“Honestly, it’s scary to see that things are growing day by day at home and around the world,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during a press conference in Ottawa on Friday when he asked Canadians to follow health guidelines while getting vaccinated. distributed. the country.
“The amount of Pfizer and the Moderna vaccine will increase in February,” he said. “Remember that Canada has the most vaccines per capita in the world, which means that by September we will have enough vaccines for every Canadian who wants them.”
Some provincial leaders have said that federal authorities have not yet delivered enough doses to meet the demand for vaccinations for priority groups such as health workers and residents of long-term care centers.
Anxiety about vaccinations comes as Canada’s second wave of pandemic hospitals suffers, with admissions higher than hospitalizations during the first wave.
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, the country’s 7-day average for new daily cases is about 7,600. There are currently more than 4,300 people in the hospital and more than 800 patients in critical care – a record number.
Provinces close amid boom
Canada is experiencing a boom after the holidays, although most Canadians have been told not to meet with anyone outside their household for the holidays.
Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, has warned that its hospital system is at a breaking point and that it will soon be necessary to transfer patients from region to region when beds are full.
“There’s going to be a wake-up call, a real wake-up call,” Ontario’s premier Doug Ford told a news conference on Friday.
And Ontario could be next, Ford suggested, saying people should “stay home to save lives.”
“If these basic measures are still ignored, the consequences will be worse. The closure does not end at the end of January and we will have to look at more extreme measures,” he said.
The province of Manitoba, like most other Canadian provinces, on Friday extended its exclusion by two weeks, citing 355 new Covid-19 cases directly related to holiday conventions. Officials noted that these positive cases could have infected more than 1,900 other people, and some stated that they had attended meetings with more than two dozen people.
For the first time during this pandemic, Canadian health officials in many provinces are beginning to deplete the training capacity of hospitals, with Ontario in particular creating and staffing more ICU beds.
“In fact, today’s numbers are narrow. It’s going the wrong way,” he said. Barbara Yaffe, co-head of health in Ontario, said during a press conference on Friday, while Ontario broke a one-day record for new cases.
“We have more and more people being admitted to the hospital, more and more people in ventilators. Hospitals are starting to save on surgeries and other important procedures that ICUs need. We have more and more outbreaks in community care, especially long-term care. We have increased ‘rates of positivity are increasing, even now in children,’ she said.
CNN’s Dakin Andone contributed to this report.