Another steep rise in Quebec COVID-19 cases and more measures coming later today

Quebec Premier François Legault is expected to announce more measures this evening, as projections released by the province's public health institute warn of a significant increase in hospitalizations by January due to COVID-19.

Positive daily cases have surpassed 6,000 in Quebec and the Omicron variant has become the dominant strain of the virus in the community. 

Legault is holding another update on the pandemic at 6 p.m. ET Wednesday, with more measures coming in an effort to slow hospital admissions.

CBC will be live streaming the news conference. You can watch it here at 6 p.m. ET

Tuesday evening, Legault met with public health officials in private. They discussed reducing the number of people allowed at indoor gatherings from 10 to six, either in time for the holidays or just after, according to Radio-Canada sources. 

Hospital capacity in the province is about a third of what it was at the beginning of the pandemic and before the fall, due to severe staff shortages, according to the provincial Health Ministry.

Nearly, 5,200 health workers are currently off the job due to COVID. Thousands more are on leave or have left altogether, exhausted by the pandemic's toll.

Quebec's public health research institute, the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ), released new projections Wednesday of Omicron's possible impact on the number of cases and hospitalizations. 

The projections differ depending on the types of measures the government decides on and how strongly the population adheres to them. It is also unclear how severe of a disease the variant could cause and just how much it evades vaccination immunity. 

Among the best case scenarios, there could be a peak of about 150 hospitalizations per day by January, with daily cases rising above 6,000 in December, which already happened today. 

In a more pessimistic scenario — if Omicron causes severe illness, is highly transmissible, easily evades vaccination immunity and the administration of third doses continues to go slowly — the INSPQ warned of an "exponential increase" in hospitalizations, peaking in January with more than 250 admissions per day.

The research institute said Omicron's impact is still hard to measure because there could be even more cases than reported, since testing centres have been overwhelmed and many have had to turn people away. There is also a shortage of rapid tests in the province. 

But it said it's also hard to determine the severity of illness caused by Omicron. One of the reasons for that is that the transmission has happened so fast, it's hard to know what impact current cases will have on hospitals and what portion of them could end up in hospital. 

The spike in cases earlier this month has been attributed to the Delta variant, a rise in person-to-person contacts earlier in the fall, and the waning of vaccine immunity over time.