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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.

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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.