Ontario lockdown: Canada enters house arrest as officials warn of impending ‘collapse’ of healthcare system

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The new order will take effect Thursday and will cover Toronto and Ottawa. It is the second of its kind since the start of the pandemic.

“I stood here last week telling you our province is in crisis,” Doug Ford, Ontario’s prime minister, said at a news conference in Toronto on Tuesday. “The facts are clear: cases and deaths are the highest since the start of the pandemic and the spread of the community continues to escalate.”

For at least four weeks, the Ontario government will “require everyone to stay at home, with exceptions for essential purposes, such as going to the grocery store or pharmacy, accessing healthcare, for exercise, or for essential work,” a statement provided to CNN .

All non-essential shopping and personal dining have been closed since Christmas Day in Ontario and in Toronto since late November. Schools in Ontario’s hot spots, including Toronto and the suburbs, won’t be learning in person until February 10.

Sign urging customers to only touch items they want to buy at a Walmart store during the new coronavirus pandemic in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on January 8, 2021.

“We need to change our mobility patterns, too many people have too many contacts. More contacts are the result of increased mobility,” said Christine Elliott, Ontario’s health minister. “To break this cycle you have to stay at home as much as possible and that starts with a stay-at-home order.”

Officials pledged strict enforcement of the new restrictions and warned people who violate the measures could face a fine of thousands of dollars and up to a year in prison.

Ontario ICUs are already nearing capacity

Canada’s second wave of Covid-19 is now more widespread and more serious than the first, with a seven-day national average of 8,100 new cases per day, a pandemic peak, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Ontario public health officials warned at a press conference on Tuesday that one in four ICUs in Ontario was already full and the hospital system was in danger of being overwhelmed.

Officials also said the UK variant of Covid-19 could become the dominant variant in Ontario in less than two months if left unchecked. The variant is at least 56% more transmissible than previous variants and if it were to spread it would mean that vaccines have no significant effect on mortality or morbidity given the current slow vaccine rollout.
Trudeau warns of difficult days ahead as Canadian officials consider extended Covid-19 lockdowns

Ontario has reported 14 cases of new variants in the province, but officials said it is more alarming the discovery of three unrelated cases this week that could indicate the variant is already in the community and spreading.

“In three of our cases, we have no travel history,” said Dr. Barbara Yaffe, Ontario’s chief of medical health. “If that is confirmed, we have evidence of community transmission and that is a very serious concern that the vaccine will not be able to address quickly enough.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government will purchase 20 million additional doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, adding that Canada would have at least 80 million doses of the vaccine available by the fall. Canada is also currently administering the Moderna vaccine.

Trudeau reiterated his promise that any Canadian who wanted the vaccine would be vaccinated by September.

“We are doing everything we can to bring forward more doses, to speed up the process,” Trudeau said at a press conference from Ottawa on Tuesday. “Because we know that the sooner we get as many Canadians vaccinated as possible, the sooner we’ll get through this pandemic.”

CNN’s Elizabeth Hartfield contributed to this report.

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