The fifth wave can be blunted, but not likely flattened
Vaccines won’t be enough to blunt the next wave of COVID-19.
Ontario’s Science Advisory Table says a circuit breaker is needed.
That includes cutting personal contacts by half and strong booster shot campaigns.
But the Science Advisory Table’s Dr. Steini Brown said that doesn’t mean provincial stay-at-home or work-from-home orders or another lockdown.
He says the Omicron variant is likely already the dominant strain of COVID-19 in Ontario.
If no additional measures are taken, Dr. Brown painted a grim picture where Ontario could see nearly 10,000 daily cases as early as next week.
Coronavirus Masks
As the number of COVID-19 cases soars in Ontario, medical experts say it’s time Ontarians stepped up their protection.
With the Omicron variant spreading rapidly through the air, they say people should be abandoning any single-layer cloth masks they may have been using.
Instead, we should be using high-quality medical-style masks of at least three layers.
The government’s Science Advisory Table says we should be cutting our contacts as much as we can and the booster shot program should be expanded if we’re to head off the worst of the fifth wave of COVID-19.
Without this so-called “circuit-breaker,” its report says we could see ten-thousand new cases a day next week.
Coronavirus Aid
The Senate has passed the Trudeau government’s latest pandemic aid legislation, as Parliament adjourns for the Christmas break.
The legislation provides financial assistance to businesses that are ordered closed, and to workers sent home, as part of a local lockdown.
It also continues wage and rent subsidies to those still recovering from earlier pandemic limits.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland says, with another wave of COVID-19 cases building, the government will now move to make sure the 7.4-billion dollars is available quickly.
Cornavirus Tests
Tens of thousands of people lined up at malls and other pop-up sites across southern Ontario yesterday, as the provincial government made COVID-19 rapid testing kits widely available for the first time.
Most locations ran out of supplies in a couple of hours.
More spots across the province are expected to open up as the government holds what Premier Doug Ford calls a “vaccination blitz.”
Those include the first 100 of the LCBO’s 660 outlets, mostly in southern Ontario.
Testing kits are showing up for sale online, some at inflated prices.