Ontario must shrink its daily increase in new COVID-19 cases by more than half — to 200 or fewer — before the economy can begin reopening, warns the chief medical officer of health.

The target was revealed Tuesday by Dr. David Williams after Premier Doug Ford promised a framework for loosening restrictions will be released within days, noting sombrely that “people will still be dying” even as measures ease.

With the province now reporting about 500 more Ontarians testing positive every day, people will have to stick with strict stay-at-home and physical distancing measures into May, Williams said.

“We have to see some real ongoing change. Ontarians have done a great job of flattening the curve, of bending the curve, but now we’d like to actually see it coming down,” he told reporters.

“I think we’d have to see ourselves back down at least in that 200 (area) if not lower.”

Ford acknowledged he is being “lobbied hard by so many different groups” to relax curbs on commerce, but noted there is a “balancing act” to keep in mind.

“We still have deaths happening every day and they want to open up. I’m thinking, really? We’re seeing a tremendous death toll every single day. That’s the first thing I ask in the morning,” he said.

“I can’t even comprehend all these families. Every day you see 30, 40, 50 people passing away. It’s heart-wrenching.”

Some of the pressure for reopening stems from the situation in British Columbia, which Ford said is “about three weeks ahead of us” in the pandemic.

“They ended up getting the spike much earlier than we did,” said the premier, mindful people in Ontario are seeing news coverage of some B.C. golf courses, which were not ordered closed by health officials, opening to the public for the season.

Ontario has been in a state of emergency since March 17 and will remain so until May 12 with an extension possible.

That means only essential businesses, such as supermarkets, pharmacies, and liquor stores, are allowed to be open with restaurants limited to serving takeout meals.

Other retail outlets, such as hardware stores and pet shops, are restricted to “curbside” service.

“There’s no one out there that wants to move forward more on the economy than I do, but I’d rather be safe than sorry,” Ford said.

“People are going to have to hang in there. It’s easy to say ‘open, open, open’ until we get a second wave of this and it bites us on the backside.”

He recounted a difficult conversation with his 12-year-old nephew, Doug, son of late former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who was peppering his uncle with questions about whether he could go to camp in August.

“I told him: ‘I can’t answer that.’ But that’s important to people. There are so many kids out there, thousands of kids, that their biggest highlight of the summer is going to camp and it weighs on their minds.”

Ford conceded the first wave of reopening would likely apply to “outdoor” workplaces where employees can work a safe distance apart and possibly wear masks.

Getting the number of new cases in the community to 200 or lower — not including nursing homes and similar group settings — is important because it’s more manageable for local public health units to trace them, find their contacts and quickly isolate them to contain any spread of the illness, said Williams.

Local public health staff have been so swamped that the origins of 40 per cent of the 12,000-odd cases in the province to date still have not been pinpointed.

Even though there’s a ways to go to easing restrictions, Williams said it’s not too soon to start planning how the economy will open because every government ministry and businesses and industry must be consulted widely.

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“You need a lot of lead time.”

In the United States, the framework for the initial loosening of restrictions includes measures to protect the health of workers in critical industries, limiting gatherings to no more than 10 people, temperature checks and physical distancing for workers and keeping as many people as possible working from home. Schools will remain closed.

A Star compilation Tuesday at 5 p.m. showed the province topped 13,000 confirmed and probable cases, an increase of 483 in the preceding 24 hours, with another 42 deaths bringing the total to 699.

Also Tuesday, Ford said the province is earmarking $11 million to deliver meals and medicines to seniors and other vulnerable citizens with chronic medical conditions.

As well, the province is issuing the first doubled payments to 194,000 low-income seniors under the Guaranteed Annual Income System, known as GAINS, providing up to $166 monthly for single seniors and $322 for couples for the next six months at an additional cost of $75 million.

Robert Benzie is the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie

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