But what makes it even more difficult, the Toronto-based palliative care physician and health justice activist told Al Jazeera, is watching the Ontario government put measures in place that he says will not do enough to get the pandemic under control.

“This entire humanitarian catastrophe should never have happened. Had the Ontario government just listened to the experts and made the important decisions … around public health restrictions, we would never have been here,” Dosani said.

“This whole scenario was entirely preventable.”

Surging infections
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned on April 6 that Canada was facing a “very serious” third wave of the pandemic, and this week, the national seven-day average of new coronavirus cases surpassed that of the United States per capita.


Ontario, the country’s most populous province, has been one of the hardest-hit places, with new, more easily transmissible strains of the virus spreading rapidly. According to Ontario’s COVID-19 advisory table, the so-called variants of concern accounted for 67 percent of all infections as of March 29. The variants also increased the risk of hospitalization by 63 percent; intensive care admissions by 103 percent, and death by 56 percent.

As of April 17, total coronavirus cases in Ontario were at 2,801 per 100,000 people, while as of Sunday, its seven-day average of new daily infections stood at 4,341 and 741 COVID-19 patients were in intensive care. The Globe and Mail newspaper reported that 1,040 COVID-19 patients were in ICUs countrywide on April 12, surpassing the second wave’s peak by around 150 people.
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