(Photo of Ontario Premier Doug Ford, January 12th, 2020)
The province has issued a stay-at-home order requiring everyone to remain at home with exceptions for essential purposes or for essential work effective Thursday, January 14th at 12:01 a.m..
Premier Doug Ford made the announcement earlier today.
The announcement comes less than a week after the decision was made by the provincial government to not reopen schools on Monday, January 11th. The Region of Halton provided myFM News an in-depth look as to why that decision was made. You can read that article here.
- Windsor-Essex
- Peel Region
- Toronto
- York
- Hamilton
By Wednesday of next week, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health will provide the Government with advice regarding whether schools in the rest of the Province can reopen, or continue with online education.
The Premier says today’s actions are intended to prevent Ontario’s Health Care system from being overrun by COVID-19 cases.
I-C-U occupancy by COVID-19 patients is now over 400 beds and is projected to be as high as one-thousand beds by early February which has the potential to overwhelm Ontario’s hospitals.
Residents are allowed to leave their homes for essential purposes, such as going to the grocery store or pharmacy, accessing health care services, for exercise or for essential work. The province says this order and other new and existing public health restrictions are aimed at limiting people’s mobility and reducing the number of daily contacts with those outside an immediate household. In addition to limiting outings to essential trips, all businesses must ensure that any employee who can work from home, does work from home.
To reign in the spread of the virus via community contacts, outdoor gatherings are being restricted to no more than five persons.
Big box stores will be subject to random inspection to ensure premises quotas remain within authorized limits. Last week, Eddie Oliveira of EddieO’s Kitchen and Pourhouse in Milton spoke about how it was unfair that his business was forced to close but department stores were allowed to stay open with a large number of people bumping into each other unsupervised. You can read that full story here.
