TORONTO – The Ontario government is seriously considering a new tightening to curb the infection curve. Yesterday Doug Ford met with his ministers and with the health control room led by Chief Medical Officer David William to examine a new set of measures to be activated immediately to counter the race of Covid-19 in the province that now seems out of control. Despite the closure of schools, despite the entry into force of the obligation to stay at home, despite the closure and restrictions applied to businesses and businesses considered non-essential, every twenty-four hours in Ontario have broken all previous records for the various indicators used during this pandemic: number of infections, hospitalizations, intensive care admissions, deaths, and coronavirus transmission rate.
Every option is on the table, every possible restrictive instrument is not excluded a priori, not even those that had previously been discarded during the first and second wave of the pandemic. Among the hypotheses at stake, the possible curfew for the night hours, the blocking of travel between different areas of the province, the tightening of fines for all those who violate the rules, protocols and guidelines activated by the health authority and the temporary closure of other sectors of the provincial productive fabric that until now have remained open.
The main objective is to relieve the burden on Ontario hospitals and in particular intensive care, with a lack of beds and staff trained in the use of assisted breathing machinery.
If the government decides to activate new restrictions, it intends to act very quickly: if the green light were to come, there would already be an announcement of the new measures that would now come into force as early as tomorrow. But nothing has yet been decided. The fact is, in any case, that the government must somehow change gears, especially on the vaccine front. The excuse of the lack of doses no longer holds up in the face of the numbers that are provided daily by covid19tracker.ca who have laid bare the inefficiency with which provincial authorities are managing the doses that are sent by federal ones. According to the new data, Ottawa has invited Ontario 4,852,885 doses and used 3,528,404 of them until yesterday: more than 1.3 million doses remain unused. In 24 hours, the situation even worsened, given that there were 1,083,521 unused doses on Wednesday. At this rate we can no longer go on: yesterday 105 thousand people were vaccinated in Ontario, but the stocks of doses increased by more than 200 thousand units. The province’s vaccination campaign is resoundingly failing and it is clear that it is necessary for the government to intervene to reorganize the entire logistical and organizational plan.
