Ontario declares three more hot spots for COVID-19’s Delta variant, accelerates second doses across the province - Toronto Star

Declaring three more hot spot regions for the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 — Hamilton, Durham and Simcoe-Muskoka — Ontario is speeding up second doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines there and in areas like Toronto and Peel already flagged as problem zones for the strain.

Starting Wednesday, people in those regional health units along with Halton, Durham, Waterloo, Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph and the northern Porcupine region will be able to book appointments for booster shots, health officials told a background briefing Thursday morning. The eligibility is for people who got first shots on or before May 30.

Booster shots are also being accelerated by a month for anyone in the province who got a first dose on or before May 9, with people being able to book appointments starting Monday.

“We want to supply second doses as quickly as we can,” a senior medical official told reporters in advance of an afternoon news conference by Health Minister Christine Elliott and Solicitor General Sylvia Jones.

“There’s a significant demand for second doses right now.”

Mobile vaccine clinics will also be sent to Waterloo Region to tamp down what another official called “significant outbreaks” there. The region reported 57 new cases Thursday, more than the much larger Peel Region with 47.

Premier Doug Ford said most of the hospitalizations from COVID-19 now are of people who have not been vaccinated.

More than 120,000 additional doses of vaccines were allocated in the last week to improve the rate of second doses in Delta hot spots, according to briefing materials provided by the ministry of health.

AstraZeneca first dose recipients around the province are eligible to book second doses of that vaccine, Pfizer or Moderna as soon as eight weeks after their initial jab.

The science table advising Ford estimates the Delta variant first identified in India now accounts for just over half the new COVID-19 infections in the province, well on its way to displacing the Alpha strain originally found in the United Kingdom as the dominant variant.

Delta is 50 per cent more transmissible from person to person than Alpha, which became the dominant variant over the winter and fuelled the third wave.

The province has seen a steady decline in cases in recent weeks as vaccination levels have increased substantially, reporting 370 new cases on Thursday, a level not seen since late September. There seven more deaths, bringing the pandemic total to 8,993.

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Ontario was on pace to surpass 12 million vaccinations Thursday, with almost 2.4 residents fully inoculated with two doses.

Premier Doug Ford was asked Thursday if the high levels of vaccination — 75 per cent of adults with one shot and 18 per cent with two shots — could make it possible for the province to enter step two of its reopening strategy sooner than planned on July 2. The threshold for that reopening has been set at 70 per cent of adults with first shots and 20 per cent fully vaccinated.

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Ford said he would ask chief medical officer Dr. David Williams and the science table for advice on any possible changes to the timing of a further easing of public health measures, which would include the reopening of barber shops, hair and nail salons.

“I don’t want to put any dates on it,” Ford told reporters in Milton.

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Ontario declares three more hot spots for COVID-19’s Delta variant, accelerates second doses across the province - Toronto Star
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