Brampton and Peel are seeing a “holiday surge at the worst possible time”, the region’s Medical Officer of Health Dr. Lawrence Loh said at a Wednesday morning briefing at Brampton City Hall.
The city’s positivity rate has now risen to 17.4 per cent, up from 16.9 per cent last week, he said adding that it is also seeing 350.8 new cases per week per 100,000 residents compared to 278.9 at this point last week — this is the highest number reported across all 34 of Ontario’s public health units. Nearly one out of every five COVID-19 tests conducted in Brampton is now coming back positive, he pointed out.
“Brampton and Peel are seeing a holiday surge at the worst time,” Loh said. “This concerning increase comes as area hospitals continue to cancel surgeries, transfer patients all across Ontario for care and see ICU capacity dwindle while contending with more admissions and also more deaths. Let me be clear this is an emergency.”
“We are seeing hospitals (in Peel) that are overwhelmed, we are seeing patients that are being transferred hours away for care and we are seeing surgeries get cancelled more and more,” Dr. Loh said. “Our hospital system is really on a brink of catastrophe and we are continuing to see cases rise which is not what we want to see because cases ultimately become hospitalizations and then become deaths. Let me be clear this is an emergency.”
Loh told reporters that while he is generally in favour of the province’s stay-at-home orders and other restrictions, he is also urging his provincial counterparts to “review the list of essential workplaces to see what else could temporarily be closed” given the surging case counts in many parts of Ontario, including Peel.
In the meantime, he said that the surging positivity rate in Brampton should be a reminder to residents of the “risk that exists with any sort of interaction with people outside of your home at this point in time.”
“To put it in context the World Health Organization as well as our federal partners recommend that test positive be kept at three per cent or less. So we are magnitudes above that,” he said.
