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“Ontario will pull the emergency brake,” Premier Doug Ford announced Thursday.
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The lockdown is necessary to control a surging third wave of COVID-19 infections driven by more contagious and lethal virus variants, the premier and the province’s science advisory table said. Sixty-seven per cent of new cases are virus variants.
“This is a new pandemic. We are now fighting a new enemy,” Ford said, citing 2,557 new infections reported Thursday, a 41 per cent increase in hospital admissions in the last two weeks, a risk of ICU admission that is two times higher and risk of death that is 1.5 times higher than the original novel coronavirus.