Ontario reported 4,227 cases of COVID-19 on Friday, the second-highest on a single day at any point during the pandemic.
Canada’s most populous province logged 4,249 new infections on January 8, but 450 of those were attributed to a delay in releasing the data.
Ontario had reported 3,295 infections on Thursday and 3,215 infections on Wednesday, with the daily average hovering around 3,256 cases for the last week.
Meanwhile, to free up capacity for treatment of COVID-19 patients, provincial health authorities have ordered hospitals across most of Ontario to stop performing all but emergency and life-saving surgeries, CBC News reported Thursday.
“Given increasing case counts and widespread community transmission across many parts of the province, we are facing mounting and extreme pressure on our critical care capacity,” said Ontario Health CEO Matthew Anderson in the memo, obtained by CBC News.
“We are instructing hospitals to ramp down all elective surgeries and non-emergent/urgent activities in order to preserve critical care and human resource capacity,” said Anderson.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford, left, receives the Astrazeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine from pharmacist Anmol Soor at Shoppers Drug Mart during the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto on Friday, April 9, 2021. (Nathan Denette/THE CANADIAN PRESS)
The provincial health agency has also warned hospitals that they may be asked to send staff to harder-hit areas.
“We may request available health-care workers/teams to support care in other parts of the system,” said Anderson. “We may be asking you to identify available staff who might be redeployed to sites requiring support.”
The order comes with Ontario hospitals reporting a record number of patients critically ill with COVID-19 in the intensive care units.
Ontario has administered 2,940,166 doses of COVID-19 vaccines as of Friday, with 328,598 Ontarians being fully vaccinated, public health officials reported. That represents about 2.3 per cent of Ontario’s 14 million population.
With files from CBC News
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