Mayor John Tory says city staff will meet Saturday to discuss how Toronto could potentially reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic, but warns any plan won't be simple.
“We’re having a big meeting,” Tory said on CP24. “We don’t have a date, we got to just keep working at the physical distancing and so on to make sure that date comes sooner than later.”
Tory said the city would have to create a separate team to examine how the city could re-open, as tomorrow’s meeting will explore to logistical challenge of balancing business, government and transportation with public health.
“You can’t believe how complicated it is and it’s almost as complicated to have a plan to re-open the city as it is to manage what’s going on today,” he said.
He was clear however that they’ll lean heavily on Toronto Public Health.
“You are the ones that have to tell us how to do this without either seeing the numbers start back up or seeing a second wave hit us,” he said.
Tory gave the example of restaurants and whether all should open but with physical restrictions inside to ensure distancing or opening up certain establishments to start, and how that would be determined.
On Wednesday, the province extended its declaration of emergency until May 12 and testing for the current capacity of 13,000 tests a day isn’t scheduled to be reached until late this month.
The province’s goal is to eventually get up to 16,000 by May 6, while Thursday saw almost 9,000 tests completed.
Ontario now has 9,525 confirmed cases, including 564 new ones being reported Thursday, with total deaths increasing by 55 to 478.
Almost 137,000 total tests have been completed.
On Thursday, Toronto Public Health set up its own online database, separate from the provincial system.
The latest data for Toronto is 2,881 cases and 147 deaths, while 161 people have recovered.