TORONTO – The risk of a new lockdown is increasingly real in Ontario. The threat posed by the new Omicron variant has prompted the provincial government to adopt some restrictions that they had already seen during the first three waves of the pandemic, but the Canadian scientific community believes that these measures are too bland to hope to contain the increase in infections. 

For now, the executive led by Prime Minister Doug Ford has decided to adopt a double strategy to try to contain the risks related to the new strain of Covid: on the one hand the acceleration of the administration of the third dose of the vaccine, on the other the activation of restrictions that mainly concern the capacity limits in non-essential stores and in structures capable of accommodating more than a thousand people, such as stadiums, sports halls, arenas, theater and cinema. Quebec, which recorded more than 5,000 cases yesterday, has put in place much harsher restrictions and all signs indicate that Ontario will soon be forced to follow the same path.

Meanwhile, in the face of the substantial immobility of the government, health facilities begin to self-organize to try to avoid the worst-case scenario, that is, that a possible uncontrolled number of hospitalizations and hospitalizations in intensive care will jeopardize the entire system: many hospitals, including St. Michael’s Hospital, St. Joseph’s Healthcare and Providence Healthcare, have decided to postpone less important surgical operations, while the crackdown on patient visits within hospital facilities has arrived.

In the meantime, to give a little sense of the serious emergency we are experiencing, came the words of Theresa Tam, who yesterday participated in a private meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take stock of the situation.

According to the federal Chief Medical Officer, the priority is to reduce contacts and iterations between people to break – or at least curb – the chain of contagion, also because Omicron has already abundantly demonstrated in Canada and in the rest of the world to be more contagious than previous variants of Covid-19. And it would be of little importance, according to Tam, if the new variant proved to be less dangerous than the others.

“Even if Omicron were to manifest with milder symptoms and medical consequences, the ability to infect more quickly would lead to a situation where our hospitals may no longer be able to sustain the number of admissions.”

In short, the situation is destined to worsen before improving, a consideration that unfortunately we have already made too many times since the beginning of the pandemic.
The spectre of the lockdown is therefore becoming more and more concrete, in Ontario and in the rest of the country.