Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has warned Canadians that measures for public health, including restrictions on indoor social gatherings, should continue for weeks as new Covid-19 variants and a slow explosion of the vaccine could pose a dangerous third wave of the virus.
“We must continue to take strong public health measures,” Trudeau said at a news conference on Friday, “otherwise we may see a third wave that is even worse than the second or the first, and I know this is not the news you do not want to hear. “
Canadian public health officials on Friday released a disturbing new model indicating that even current public health measures will not be enough to curb a third wave if fueled by the rapidly spreading variant of Covid-19.
“We need to make sure that while provinces are looking at the weakening of certain constraints, that other constraints are being held, and that there is the ability to … respond quickly when variants appear,” Trudeau said.
The new modeling highlights the fact that “variants of concern” have now been detected in all provinces and are still spreading. Based on the projections released by public health officials, the current public health measures would not be enough to limit the spread of the virus by spring if the new, more contagious variants take hold.
A resurgence is most likely if people abandon social health measures now. What you want to do is keep trying to avoid this yo-yoing effect of ups and downs. You have to avoid total exclusions and curfews and all that by trying to maintain a strong level of public health measures, ‘said Dr. Theresa Tam, the head of Canada’s public health officer, said during a modeling presentation on Friday.
The province of Ontario announced Friday that the city of Toronto and one of its neighboring regions will remain in a trap, with a home order, until at least March 8, as the threat of the spread of new variants continues to affect health officials.
Canada remains quite vulnerable to a third wave, as the new Covid-19 variants continue to spread and vaccination vaccines across the country are painfully slow.
“We need more vaccines, more vaccines will solve big problems,” Ontario Prime Minister Doug Ford told a news conference in Toronto on Friday.
Like other provinces and territories in Canada, Ontario has succeeded in vaccinating the vast majority of residents and staff in long-term care homes. The residents are still the ones most vulnerable to Covid-19 in Canada.
But there is no significant explosion of vaccines in other vulnerable groups other than indigenous communities. The captain who led the deployment of vaccines in Ontario described the situation as a ‘vaccination drought’.
“We did not waste our time while in the drought, with a minimal amount of vaccines to use, which we did to prepare for the day when more is coming,” retired Genl. Rick Hillier said at a news conference. in Toronto Friday.
Hillier said his vaccine task force will now give health care workers priority over “patient-centered”, among other risk groups, and says he expects the scarcity of doses against the vaccine to improve over the next few weeks.