Ontario is likely seeing upwards of 100,000 new cases of COVID-19 each day, with roughly five per cent of its residents currently infected, the head of the province’s science table says.
Peter Jüni made the comment in an interview with CP24 on Wednesday afternoon as he discussed a resurgence in COVID activity, which has now seen the number of people hospitalized with the virus increase by 40 per cent week-over-week.
“Based on our wastewater analysis, we just reached the peak we were at in early January and at that time, we were at about 100,000 to 120,000 new cases per day,” he said. “What it basically means is that roughly five per cent of the population of Ontario right now has an active infection.”
Jüni told CP24 last week that the actual number of daily infections in the province was likely 35,000 to 40,000 but since then, positivity rates have spiked and wastewater surveillance has pointed to even higher levels of COVID-19 in the community.
He told CP24 that while the more transmissible BA.2 sub variant is driving some of the resurgence, it is not the primary factor behind the rise in transmission.
He said that behavioral changes, brought about by the lifting of mask mandates for most settings, are, in fact, helping to push caseloads higher than were anticipated when the science table released its last modeling forecast three weeks ago.
At the time, it said that hospitalizations would likely rise to around 800 by May.
But as of Wednesday morning, there were 1,074 people in Ontario hospitals with COVID-19, with the strain on the health-care system showing no signs of easing anytime soon.
“BA.2 is a bit more transmissible than the original Omicron for sure, but what we are doing, and this is in line with the provincial communication, people just have charged their behavior dramatically,” Jüni said. “So it doesn’t correspond to what we presumed in our last projections when we assumed a moderate change in behaviour.”
Premier Doug Ford has insisted that the uptick in COVID-19 activity is not unexpected given the lifting of many public health restrictions and has expressed confidence that Ontario’s hospitals will be able to manage the increased patient volumes.
Some epidemiologists have, however, warned that the rapid rise in transmission could put vulnerable individuals at risk and ultimately lead to avoidable deaths.
They have also questioned whether there are sufficient health-care resources to staff the extra beds the province has claimed it has created.
“Mask-up. We are not through this yet. This wave will go high. It doesn’t mean we will see the same amount of hospitalizations necessarily, at least not if we have the same level of infection but remember we are still going up and we are already at the peak we were at last time,” Jüni warned on Wednesday.