17M Canadians got Omicron in 5 months, new federal report says
Global News
The COVID-19 Immunity Task Force released a report illustrating how transmissible the Omicron variant and its subvariants have become as millions of Canadians were infected.
Some sobering figures from Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force reveal how quickly the Omicron variant of COVID-19 and its subvariants spread across the country at the end of 2021 and the first few months of this year.
The task force illustrates that 17 million Canadians were infected in only five months, between December 2021 and May 2022, its data suggests.
That represents an average of more than 100,000 infections a day.
Task Force officials are calling this an “Omicron Tsunami.”
“This variant was extremely transmissible. It caused people to have asymptomatic infections, infections with no symptoms so they went about doing their daily thing. And we were lifting all these restrictions,” Dr. Catherine Hankins, the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force Co-Chair, told Global News.
The results come from blood tests that were conducted across the country where antibodies with evidence of COVID-19 infections were measured.
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