Ottawa is reporting 63 new cases of the novel coronavirus on Friday as the city’s top doctor confirms a second wave of the virus is hitting the nation’s capital.
Asked by reporters outside the Château Laurier Friday morning whether the city is facing a second wave of the virus, Ottawa’s medical officer of health Dr. Vera Etches said “yes.”
She said the speed at which Ottawa is reporting new cases of the virus is unsustainable, and that the community must work to keep it to a more manageable level.
“Our goal, as a community, is to stop the rise, slow down the rise, turn the curve again,” she later said in a media availability on Friday afternoon.
Even as the city’s testing sites face “record-setting” demand, it’s not only a matter of more people getting tested, Etches said. She explained that a higher proportion of people are testing positive for the virus as well, offering another “clue” that Ottawa is indeed facing a second wave of COVID-19.
Ottawa has seen 275 new cases of the virus since Monday, with 458 active cases in the city.
No new deaths related to COVID-19 were reported on Friday, though 11 people are currently in hospital with the virus.
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Eighteen schools in Ottawa are reporting COVID-19 cases among staff or students.
There are now 23 ongoing outbreaks in Ottawa institutions such as long-term care homes and daycare centres, two more than the day before.
Returning to the basics of transmission control and prevention is the best way to keep the virus out of Ottawa’s schools and long-term care homes, Etches said.
She estimated that if residents are successful in stemming the spread of the virus, this “second wave” could become just another brief peak, similar to the spike in cases Ottawa faced in mid-July.
“The actions we take today could make that wave, that curve, flatten within the next two-to-three weeks,” Etches said.
The city’s top doctor and Mayor Jim Watson met with Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Friday, and Etches said she thanked the premier for reinstituting a tighter cap on private gatherings.
The new rules, which apply to private residences but not commercial settings, will see a maximum of 10 people permitted in gatherings indoors and 25 people outdoors.
Ford said during a meeting with his fellow premiers on Friday that asymptomatic people who were anxious about a possible infection should be able to get a test.
“They want to get tested and, God bless ‘em, get tested,” Ford said.
That seemed to conflict with directions from Etches and other health officials in Ottawa, who have said this week that the long lineups outside the city’s COVID-19 assessment centres are largely made up of asymptomatic people who will receive little value from a test, because it can provide false assurance that an individual is negative.
Asked about the confusion, Etches said she “appreciates” the premier’s approach that everyone should be able to get a test, but said that it’s her job to clarify when it’s “useful” to get tested.
She laid it out as simply as she could Friday afternoon: residents should get tested if they are showing symptoms of COVID-19 such as a cough, runny nose or fever, or if they have been specifically asked by OPH to go get tested.
As of Friday, the Ontario government has deployed three mobile testing teams in Ottawa to help alleviate the overwhelming demand at the city’s testing sites.
The care clinic on Moodie Drive tweeted at 9 a.m. Friday that it was already at full capacity as soon as it opened due to people lining up to get tested in the early morning hours.
Etches said there will be a mobile team at the Brewer Assessment Centre over the weekend to help increase capacity at the city’s primary testing site.
Two of these “pop-up” teams conducted targeted testing on Friday at Ottawa schools facing cases of COVID-19, including Franco-Ouest high school in Nepean where three students have tested positive for the virus.
Ford also announced Friday that asymptomatic residents should be able to get a coronavirus test through pharmacies by this time next week, another effort to relieve pressure on Ontario’s testing system.
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