Ontario health officials are expected to hold a news conference on COVID-19 Friday at 1 p.m. at Queen’s Park.
Premier Doug Ford is expected to hold a second news conference at 2:30 p.m. following an emergency cabinet meeting.
You can watch both news conferences live in this story.
Ontario reported 939 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday — its highest-ever daily number of new cases.
It is also the second day in a row the province is seeing record-breaking daily figures, trumping the previous record of 797 set Thursday. Doctors are also sounding the alarm about an increased number of COVID-19 patients being admitted to intensive care units.
Friday’s update has prompted Premier Doug Ford’s cabinet to hold an emergency meeting to consider tighter public health measures to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus. That meeting was set to begin at 11 a.m., and Ford is scheduled to hold a news conference at 2:30 p.m. ET, which you’ll be able to watch live in this story.
The increase, while startling, is consistent with modelling from epidemiologists who forecast last month that Ontario’s second wave of the pandemic was accelerating at a pace that put the province on track to hit 1,000 new cases per day by mid-October.
Toronto, Peel, and Ottawa continue to account for the majority of the province’s daily figures, with 336, 150, and 126 cases respectively, Health Minister Christine Elliott said in a series of tweets.
Other areas that saw double-digit increases include:
- Halton Region: 59
- Simcoe-Muskoka: 28
- Durham Region: 32
- Hamilton: 40
- Middlesex-London: 24
- Waterloo Region: 13
- York Region: 68
- Windsor-Essex: 18
- Niagara Region: 10
- Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph: 16
Friday’s update brings the province’s total to 57,681 cases of the virus since the outbreak began in late January.
There are 225 patients currently hospitalized in Ontario, a significant increase from yesterday’s figure of 206. However, the number of patients admitted to intensive care has remained the same at 47, and the number of patients on a ventilator has nearly halved from 49 to 29.
An additional 724 cases of COVID-19 are now considered resolved, bringing the province’s total number of resolved cases to 49,032.
Sources say restrictions recommended for hot spots
The government’s pandemic advisers will recommend cabinet put Ontario’s COVID-19 hot spots under a modified version of the province’s Stage 2 restrictions, according to two sources.
The measures being recommended to cabinet Friday include the closure of:
- Indoor food and drink service in restaurants, bars, nightclubs and food courts.
- Cinemas, casinos and conference venues.
- Gyms and fitness centres.
Cabinet is also being urged to put capacity limits on real estate open houses and guided tours and to shutter interactive exhibits at tourist attractions, such as museums where there is a high risk of transmission of the virus. Team sports would be limited to training activities, with no games or scrimmages permitted.
The recommended closures do not extend to schools, child-care centres, colleges, universities or courtrooms.
Two additional sources said the recommendation is to apply the stricter measures to Toronto, Peel Region and Ottawa. The nation’s capital has seen a sharp rise in new COVID-19 cases over recent weeks, along with outbreaks and deaths in long-term care homes.
Toronto Mayor John Tory called the recent surge in numbers “troubling.”
“The status quo is not acceptable,” he said on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning on Friday. He said he hopes provincial regulations revert back to “more like what we were doing last spring…with some more latitude to be out and about.”
For Stage 2 of Ontario’s reopening plan, which was in place during May and June, bars and restaurants were banned from seating customers indoors, cinemas and gyms were closed and schools remained shut.
Dr. David Williams, the province’s chief medical officer of health, indicated during a news conference Thursday afternoon that he has recommended tighter restrictions to cabinet but declined to offer any specifics.
Toronto’s medical officer of health Dr. Eileen de Villa asked the province last week to order a 28-day closure of indoor service at restaurants, as well as indoor fitness and recreation facilities, to try to rein in the spread of COVID-19 in the city.
Under strain
This all comes with many hospitals in the province filled to capacity and intensive care units in some GTA hospitals reporting few available beds.
The Ontario Hospital Association urged the province on Sept. 28 to put the GTA and Ottawa back to Stage 2, with restriction on indoor dining and bars, places of worship, weddings, gyms, movie theatres and other non-essential businesses.
The province’s COVID-19 testing system is also under strain, with appointments at assessment centres in the hardest-hit areas being snapped up shortly after they become available and some people having to wait days to get tested. The Ministry of Health last week changed the criteria to get a test, limiting eligibility primarily to people with symptoms of COVID-19 or those who’ve been exposed to a confirmed case.
Nearly one-tenth of Ontario’s 4,800 publicly-funded schools have reported cases of COVID-19, and a similar proportion of the 630 long-term care homes in the province are battling outbreaks of the coronavirus.
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