COVID-19 is on the rise again, but politicians are acting like the pandemic is over
Now it’s April, and the expected consequences of those decisions – which were made just as a highly contagious Omicron subvariant, BA.2, was becoming dominant – are arriving right on schedule.
On Thursday, the province reported 807 people in hospital with COVID-19, the first time since March 4 that the number topped 800.Dr. Peter Juni, director of Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Table, said this week that the levels of COVID-19 found in wastewater are back to those seen in the winter Omicron wave that killed more than 7,000 Canadians.It’s still too early to say whether the current numbers are the early warning signs of a huge wave that could swamp provincial health care systems.
Provinces have also cut back on testing, which means the limited testing they still do is an unreliable measure of how widespread the disease is. Federal data on Thursday showed that the country is now doing a seven-day average of 109 tests per 100,000 people on a daily basis. That’s a quarter of the testing done three months ago.
That added protection could make all the difference. But it’s not surprising that, at a time when governments are telling people it’s safe to go without a mask, and that two shots is considered “fully vaccinated,” a tired population isn’t eagerly lining up for boosters.
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