TORONTO -- Grey Bruce Health Unit is telling residents to stay home for the next two days as COVID-19 variants of concern surge in the region.
Public health authorities say all residents should consider themselves a COVID-19 carrier for the next 48 hours.
Authorities say the steps are necessary after 70 new cases were confirmed in the region in the past 36 hours.
Grey Bruce Health Unit says the advisory is on top of Ontario's pre-existing stay-at-home-order.
The public health unit says it needs to slow the spread of the virus in order to do contact tracing.
It is also shutting down the Grey Bruce Health Unit info-line and cancelling a mass vaccination clinic on Saturday to redeploy staff to case management and contact tracing.
Meanwhile, Ontario said a COVID-19 field hospital could be activated in Toronto later this month as it grapples with rising hospitalizations caused by the pandemic.
The Ministry of Health said in a statement that the mobile health unit at Sunnybrook Hospital is expecting to take patients in the coming weeks.
The field hospital has been set up in a parking lot at the site and is one of two in the province designed to help address growing capacity challenges.
The province said the temporary beds will provide increased capacity to the health system as a whole by freeing up acute and critical care capacity within hospitals.
The government said it will also help expand capacity by allowing the hospitals to transfer non-critical care patients to these general medicine beds.
This week, Ontario has set new records with the number of patients hospitalized and in intensive care units because of COVID-19.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 15, 2021.
