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Ontario to begin vaccinations next week in Toronto, Ottawa

Province could see 2,500 daily cases of COVID-19 by month's end if virus spreads at current rate

Cbc.ca
Dec. 11, 2020

Ontario will administer its first COVID-19 vaccines next Tuesday at two hospitals in Toronto and Ottawa, the province confirmed Thursday as it recorded a record high number of new daily cases.

The province will receive 6,000 doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine on Monday. The University Health Network in Toronto and the Ottawa Hospital will give the first shots to health-care workers from long-term care homes and other high-risk settings, said retired Gen. Rick Hillier, who is leading Ontario's vaccine task force.

"We are going to come after people who are in most vulnerable circumstances and our health care workers first and get them vaccinated because the tragedy has been visited upon them most," he said.

Hillier said the province anticipates it will receive 90,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine by the end of December and will distribute it to 13 hospitals across Ontario.

He said Ontario may also receive between 30,000 and 85,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine by the new year, provided it is approved by Health Canada in the coming weeks.

More details are set to be provided on Friday, Premier Doug Ford said in a news release.

Toronto has been hard hit during the first and second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ottawa, which recorded just 56 new cases on Thursday, was selected in part to "test and validate provincial distribution networks, as well as in recognition of the challenges the region has faced with certain long-term care home outbreaks," the premier said.

Ontario reported single-day highs of 1,983 new COVID-19 cases and nearly 62,000 tests earlier Thursday.

The additional cases include 515 in Peel Region, 496 in Toronto, 208 in York Region and 112 in Windsor-Essex.

Other public health units that saw double-digit increases were:

(Note: All of the figures used for new cases in this story are found on the Ontario Health Ministry's COVID-19 dashboard or in its daily epidemiologic summary. The number of cases for any region may differ from what is reported by the local public health unit because local units report figures at different times.)

The Ministry of Education also reported 139 new cases that are school-related: 111 students and 28 staff members. Some 878 of Ontario's 4,828 publicly funded schools, or about 18.2 per cent, have at least one case of COVID-19, while 10 schools are currently closed because of the illness.

The new cases push the seven-day average to 1,862, the highest it has been since the first instance of COVID-19 was reported in Ontario in late January.

There are currently 16,233 confirmed, active infections of the novel coronavirus province-wide, the most at any point during the pandemic.

They come as Ontario's network of labs processed 61,809 test samples for the novel coronavirus -- the most on a single day by a considerable margin -- and reported a test positivity rate of 3.6 per cent. Another 66,326 test samples are in the queue waiting to be analyzed.

Furthermore, hospitalization figures all hit second-wave highs in today's update. There are now 829 patients with cases of COVID-19 in Ontario hospitals. Of those, 228 are being treated in intensive care units, while 132 people require the use of a ventilator.

Ontario also recorded 35 more deaths linked to the illness, bringing the official total to 3,871.