Health officials credit 'the sacrifices people are making to stay home and wash their hands' with accelerating the peak by at least a month

The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have peaked in Ontario, several weeks ahead of earlier forecasts, and hospitals have largely escaped the feared surge in critically sick patients, provincial health officials said Monday.

Canada could be through the worst of the pandemic by the end of April. Growth rates are slowing across the country.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Fresh modelling data were released in Ontario, one of the worst-hit provinces, on Monday. While earlier, frightening models predicted a peak in cases in May, shelter-in-place and other public health orders “have accelerated the peak to now,” according to the fresh data.

Provincial officials stressed it doesn’t mean the disease has “passed over.” Without a vaccine, the pandemic virus is expected to circulate for a year or longer. “It just means that the current set of interventions are pushing down the rate of infection, which means that we start to see fewer and fewer cases as they go along,” Adalsteinn (Steini) Brown, dean of the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health told a media briefing.

Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

The total cases for the span of the outbreak are now likely less than 20,000, starkly lower than the worst-case scenario of 300,000 or even the 80,000 expected cases pegged by earlier models.

But the spread of COVID-19 in long term care homes is growing and efforts to slow its spread among the most vulnerable must be re-doubled, officials said.

However, the rate of growth in hospitalizations has slowed in the province, while the number of people in ICU has remained relatively constant over the past week.

“Regardless of the model we use, we are looking at a peak that is right now for the community transmission of COVID-19,” Brown said.

While the data released Monday don’t show an actual peak followed by a sharp drop, epidemics follow what’s called Farr’s Law, he said, “which means that they essentially have a symmetrical shape. And so as you come up, you peak, and then hopefully cases diminish down the other side of it. That’s important when we talk about peak. We’re now hoping to see a reduction in cases as we go along.”

“Peaks are not a single day,” Brown added, “peaks are not a nice single sort of spike. They can be a little bit bumpy. They can prolong for a period of time, particularly given public health interventions. But we’re in that peak period right now.”

Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Under Ontario’s grim modelling released earlier this month, the “best case” scenario had put the number of COVID-19 sufferers in intensive care at around 1,200 as of Monday.

According to Ontario government data, there were 247 people in intensive care on Monday morning, 193 of them on ventilators.

The earlier projections had also called for 1,600 deaths by April 30, and 80,000 cases. As of Monday morning, there were 584 reported deaths, 11,184 confirmed cases and 802 people in hospital.

Officials said the earlier models were reasonable and based on experiences in Italy and other countries, and that frightening data can get people to change their behaviours. The models are designed to plan for what could happen. However, the further out the forecast, the more uncertainty in the predictions. Brown said it’s hard to draw conclusions about mortality. While the expectation now is that Ontario will see a lower number of overall deaths, the ramp up of cases in long-term care homes “obviously makes it hard to predict a number of actual deaths.”

The pandemic curve in nursing homes (there are outbreaks in 127 long-term care homes in Ontario alone) homeless shelters and other places where a lot of people are brought close together is still accelerating upwards.

However, the Ontario curve, most provincial curves and even the national curve are showing signs of bending, Brown said. “We may be at a place where we are seeing roughly the same number of cases every day as we talk about peak.” Discussions are now happening about bringing some elective procedures back online while maintaining the ramped up hospital capacity as a buffer when the economy and society reopens “should we accidentally go back into a period of community spread,” said Matthew Anderson, president and CEO of Ontario Health.

Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

British Columbia is now past the peak of new infections, Alberta is approaching its peak and Ontario and Quebec, “the worst-hit provinces, should reach their peaks within days,” Eric Hoskins, Ontario’s former health minister, recently wrote in the Globe and Mail. He added that barring any dramatic change in the epidemic, it would be reasonable to start cautiously loosening restrictions by early May.

About half of COVID-19 deaths in Canada have occurred in long-term care homes.

The disease preys upon older people with pre-existing illness. “We’re seeing this play out in spades in the long term care facilities,” said Dr. Ross Upshur, a physician and bioethicist with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. We got our triage backwards, he said. “We thought that the best thing to do to fix this was to protect the health-care system and that was never the goal of a pandemic plan.

“When you flatten the curve, you push things out into the community, and in the community exist a large number of people who are susceptible to COVID-19 diseases, and they’re becoming ill and dying.”

As people think through possibilities for restarting the economy, many competing interests will surface, Upshur said. “How do you set up a system where you can deliberate these things in a fair way without caving in to those who have the most power or influence?”

“We still remain a democracy, which means we have to have the interests and concerns of every citizen in mind.”