Regions get provincial OK to start reopening
Ontario easing COVID restrictions despite warnings of third wave
Residents in more than two dozen regions of the province — including parts of the GTA — will be able to get their hair cut and have dinner out next week as the province eases COVID-19 restrictions despite concerns that highly contagious new variants could trigger a third wave.
The changes for Halton and Durham regions, among others, take effect Tuesday under measures announced by Premier Doug Ford’s government to give struggling businesses more leeway after a sharp drop in cases from weeks in a province-wide stay-at-home order.
But they follow a warning from scientists advising the premier and chief medical officer Dr. David Williams that strains like the B.1.1.7 variant, which was first found in the United Kingdom, will cause infections to spike again unless transmission rates are lowered, vaccinations increased and most businesses remain closed.
“We’re doing a little bit of a balance and letting small businesses open up very, very cautiously,” Ford said Friday, shortly before the province detailed how restrictions will ease to varying degrees in 27 regional health units.
Halton, Durham and Hamilton are among 11 regions heading into the red zone of precautions, one below lockdown, with 16 other regions facing even fewer restrictions.
Just because residents can do more things doesn’t mean they have to or that the risks are over, Ford said, urging people to stick with masks, physical distancing and hand washing.
“Please stay at home. Please don’t be travelling. Please don’t have people over to the house,” the premier added. “We saw what happened before and we don’t want it to happen again.”
Critics predicted region-hopping will occur with Toronto and the regions of Peel and York remaining under stay-at-home restrictions until at least Feb. 22, while Halton and Durham regions will be allowed to reopen hair salons, barber shops and restaurants and gyms with limits of 10 patrons indoors.
Ontario Hospital Association president Anthony Dale called the reopenings a “huge gamble.”
“We can all hope against reason there won’t be a third wave,” he said.
New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath said stay-athome orders should remain in place province-wide, with better supports for businesses, until Ontario has a better handle on a new strain of COVID-19 that is forecast to dominate in March.
“Let’s not wait until the variants have taken hold,” Horwath told a news conference. “Let’s do what needs to be done sooner rather than later for a change.”
In a Thursday briefing on the trajectory of the pandemic, science table co-chair Steini Brown, dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, said the B.1.1.7 strain that caused cases in the U.K. to triple in the month before Christmas is “spreading throughout Ontario.”
“There’s little room for error,” he cautioned.
Oakville Mayor Rob Burton said he doesn’t want to see people from Toronto and Peel coming out to Halton.
“Stay the hell home,” Burton told CP24.
Toronto medical officer Dr. Eileen de Villa said this week that she does not believe “now is the time” to be easing restrictions in Toronto with three variants identified in the city.
Friday’s announcement also continues the stay-at-home order for the health unit serving the Parry Sound and North Bay areas because of an outbreak, but moves 27 other regions back into the five-tier, colourcoded framework of restrictions developed last year.
Depending on their case levels, hospital capacities and other statistics, health units are slotted into the framework with the lowest level of restrictions in the green level, and measures increasing through the yellow, orange, red and grey or lockdown stages.
Niagara Region moves to the lockdown stage that allows non-essential businesses, which have been limited to curbside pickup for the last month, to open at 25 per cent customer capacity — a minimal change.
But for other health units moving one step below to the red zone, residents can gather indoors with up to five people from outside their households, hair and nail salons and barber shops can open, as can restaurants, bars and casinos with limits.
Also going into the red zone are Simcoe-Muskoka, where the U.K. variant sped through Barrie’s Roberta Place nursing home last month killing about 70 residents, as well as Middlesex-London, Waterloo, Windsor-Essex and Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph.
Health units serving the Ottawa, Stratford, Brantford, Haliburton-Kawartha and Sarnia areas are going into the orange level, which allows 10 people to gather indoors, and restaurants and gyms to have 50 patrons with a maximum of four diners per table and physical distancing. Movies theatres can reopen with no more than 50 people.
Several others regions are going into the yellow and green categories. On Wednesday, three eastern Ontario health units serving the Belleville, Kingston and Renfrew areas moved to green because of consistently low case counts.
Critics predict regionhopping will occur with Toronto and Peel and York remaining under stay-at-home restrictions until at least Feb. 22