Premier François Legault says Quebec City, Lévis and Gatineau will be essentially shut down for 10 days starting Thursday at 8 p.m. to curb the “exponential” rise of COVID-19 cases in these three cities.
Schools will be closed and students will move to full-time online learning.
Gyms, theatres, hairdressers and other non-essential businesses are also shutting down, Legault said on Wednesday. Religious gatherings will be limited to 25 people and there will also be an 8 p.m.– 5 a.m. curfew until at least April 12.
“The situation is critical. It is deteriorating in these three cities,” Legault said. “People have to remain at home unless they absolutely have to go to work.”
With Easter weekend on the way, Legault stressed the importance of staying home and not gathering. The variants are spreading fast, he said.
“The alarm is sounding,” he said. “We cannot make any exceptions.”
Hospitalizations have not spiked in these three areas, he added, but they may soon.
“We must act quickly,” Legault said. “Everywhere in Quebec, we have to be more careful.”
Legault is also announcing that four regions are moving from orange to red, in accordance with the province’s colour-coded alert system.
The Outaouais, Chaudière-Appalaches, Lower Saint-Lawrence and the Quebec City region will return to red zones.
Legault said it is time to crack down now, and adjust as needed as more data is gathered. Montreal is not affected by the increased restrictions, but that may change as the situation evolves, he said.
Cities see spike in cases
Quebec City, Lévis and Gatineau have been orange zones for more than two weeks, allowing restaurants to welcome diners and gyms to open. But bars remained closed and indoor gatherings were still prohibited, with guests allowed only under specific circumstances.
With restrictions loosened, cases jumped. In the Quebec City area, 194 more cases were recorded on Wednesday, for a total of 990 active cases there.
“When we go from 50 to 200 cases per day, we are going to have an impact on hospitalizations,” Legault said.
Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé said there may be 250 cases reported tomorrow and that’s why the government can no longer wait. If hospitals fill up with COVID patients, other services are delayed, he said.
Dr. Horacio Arruda, the province’s public health director, said the variants are spreading fast and it is likely because people are ignoring public health rules.
“We have to intervene,” he said.
Arruda said travel to these three cities will not be restricted, but it is “highly recommended” that people avoid these zones because there is such a high rate of transmission. People should only go there for essential reasons, he said.
Earlier in the day, Quebec City’s public health director, Dr. André Dontigny, voiced his concern about the rise in cases and said the current measures weren’t sufficient. A local gym linked to nearly 70 cases of COVID-19 has been shut down.
“We will need something really more stronger, but what is absolutely important is the support of the population,” he told Quebec AM this morning.
“It could be a situation difficult and in maybe 10, 14 days for the hospital, for the intensive care unit too.”
In the Ottawa-Gatineau region, the number of active cases surpassed 2,000 over the weekend as the situation in Ontario worsened.
Legault scaled back public health restrictions in all but the Montreal region on March 8.
Since then, the curfew has been eased — from 8 to 9:30 p.m. — in the Montreal area, gyms were allowed to open and a few other rules were relaxed in the metropolitan area.
Specialist says restrictions should be tightened
Dr. Fatima Kakkar, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist in Montreal, said tightening the restrictions in some of these more harder-hit areas in Quebec is going to send an important message to the residents there — showing them that they need to avoid gathering indoors and close contact with others so as to prevent transmission.
“One of the things that has to be clear is that we are not out of the woods and we are back in dangerous territory,” Kakkar said.
In Montreal, the restrictions are still relatively strict and the vaccination program is in full swing, she said. She suspects a false sense of security is spreading through the population as spring begins to bloom, but, she said, people are forgetting that the pandemic is still very real.
Kakkar supports sending high school students back to school full time is crucial because kids need that social interaction for their mental health, she said.
“As pediatricians, we weigh the risk of infection versus not being in school, and that risk of not being in school has just been so detrimental to so many teens that I think it’s still worthwhile trying to keep kids in school,” Kakkar said.
However, she said, elective activities, such as gyms and restaurants, should remain closed mainly because of the variants of the disease which are proving to be more contagious and dangerous.
Going to the gym, stripping off your mask and hopping on a treadmill for 30 minutes may be allowed, she said, but that creates a high-risk situation when it comes to the transmission of a disease that spreads through respiratory droplets.