Health officials are calling it a “critical” time for the province as new modelling predicts Ontario could reach 2,500 Covid-19 cases a day by mid-December, and even as a high as 6,500 cases a day if there’s a higher growth rate.
That’s the best and worst scenarios released this afternoon.
“The key indicators of the pandemic continue to worsen across the province. The impact of these indicators and the level of these indicators does vary across public health units, but it continues to worsen across the province overall,” says Dr. Adalstein Brown, co-chair of the Ontario Covid-19 Science Advisory Table and Dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at U of T. “Other countries that have allowed substantial case growth have now found it very hard to turn that curve and arrest that case growth.”
Long-term care home cases are growing among both residents and staff, and mortality in these settings are growing substantially.
Brown adds hospitalizations have seen a 61 per cent increase over the past three weeks.
“Now, it is still a relatively low number of hospitalizations, compared to the total number of hospital beds in this Province,” he said. “But it’s important to keep in mind as well that our hospitals run very close to capacity at all times and particularly given the access to care deficit that built up in the first wave, this makes it very challenging to actually get caught up and provide people with the care that they need.”
The other expectation is the Province’s ICU capacity will grow over a threshold which will mean surgeries will have to be cancelled.
Brown says Ontario’s case numbers will likely exceed several jurisdictions in Europe — including the United Kingdom and France — that have gone back into some form of lockdown.