Ontario's COVID-19 cases to increase before coming down: health minister
Ontario’s Health Minister Christine Elliott said it was anticipated that the province’s COVID-19 cases would increase before the numbers go down.
During a press conference on Friday, Elliott responded to a question on the record-breaking 1,855 daily COVID-19 cases reported Friday and if it was a result of the 58,000 tests that were conducted — the highest count since the pandemic began.
“It’s not just because we’re seeing an increase in testing which resulted in more cases. We expected there would be an increase since Peel and Toronto were put into lockdown. It is going to take two full weeks before we see those numbers come down because we’re still seeing the results of some of the events and some of the celebrations that have happened in the last few weeks,” she said.
“So we anticipated that the numbers would go up first before they started coming down. That is what we’re seeing with the numbers.”
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Elliott added that the province is looking at all the regions to “act quickly” to see if regions need to be moved in different colour-zones to add more restrictions as cases increase.
“We’re trying to act quickly so we can make changes while you’re moving some regions into other colours early so we can take action to get the numbers down faster so we don’t have to go into lockdown or go into businesses shutting down.”
Another region, Windsor-Essex County Health Unit, entered the Red-Control as Haldimand-Norfolk Health Unit was placed into the Orange-Restrict level.
Also, Hastings Prince Edward Public Health, Lambton Public Health and Northwestern Health Unit entered the Yellow-Protect zone.
The only two regions in lockdown are Toronto and Peel.
Of the newly announced cases on Friday, 517 are in Peel, 495 are in Toronto, and 189 are in York Region.
To date, Ontario has seen 111,216 COVID-19 cases.
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