1 pm Canada’s top doctor says COVID-19 disease activity is on the decline, but variants of concern threaten set back the country’s progress in flattening the curve in the second wave.
Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam said today there have been 826,924 cases of COVID-19 in Canada, including 21,311 deaths. Over the past week, the country completed an average of 98,000 tests daily and the positivity rate was 3.1 per cent.
“Overall, disease activity and severe outcomes are continuing to decline nationally and there are now less than 35,700 active cases across the country,” she said, adding that on average over the last week under 3,050 new cases and 75 deaths were reported daily in Canada.
“This steady progress demonstrates a combination of community based measures and individual practices works to slow to the spread of COVID-19 as long as we can abide by and sustain these measures long enough,” she added.
However, Tam said highly transmissible new variants have appeared in all 10 provinces and threaten “to flare up in a new rapidly spreading blaze.”
There are now over 540 confirmed cases of the UK variant, 35 confirmed cases of the South Africa variant and one cases of the Brazil variant. Four provinces have reported incidents of community spread and outbreaks related to variants.
