Ontario’s second wave now deadlier than first,

With almost 3,000 dead, coronavirus’s second wave hits grim milestone

Ontario marked a tragic milestone Friday as the number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the virus’s second wave surpassed the tally recorded during the first wave.

According to the province’s data, 2,813 Ontarians died of COVID-19 in the first wave before Ontario’s death toll fell to its lowest point Sept. 8. As of Friday, a further 2,888 deaths have been reported since.

“We’re hopefully at or around the peak of the second wave, but that means there are still a lot more deaths that will happen in the coming weeks,” said Ashleigh Tuite, an infectious disease epidemiologist and mathematical modeller at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

“A lot of scientists and people working in public health over the summer were very vocal about the fact that, in the absence of a really strong response, we would expect the second wave to be worse than the first wave, given what we’ve seen in other pandemics. So unfortunately I would say this is not unexpected. It wasn’t inevitable,” Tuite said.

“It speaks to our lack of preparedness.”

Although there is no official dividing line between the province’s first and second wave, as of Friday, Ontario’s Wave 2 has seen more reported deaths by any reasonable choice of date.

By any of these dates — July 31, when Toronto and Peel joined most of the province in Stage 3 of reopening, Aug. 31 when provincewide infections hit a low before starting to rise again, or Sept. 8, when schools reopened for in-person learning — Ontario’s second-wave death toll passed Wave 1 sometime this week.

“We always knew that a second wave was inevitable more or less and it was likely to be larger than the first wave, absent the mitigation tools that were going to be in place,” said Raywat Deonandan, an associate professor and epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa.

“So many of us, myself included, assumed that when the first wave was done we had learned what to do,” Deonandan said, noting measures we should have taken included heavy investment in contact tracing, better protecting long-termcare centres, preventing healthcare workers from working at more than one workplace and improving ventilation.

“We didn’t do what we were supposed to do. … Even if we didn’t avoid the large number of cases in the second wave, it was foreseeable that the same population would be susceptible, that being the long-term-care and retirement home populations, and yet they were not sufficiently hardened (to the virus),” he said.

“We continue to see the same kind of failure and missteps with our inability to inoculate long-term-care centres in Ontario fast enough even though we knew they were going to be the ones who died,” Deonandan added.

Also on Friday, the province reported 2,662 new cases of the virus, lowering the seven-day rolling average to 2,703 cases daily.

Of the 87 deaths reported in Ontario on Thursday, the vast majority (92 per cent) were people aged 70 and over. Of those, 20 were in their 70s, 29 were in their 80s and 31 were in their 90s.

Dionne Aleman, a University of Toronto professor and expert in pandemic modelling, said the magnitude of the second wave was so large it makes sense the number of second-wave deaths exceeded those seen in the first wave.

She stressed the need for COVID-19 vaccinations to take place as fast as possible, not only to stop deaths but also to prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

“Hospitalizations are a very serious concern right now. Our health system is almost on the brink of catastrophe,” Aleman said.

“Fortunately, with the latest stay-at-home mandate, it does seem that the provincial numbers are finally decreasing, which is good and which does hopefully tell us that, in another week or two, since hospitalizations are a lagging indicator, those numbers will start to come down.”