ontario Ontario sees 3,295 new COVID-19 cases, record-high vaccinations as stay-at-home order kicks in Ontario reported another 3,295 cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, as public health units administered a record-high 108,563 doses of vaccine and a renewed provincewide stay-at-home order went into effect. A total of 326,360 people in the province have received both shots of vaccine, according to the Ministry of Health. As of Wednesday evening, Ontario had administered just over 70 per cent of the 4,031,325 doses it has received from the federal government to date. More than a million of those total doses arrived last weekend. ont hospitals Ontario orders hospitals to halt non-emergency surgeries as COVID-19 patients fill ICUs 'Extreme pressure' on critical care means elective procedures postponed as of Monday across most of province. Non-emergency surgeries in Ontario are now on hold, despite a backlog of postponed surgeries from the past year approaching 250,000. Doctors are warning that in a matter of days, people may be turned away from hospitals altogether as COVID-19 overwhelms the system The Ontario government's health agency is telling hospitals across most of the province to stop performing all but emergency and life-saving surgeries because of the growing caseload of COVID-19 patients, CBC News has learned. A memo was sent to hospitals Thursday night telling them to postpone their non-emergency surgeries, effective Monday, everywhere but in northern Ontario. Pediatric specialty hospitals are excluded from the order. Ontario has not ordered such an across-the-board postponement of non-emergency surgeries since the first wave of the pandemic hit the province in March 2020. "Given increasing case counts and widespread community transmission across many parts of the province, we are facing mounting and extreme pressure on our critical care capacity," says Ontario Health CEO Matthew Anderson in the memo, obtained by CBC News. "We are instructing hospitals to ramp down all elective surgeries and non-emergent/urgent activities in order to preserve critical care and human resource capacity," says Anderson.

canada Feds 'don't have enough robust scientific advice' to lay out plan for reopening Canada-U.S. border: LeBlanc - prospect of surplus vaccine doses makes a sort-of normal summer possible There's too much uncertainty about the pandemic's path in the coming months for the federal government to engage in discussions about reopening the Canada-U.S. border, said Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc. "This doesn't feel like the right moment to have those conversations," LeBlanc told CBC News Network's Power & Politics. "We do recognize, as vaccination rates go up and, hopefully, as we see the public health measures that are in place now bring down those case counts, there will be a conversation that we can have both with the American administration and with provinces and territories about what is the right posture at the international borders. "But for the moment, there's no active discussion [about] adjusting those measures." LeBlanc said his government needs more detailed advice from scientists about the impact of the vaccine rollout and how effective it will be in reducing transmission and infection rates. "All of those conversations I know are taking place with scientists," he said. "We don't feel, as a government, that we have enough ... robust scientific advice to lay out a map with so many uncertainties."