Extend stay-at-home order, experts urge

Warning comes as some areas of province prepare to ease restrictions

A rising surge of more contagious variants is pushing Ontario toward a third wave of COVID-19 unless transmission levels are reduced, vaccination rates boosted and stay-at-home orders extended, says the table of science experts advising Premier Doug Ford.

“There’s little room for error,” Steini Brown, dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, said Thursday in presenting the latest computer modelling on the trajectory of the virus.

The warning came as the province prepared to indicate Friday the number of public health units across the province that could see restrictions ease to varying degrees next week. Three eastern Ontario regions are already back in the least restrictive green category, under which businesses including hair salons, gyms and restaurants are allowed to open with some limitations.

“Clearly, the premier is not taking the advice of the science table with his reopening plans,” said Green Leader Mike Schreiner.

COVID-19 variants now comprise an estimated five to 10 per cent of all cases, Brown told a news conference, with the more prevalent B.1.1.7. strain first identified in the United Kingdom now “spreading throughout Ontario.”

New infections, which are down to about 1,100 a day after weeks of firm restrictions, are poised to begin rising again by late February, further crowding hospital intensive care units in mid-March as the B.1.1.7 strain becomes dominant, Brown added, noting it tripled daily new cases in the U.K. in a month.

“We face the very real risk of a third wave, potentially a third lockdown,” Brown added at Queen’s Park, where he appeared with Ontario’s chief medical officer, Dr. David Williams. “There will be little time to react quickly because of how fast the variants spread.”

Williams acknowledged the province is in a “precarious, tenuous” situation but defended the plan to put some of Ontario’s 34 regional public health units back into the five-tier, colour-coded framework of public health measures.

“People are suffering, economically and personally … so it’s a fine balance,” he said. “We’re not opening up. We’re allowing some things to be available, but we want even more personal adherence to the stay-at-home, to the masking, to limiting to your household contacts.”

Williams added it is more important than ever to closely follow all pandemic precautions,

saying “casualness is not on.”

Framework categories start with green at the lowest level, with businesses and services open with minor restrictions, and escalate through yellow, orange, red and into the most stringent grey or lockdown category depending on factors including case levels, test positivity rates, hospital capacity and outbreaks.

Brown said the transmission rate — the average number of people one person with the virus will infect — needs to come down to 0.7 from the current 0.9 because the variants are spread much more easily and quickly. They are about 50 per cent more transmissible.

But he pointed out that 0.7 level has “rarely” been reached in Ontario, where vaccine supplies have been limited and dozens of clinics postponed in a race to finish shots for residents of long-term-care homes, where the virus has been most lethal.

Toronto, Peel and York regions are being kept in stay-athome restrictions until at least Feb. 22.