By Gbenga Adedayo
Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau has stressed that the country remains in an “incredibly serious” situation where Canadians will need to refocus their efforts until vaccines become widely available.
“We still have to get through the next month and the month after that before vaccines arrive,” Trudeau said Tuesday in Ottawa.
This is coming just as America’s top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci says Canada, once an example of managing COVID-19, is wading into dangerous territory as the virus surges across the world.
“Right now, the entire planet is in trouble. If you look at almost every country, there are very few exceptions,” said Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in an interview with CBC News.
“The European Union, if you look at the number of new infections, it’s out of sight. The United States is out of sight. Canada, which was supposedly doing so well, is also getting into trouble. There’s a lot of community spread.”
Fauci worries particularly about the spread of the novel coronavirus at the household level, where smaller groups of people are becoming infected but may not even know about it. This is because of the threat of asymptomatic people.
“We’ve got to be able to test widely in the community for asymptomatic spreaders of the infection,” he said. “If you just test people who are symptomatic, you’re going to miss a very large contingent of the spread of infection in the community.”
This becomes particularly important as people hunker down for the winter months since the virus thrives in colder weather.
The second wave in Canada has played out just as public health officials predicted at the beginning of the pandemic, with case counts breaking records from the first wave of the virus.
Total cases hit 304,477 across the country, according to numbers reported as of midday Tuesday.
-With additional reports from Nationalpost