He’s wrong. Maybe he meant just four new cases. Ontario has been steady around 100+ ICU cases for the past little while. A proportion of those are going to be at Toronto’s University Hospital Network if for no other reason than they’re one of the best treatment centres in the world. That said, I take his sentiment.
There is reason for optimism in this because test positivity is climbing, and along with waste water analysis, shows that cases are on the rise, but importantly critical illness is not overwhelming ICUs the way it had been 18 months ago. The first take away from this is that vaccine mandates work: they prevent critical illness with extremely high success.
The next learnings will be related to how long do they work? Some will begin to experience waning immunity. We know people are getting reinfected. Active infections are estimated at 3-6X the PCR test number. Wide testing is not available, but using modelling and waste water data, somewhere between 5,000-12,000 active infections are circulating Ontario as we speak. It’s not that precise, but that’s the price to be paid for limiting testing. We have yet to discover at what point do people begin to experience waning protection from severe symptoms/critical illness?
Prevailing medical opinion is that a full course of vaccination should be considered 3 doses, NOT 2, and that risks increase after 5-6 months from the last, especially for those that have not had a full course (3 doses) to begin with.
My own reading suggest that we have another 18-24 months of caution ahead of us still.
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