OTTAWA (CU)_Canada is scrambling to deal with the deadly third wave of COVID-19. It appears to be ravaging several provinces in the country, which have broken records of new daily infections, as well as hospital and ICU admissions.
According to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the situation is particularly grave in the province of Ontario, with hospital beds and intensive care units filling up at record levels. The state government is struggling to reconstruct its COVID response plan after the reverse of lockdown measures on account of unprecedented civil pushback.
“Notice that our hospitals can no longer function normally, they are bursting at their seams,” Dr. Adalsteinn Brown, Ontario’s science advisory co-chair, said. “We’re setting up field hospitals and we’re separating critically ill patients from their families by helicoptering them across the province for care, our children’s hospitals are now admitting adults as patients. This has never happened in Ontario before, it’s never happened in Canada before.”
Meanwhile, on Sunday (18 April), the government lowered the age threshold from 55 to 40, in hopes to accelerate the province’s vaccine campaign which has been criticised for being too slow.
“We need to have an open mind,” Dr. Peter Juni, the scientific director of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, said. “We need to be aware that this age cut-off of 55 is sort of an arbitrary cut-off to find this balance between potential rare side effects – remember it’s rare, we’re talking probably a frequency of one in 100,000 – and the risk associated with COVID. The more the risk of being infected with COVID goes up, the more this age cut-off should move down.”
