Ontario’s top doctor says that the doubling time for the number of COVID-19 patients in the province’s intensive care units is currently two-to-three weeks.
Dr. Kieran Moore made the remarks during his weekly COVID-19 briefing on Tuesday.
“It bothers me deeply that the majority of these individuals continue to be individuals who haven’t taken advantage of the immunization to protect them,” he said.
“And I think over the next several weeks we have to make a decision as a society to embrace prevention as the key strategy.”
During the briefing, Moore made repeated calls for those eligible to get vaccinated.
“We need to get our numbers higher, above 90 per cent, to slow this virus down, to limit the community effect and then we’ll see the benefits on decreasing hospitalizations, decreasing use of the intensive care unit,” he said.
Moore said recent evidence in Ontario shows that those who are unvaccinated are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized due to COVID-19 and 48 times more likely to go in intensive care due to the disease.
In Ontario, 295 people are in general hospital wards with COVID-19 with 156 patients in intensive care units due to COVID-19 and 125 patients on a ventilator.
Provincial officials recently announced they would start including the vaccination status of those hospitalized due to COVID-19 as part of their daily COVID-19 data reporting. They noted the new dataset will grow and improve over time as more information is collected.
The most recent data showed for those in general hospital wards with COVID, 116 were unvaccinated, 13 were partially vaccinated and 27 were fully vaccinated. For those in ICUs, 67 were unvaccinated while 10 were partially vaccinated and 7 were fully vaccinated.
In Ontario, 82.3 per cent of people 12-plus have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose and 75.1 per cent are fully vaccinated.
Although the total number of ICU patients is above 150 — a threshold the province previously said could lead to cancelled surgeries — Moore said hospitals still have the capacity for normal operations.
— With files from Gabby Rodrigues