Even though the province has met the vaccine thresholds to move forward in the reopening Ontario process, provincial health officials are not committing to jump ahead and move Ontario into Step Three.
Currently, Ontario is in Step Two of the reopening process and it means you can do things like get a haircut, eat at a restaurant patio and go to a shopping mall.
The provincial schedule calls for Step 3 to occur by July 21, with one of the key criteria being 70 to 80 per cent of adults vaccinated with one dose of COVID-19 vaccine and 25 per cent vaccinated with two doses.
New numbers provided by the Ministry of Health at a technical briefing Thursday morning revealed that 78 per cent of Ontario adults have received their first dose and more than 51 per cent have received their second dose.
Despite these numbers, the health ministry officials told reporters the overall number of vaccines is just one part of the overall big picture. They want the vaccine program to continue to get more residents fully vaccinated, they said. No one would commit to an early reopening.
"There's many factors that are being considered in making the decision about moving to Step 3," said one senior official.
He said the options are being explored and evaluated daily by medical leaders about the overall health status of the province, especially with the Delta Variant of the virus, which is regarded as more transmissible, especially among those who are not vaccinated.
"There's no question that the vaccination program has had a significant impact on many of the individual factors that we're considering; the rates of illness, the rates of hospitalizations; the rates of ICU (Intensive Care Unit) admissions; the rates of deaths. All of those factors have clearly gone down," said the ministry official.
He said the vaccine success has to be considered, but the work has to continue to work by getting more residents to take their first and second doses.
Another high level ministry official said it is only normal considering the increased level of the vaccine uptake for residents to expect a quicker reopening.
"In terms of the vaccination program our operating model continues to be to get as many first and second doses in place as quickly as possible, and then be able to check lots of other indicators that go with that," she said.
Another set of numbers revealed what the ministry described as "some key findings" with respect to the number of COVID-19 cases that occurred among people who were not vaccinated.
Over the last month (May 15 to June 12, 2021) there 29,380 COVID-19 cases reported. The ministry said more than 83 per cent of those cases occurred in people who had not been vaccinated. More than 15 per cent were partially vaccinated and only 1.2 per cent of new COVID-19 cases were fully vaccinated, said the ministry report.
The same briefing also provided Ontario COVID-19 case numbers over a recent six-month period (Dec. 14, 2020 to June 12, 2021) which showed 396,076 new cases. Of that number, 96 per cent of the cases had no vaccinations at the time, 3.6 per cent were partially vaccinated and 0.4 per cent fully vaccinated.
Len Gillis is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter at Sudbury.com. He covers health care in Northern Ontario.
