Pace of injections drops over weekend
Province blames Ottawa for delivery delays as experts say campaign must pick up speed
The number of doses of COVID- 19 vaccines given out in Ontario took a steep drop over the weekend, even as new cases and deaths — especially in longtermcare homes — continue to rise.
On Saturday, the province gave 9,983 shots of the new vaccines, down from 15,700 on Friday, a drop of more than 5,700, according to provincial data. The trend continued on Sunday when just 8,859 doses were administered.
“I would see that as a fail,” said Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist at the University of Toronto.
“We need 100,000 jabs a day ( in Ontario) to get herd immunity by the end of the summer, which is what the federal government promised. That’s conservative. Every day we don’t do that, we’re actually driving that number higher to make up for it. That’s a really serious issue.”
To date, Ontario has received 143,325 doses of the Pfizer- BioNTech vaccine and 52,800 doses of the Moderna vaccine, for a total of just over 196,000. ( Each person requires two doses, given several weeks apart.)
As of 8 p. m. Sunday, a total of 122,105 doses had been given to Ontarians, according to provincial numbers, meaning the province has administered 62 per cent of all doses it has received from the federal government.
As of Monday night, nearly 8,000 doses had been administered to long- term- care residents in Ontario, according to the province. That number is an underestimation because it does not account for paperbased reports not yet entered into the provincial database.
Ontario is expecting to receive an additional 80,000 doses of the Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccine and 56,000 more doses of the Moderna vaccine this week from the federal government. That would bring the total doses received by the province to more than 330,000.
A health ministry spokesperson, Christian Hasse, said the province has exhausted its initial shipment of Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccines and, by the end of this week, will run out of an additional 48,000 Pfizer doses that arrived last week.
“As a result of limited supply, several hospitals were unable to continue vaccinating over the weekend,” he said. “We need the federal government to deliver more COVID- 19 vaccines as soon as possible to keep up with Ontario’s capacity to administer.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday the federal government’s goal remains to vaccinate every Canadian who wants it by September.
Dr. Kevin Smith, president and CEO of the University Health Network, tweeted Friday that the hospital had used up all of its vaccine that day, despite having 3,000 people booked on each of the next three days. The hospital was able, however, to vaccinate all of its partner long- term- care homes before the weekend.
Ontario has been criticized for regular low weekend activity in other areas of its pandemic response, most notably testing.
Since May 2020, the province’s assessment centres have typically collected far fewer patient samples on weekends and holidays than on weekdays, a fact that regularly leaves Ontario’s testing labs starting each week operating below their full capacity to analyze tests.
This fact leads to weekly updown cycles in cases counts and test positivity, patterns that experts say may make it more difficult to interpret the trajectory of the second wave.
“The fact is that our actual vaccine supply across all the provinces and territories continues to actually outstrip the number of vaccines that have been administered,” said Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at the Sinai Health System and the University Health Network.
Sinha has been urging the provincial government to get all of Ontario’s 72,000 long- termcare residents vaccinated within a two- week time frame, a goal he said is achievable when looking at what other countries have done. As an example, he pointed to Israel, which has vaccinated 72 per cent of its citizens over the age of 60, including long- term- care residents. Israel leads the world in COVID19 vaccine doses administered per capita.
Ontario has had “more than enough” doses available since Dec. 21 to vaccinate its longtermcare population, he said.
The province says it will ensure all residents, health- care workers and essential caregivers in long- term care in Toronto,
Peel Region, York Region and Windsor- Essex will receive a shot by Jan. 21. On Monday, Windsor- Essex became the first health unit in Ontario to administer the vaccine at all of its long- term- care homes, the province added.
Sinha pointed out there are still more than 250 long- termcare homes in the province with active outbreaks, many of them in regions of rapidly growing community spread outside these four priority public health units.
More than 740 residents and two staffers of long- term- care homes in Ontario have died of COVID- 19 since Dec. 1. The number of active cases of the virus has more than doubled to 1,502 since Dec. 1, when 664 cases were reported.
Todd Coleman, an epidemiologist at Wilfrid Laurier University, said any hiccups in the administration of the vaccine need to be identified and fixed quickly so that more people can get the vaccine faster.
“It concerns me that we’re still seeing rising cases and we’re seeing records being broken every day,” he said, noting that we’ve known since the spring that a vaccine would play a big role in curbing the pandemic.
“This isn’t the time to be figuring this out. We’ve had three quarters of a year to prepare. The seeming lack of preparedness would leave me a little worried that the level of coordination isn’t very efficient at this point.” be vaccinated” calculator.