Ontarians Need to Rapidly Increase their Personal Protection and Testing to Mitigate the COVID-19 Spread in the Province

Abstract

Public health interventions have been implemented to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in Ontario, Canada; however, the need for adoption of further public health interventions remains. We aim to equip local public health decision- and policy-makers with mathematical model-based estimates of the trend of COVID-19 in Ontario to inform the necessary additional measures required for its control. Our estimates confirm that social distancing measures have helped mitigate transmission by reducing daily infection contact rate, but the disease transmission probability per contact remains as high as 0.145 that the effective reproduction number is still higher than the threshold for disease control. We predict the number of confirmed cases according to varying control efficacies including a combination of reducing further contact rates and transmission probability per contact. We show that the adoption of personal protective equipment and rapid testing may be key to achieve control of COVID-19 in Ontario.