OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the Canadian military will keep assisting in nursing homes in Ontario and Quebec, though 36 members of the Canadian Forces have come down with COVID-19 while doing so.
That’s up from 28 cases of the novel coronavirus among those troops less than a week ago.
The military has been deployed to nursing homes in the two provinces to reinforce workers overwhelmed by the illness, unable to keep up with residents’ needs because of all the protective measures they need to take, or off work because they’re ill themselves.
Fourteen of the military members with COVID-19 are in Ontario and 22 of them are in Quebec.
When the Forces started reporting the number of positive cases, they said they’d update the figures every two weeks but have revised that plan to give new numbers every day.
Trudeau says the premiers of Ontario and Quebec have both asked for the military to extend the deployment and he expects to agree.