Ford to hold emergency meeting with hospital leaders as calls for stricter lockdowns grow

Ontario Premier Doug Ford will hold an emergency meeting with heads of Ontario hospitals today to discuss his government's next moves in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ford said in a tweet that he will be meeting with Health Minister Christine Elliott, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams and provincial hospital leaders to discuss "next steps to break the concerning trends in cases and hospitals."

He also tweeted that "Everything is on the table when it comes to protecting the health of Ontarians." This means that a full province-wide lockdown might be a reality, despite regions like Ottawa reporting stable rates of infections for weeks.

The meeting will take place virtually at 1:00 pm, as the premier faces greater pressure to impose more lockdowns, and even stricter restrictions in the GTA. This comes as Toronto and Peel end their fourth and supposed final week of lockdown, with cases still rising and records bring broken this week.

Toronto Mayor John Tory has called for the lockdown to not only be extended, but also be strengthened. He told CP24 "I believe quite strongly that we need to have further restrictions now in order to avoid or to even stem the tide of a very difficult situation in our hospital system and a very difficult situation in terms of the trends of the number of people that are getting sick and dying."

He also said that imposing a strict lockdown during the Christmas season may be needed to turn around current trends. "I want to express the hope that the province does what I believe they should do and that is to have a region-wide series of additional restrictions during a quieter period of time at this time of year so that we can really take advantage of that quieter period of time and have a jolt to the system that stops these numbers from growing the way they have been to new records almost every day," he said.

Tory had said something similar when Ontario shut down indoor dining and gyms back in October, and placed Toronto into lockdown in November. Both those moves showed to have little impacts on COVID-19 numbers while having negative impacts on small businesses.

On Thursday, Ford seemed receptive to listening to the Hospital CEOs and imposing a widespread lockdown, specifically on the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Areas.

Ford said "It's really concentrated in one area. And that's a GTA, and I'll throw Hamilton, GTHA," Ford said. "That's where we're seeing the spread to the exception of Halton. Halton’s still about 55 (cases per 100,000), but the other cases are just growing at a rapid pace. So everything's on the table."

Ontario reported a record high 2,432 new COVID-19 infections on Thursday, it was the second day in a row that Ontario reported over 2oo0 cases.