection very quickly, ”said Dr. David Williams, chief health care professional in Ontario during an update Friday in Toronto.
Trudeau echoed the fatigue of millions of Canadians who have now gone through many months of blockades and restrictions, revealing that on Friday morning he had an argument with his 13-year-old son, telling him that public health measures were 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 to play basketball with his friends, he wants to have the normal life that frankly we all want right now,” he said. the reality is that we know that the best way to overcome this is for each of us to follow local public health standards. ”