Article content continued

Among the four most populous provinces, the hospitalization charts for B.C. and Alberta look very promising. In both places the number of people in hospital each day has flat-lined and even started to fall, and officials have started expressing cautious optimism.

“To date, Alberta has fared better than most,” said Alberta Premier Jason Kenney on Wednesday while presenting modelling scenarios for the province. Alberta’s hospitalizations have flattened off at around 40 — a much smaller number than other large provinces. Alberta has also done extensive testing, giving more credibility to their case count.

B.C.’s hospitalizations are much higher, at around 140. But they have stabilized over the past week and are starting to come noticeably down. Although the province is not widely testing at this point, new cases have slowed substantially, with just 45 new cases announced on Wednesday, 25 on Tuesday, and 26 on Monday.

The picture is much different in Ontario and Quebec, where hospitalizations have been rising to over 600 in both provinces. Quebec is still seeing steady growth in hospitalizations each day, while Ontario’s growth has started to slow.

But there is still some optimism in each province. Quebec presented its modelling on Tuesday, and officials expressed optimism that the situation looks to be manageable.

In Montreal, which has seen the worst outbreak in Quebec, the chief public health officer told reporters on Wednesday that she believes the city has crested and will hopefully start to slide down the other side of the epidemiological curve. “Today, tomorrow and the day after we will be at the peak in terms of the number of cases,” Mylène Drouin said.

In Ontario, chief medical officer David Williams said the province’s hospital cases have so far stayed well within the “best case” modelling scenario for not overwhelming hospital resources.

“We are better than we thought we would be at this time, both in the number of cases as well as in the hospitalizations, ICUs and deaths at this stage,” he said. “But let’s get a few more days of data in there, let our modellers have a look at it and see, much like a report card, how are we doing. Have we moved off the Italy scenario, more towards another scenario? Much like you heard B.C. doing?”