MAKING PROGRESS
Canada has seen nearly 30 per cent drop in active COVID-19 cases over past two weeks
Canada has seen nearly a 30 per cent drop in active COVID-19 cases over the past two weeks, but the country’s chief public health officer says strict measures should remain in place as more contagious variants of the virus threaten to derail this downward trend.
In a daily update Thursday, Dr. Theresa Tam said there are 48,221active COVID-19 cases in Canada, down from more than 68,400 cases two weeks ago. Tam said the daily federal tally has also been trending downwards, with an average of 4,061 new infections reported per day over the past week.
She said this slowdown has led to a gradual decline in severe COVID-19 outcomes. Over the past seven days, an average of 3,711 patients were treated in hospitals each day, including 792 in intensive care. Even with this decline, Tam said the current caseload continues to burden local health-care resources, particularly in regions with high infection rates.
“The risk remains that trends could reverse quickly,” Tam said in a statement, noting that the spread of the virus is accelerating in some parts of the country and outbreaks continue to occur in high-risk communities. “These factors underscore the importance of sustaining public health measures and individual practices and not easing restrictions too fast or too soon.
“This is particularly important in light of the emergence of new virus variants of concern that could rapidly accelerate transmission of COVID-19 in Canada.”
Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller echoed this call for continued vigilance Thursday as his department reported that the number of people with COVID-19 in First Nations communities has declined to the lowest point since Dec. 6, with 1,869 active cases reported as of Wednesday.
Miller said more than 64,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered to First Nations on reserve, Inuit and in the territories as of Feb. 3. But as authorities wait to see how Canada-wide delays in vaccine shipments will impact the rollout, Miller warned this isn’t the time to let down our guards.
Meanwhile, every COVID-19 vaccine maker Canada signed a contract with last summer was asked if they could make the doses in Canada and all of them concluded they could not, Procurement Minister Anita Anand said Thursday.
Anand told the House of Commons industry committee that her department “proactively and repeatedly approached leading vaccine manufacturers” about the matter.
Many of the COVID-19 vaccine makers sought partners to help produce their product, but Canada’s biomanufacturing industry has shrunk considerably in the last half century and investments dried up.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced earlier this week Canada has a new contract with Maryland-based Novavax to eventually make doses of its vaccine at a new National Research Council facility going up in Montreal. But that building won’t be finished until the summer and the new doses are not likely to start being pumped out until late fall at the earliest, long after Canada expects to import enough doses to vaccinate the entire population.
Vaccine manufacturing will be newly available at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan next year, and at Precision Nanosystems in British Columbia in 2023. But none of that helps Canada make doses of COVID-19 vaccines today.