Source: CBC
On Tuesday, Ontario reported 3,469 new cases of COVID-19 and 22 new deaths from the illness. Some pharmacies in the Greater Toronto Area would start offering AstraZeneca vaccine appointments 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The provincial government announced that 20 Shoppers Drug Mart locations would begin offering round-the-clock appointments as early as Wednesday. According to the Ministry of Health, 68 new patients were admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) on Monday alone.
The province had used roughly 76% of the 5,242,495 doses it had received for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COV-19, and had a 10% positivity rate. According to the government, some clinics were forced to do paper-based reporting due to an all-day Rogers outage, so today’s total is an underestimation of how many shots were actually administered. On Monday, 347,409 vaccine doses were administered, falling short of the province’s target of at least 100,000 for the third day in a row.
The 22 new deaths reported today bring the official death toll to 7,757. The seven-day average of daily deaths increased to 25, a new high for the pandemic’s third wave. Kathleen Horwath attempted to secure unanimous support for a provincial paid sick day program, which existed in Ontario until the Ford government repealed it in 2018.
Labour Minister Monte McNaughton expressed dissatisfaction that the federal government did not expand or improve its own paid sick leave program. The province, according to Ford, does not want to duplicate the CRSB. Public health experts and labour advocates have criticized the program for being overly complicated and underfunded.
