First, the mayor got sick: portrait of a difficult week in Montreal

This week in Montreal started with Mayor Valérie Plante testing positive for COVID-19, and suddenly nearly every Montrealer knew someone who had it, too.

Things grew more ominous by the day, if not by the hour. Cases in the province shot up past 3,000, then 6,000 and Thursday, 9,397. There were 3,668 new cases in Montreal alone Wednesday, the day after the city announced it was reinstating its state of emergency.

Local Public Health Director Dr. Mylène Drouin confirmed Thursday morning what many have observed among their acquaintances: that the majority of those infected are between the ages of 18 and 44, and live in neighbourhoods with younger populations, such as La Petite-Patrie, Plateau-Mont-Royal, Mile End, Villeray and Hochelaga.

Drouin said the city's positivity rate is now close to 20 per cent, meaning one in five of people getting public PCR tests are infected. Ninety per cent of those cases are now of the Omicron variant.

As lineups snaked around city blocks and grew until public testing clinics became overrun, some turned to the private system. 

Antonella Argento, co-founder of Beacon Health Care, a private medical service that sends nurses to people's homes to test them, said her staff has been 10 times busier than usual. 

"We were expecting a Christmas rush, but nothing like this. We were expecting to test travellers, but now it's not even travellers, it's people looking for peace of mind."

Asked if there were parts of the city with higher demand, Argento said, "It's all over."

Hospitalizations have risen by about 30 per day in the province, but frontline workers say even twice that amount could overwhelm already beleaguered hospitals.

Many of those hospitalizations remain patients infected with the Delta variant, but Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital emergency physician Dr. Bernard Mathieu said some Omicron patients are starting to trickle in. 

"People are showing up with symptoms which are relatively minor and we don't see respiratory insufficiency, like we saw in the last wave. It's not as bad as it was in last wave as far as severity of symptoms," Mathieu told CBC Thursday. 

"That's a blessing for us because we couldn't face the music if it was something else."

Mathieu worries it could be the calm before the storm, though. Hospitals have started delaying surgeries and non-urgent procedures, which will lead to sicker non-COVID patients later on, and more and more of his colleagues are off the job because they are either infected or were in close contact with someone who was. 

"We're a little scared of what's going on.… It doesn't look good. And we really need people to get vaccinated, and to stay away from other people," Mathieu said.