渥太华市政府疫情信息网站

lindamy · 2021-03-19

Ontario's 3rd wave of COVID-19 could hit younger adults harder. Here's why

Across Ontario, there's growing consensus among medical experts that the province has entered a third wave of COVID-19 cases.

There's also growing concern that anecdotal evidence of recent serious infections skewing toward younger adults is a harbinger of a difficult stretch to come — one that may upend persistent notions of COVID-19 typically only being a grave illness for the elderly.

"We're at a real risk right now of the variants of concern taking off, and that prime age group of 40 to 75 being hit really hard by this wave, particularly with the variants being more likely to cause serious illness that requires more hospitalization," said Dr. Brooks Fallis, a critical care physician in Peel region, west of Toronto.

Emergency physician Dr. Kashif Pirzada said his colleagues in the Greater Toronto Area are already seeing an impact, with younger patients arriving in hospital even more ill than during previous waves.

"I myself saw a few patients in their 30s and 40s who had significant illness," he said. "One person had severe lung damage that you see in COVID, and they were young, healthy, no medical problems."

Clinicians and epidemiologists suspect multiple factors could shift the trajectory of the pandemic in Ontario.

On one hand, vaccinations are slowly making an impact for certain populations, including front-line health-care workers and the elderly — with the death toll in long-term care dropping dramatically as vaccination rates have picked up.

But there are still hospitalizations and deaths happening among other groups, with younger adults remaining vulnerable, said Dr. Kali Barrett, a critical care physician at Toronto's University Health Network and a member of the COVID-19 Modelling Collaborative, a group of scientists and clinicians affiliated with Toronto's university and hospital system.

"Our vaccination efforts to date have done nothing to protect the at-risk, community-dwelling adults," she said.

Against that backdrop, there's a patchwork of restrictions and reopenings across the province, giving people more chances to mingle and spread the virus, whether that's in a shopping mall or a spin class.

Essential workers, Pirzada warns, will likely keep bearing the brunt. They're like "sitting ducks" when it comes to highly contagious new variants, he said.

Meanwhile, the province has announced that Ontarians aged 75 and older can start scheduling COVID-19 vaccine appointments through the province's booking portal on Monday, and pharmacies will begin offering the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine to residents 60 and above.

Adults 75 and older were set to become eligible by the first week of April, but the province is moving ahead because more than half of residents 80 and older have now gotten at least one dose of a vaccine, Premier Doug Ford said on Friday.