Ontario, Canada says it’s in the third wave of Covid-19 – and officials fear vaccine rollout may not happen soon enough

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“We are in the third wave. The numbers are slowly going up, they are not moving as fast as predicted by the modellers,” said Dr. David Williams, the Chief Medical Officer for Ontario. He added, “We are now starting to see an impact on our hospital rates, our ICU admissions are up again, our hospital admissions are up again.”
It was sobering news for a province where the majority of residents have been in a state of incarceration since late last year.

Canadian public health officials also warned that vaccine rollouts would not be fast enough to halt a potentially devastating third wave in other parts of the country, further highlighting hospital capacity.

“COVID-19 activity has leveled off at a high level since mid-February and the mean daily number of cases is now rising,” said Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, Monday.

“As vaccine programs accelerate, it will be important to exercise a great deal of caution. Any relaxation of public health measures needs to be done slowly with improved testing, screening and genomic analysis to identify variants of concern,” she said in a statement. .

Canada has reported more than 938,000 suspected or confirmed cases of the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic and has recorded more than 22,000 deaths.

Public health officials have been warning for weeks that Canada risked a third wave, fueled by the variants that are more communicable and in some cases can lead to more serious illnesses.

A vaccine deficiency

Last month, as the country faced a severe vaccine shortage, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned that a third wave was a possibility.

“We need to continue to take strong public health measures,” Trudeau said during a Covid-19 update in February, because “otherwise we could see a third wave worse than the second or the first, and I know that not the news. you want to hear it. “

On Monday, he said shipments of vaccines will continue to increase and Canada is expected to receive as many as 2 million doses this week, the highest number it has received in one week since the approval of four vaccine candidates for emergency use.

But officials across the country are now facing the possibility that the vaccines will not be distributed in time to prevent a significant number of hospitalizations and deaths.

Also on Monday, the province of Alberta said it would delay reopenings as hospital admissions due to Covid-19 also increased.

“Half of those in a hospital bed for COVID are under the age of 65 and nearly 90% of those in an ICU for Covid are under the age of 65. Most of them would not be there if they had been vaccinated at the time,” Tyler Shandro, Alberta’s secretary of health, said Monday during a Covid-19 update.

While the B.1.1.7 variant, first discovered in the UK, fuels an increase in the number of cases in Alberta, the Secretary of Health also blamed the federal government for failing to secure sufficient vaccine doses in time to vaccinate the many people who are still at risk of being vaccinated. serious consequences.

Canada got a boost from the Biden government last week when the two countries struck a deal that would see the US release 1.5 million of its AstraZeneca doses to Canada in the coming days. The US is stockpiling the AstraZeneca vaccine until it receives FDA approval, which probably won’t take until next month.

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