Dr. Barbara Yaffe, Ontario’s associate chief medical officer of health, indicated at a press conference on Monday that the province is “very closely monitoring” various regions to see if they need to move to modified Stage 2 restrictions, like Toronto, Peel, Ottawa and York Region.
The areas provincial health experts are looking at are Halton, Hamilton and Eastern Ontario.
“Overall, while the number of outbreaks continues to go up in the modified Stage 2 regions, they continue to be observed more frequently in the adjacent areas,” Dr. Yaffe said.
She said there isn’t a particular numerical “threshold” that needs to be met to move a region into a modified Stage 2 but the public health measures table looks at the trends in cases, cases per 100,000 population, the positivity rate in lab reports, the capacity of the local public health unit and local health system.
“They look at a bunch of those factors together,” Dr. Yaffe said. “At this point, I know that Halton is one of the areas being very closely watched and we’ll wait to see what’s recommended.
