Nearly every province sets new record for COVID-19 cases as Omicron sweeps Canada
Global News
After pausing the release of testing data during the holidays, some provinces and the northern territories at last helped provide a full view of the national surge in cases.
Nearly every Canadian province shattered its daily COVID-19 case count record Wednesday, as the Omicron variant sweeps across the country and brings a level of infection not seen before.
After pausing the release of testing data during the Christmas holiday, some provinces and the northern territories helped provide a full view of the national surge in cases, releasing up to six days’ worth of case numbers.
The results are not pretty. Over the course of December, Canada’s case positivity rate has quadrupled to reach 20 per cent of all tests performed over the past 24 hours — a rate not seen before in the nearly two-year-long pandemic.
The number of active cases, meanwhile, now sits at nearly 210,000, an almost ten-fold increase from mid-November. And the seven-day average has reached a record 25,000 infections per day — nearly 200 percent higher than the peak of the third wave last April — with a new high of 32,180 cases reported Wednesday alone.
Experts say the real number of cases is likely higher because some provinces are hitting their testing capacities and some residents are using rapid tests.
Health officials across the country have pinned the rapid acceleration of cases on the Omicron variant, which Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam said Wednesday is “quickly” displacing Delta as the dominant variant in the country.
The surge has prompted new restrictions in several provinces, which have also begun to address how the new wave will impact the return to school.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, health officials announced that schools would shift to remote learning after the holiday break. The announcement came one day after Nova Scotia extended the holiday break for students in that province by one week in order to slow the spread of Omicron.
B.C. health authorities have announced the first case of a human avian flu infection acquired in Canada, with the teenage patient in critical condition in hospital.
People have been hearing a lot about H5N1 bird flu — or highly pathogenic avian influenza — since a B.C. teen became the first human to get the virus in Canada and is in hospital.
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"I was yelling at them saying get the F** away it’s a wild animal," resident Josh Merrin told Global News. "Sorry about my language."
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Dr. Anna Wolak, a family physician in Vancouver, said many parents are likely having flashbacks to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite this flu being a single case.
WHO acknowledged that testing for mpox is still not widespread, making it difficult to understand how exactly the virus is spreading.