Provincial COVID-19 Lock Down

The provincial government is imposing a province-wide emergency brake in all 34 public health unit regions as a result of an alarming surge of COVID-19 case numbers and related hospitalizations across the province.

The province-wide emergency brake will be effective Saturday, April 3, 2021, at 12:01 a.m. It is intended to be kept in place for at least four weeks.

The province-wide emergency brake puts into place time-limited public health and workplace safety measures to help to stop the rapid transmission of COVID-19 variants in communities, protect hospital capacity, and save lives. Measures include, but are not limited to:

  • Prohibiting indoor organized public events and social gatherings and limiting the capacity for outdoor organized public events or social gatherings to a 5-person maximum, except for gatherings with members of the same household (the people you live with) or gatherings of members of one household and one other person from another household who lives alone;

  • Restricting in-person shopping in all retail settings, including a 50 percent capacity limit for supermarkets, grocery stores, convenience stores, indoor farmers' markets, other stores that primarily sell food and pharmacies, and 25 percent for all other retail including big box stores, along with other public health and workplace safety measures;

  • Prohibiting personal care services;

  • Prohibiting indoor and outdoor dining. Restaurants, bars, and other food or drink establishments will be permitted to operate by take-out, drive-through, and delivery only;

  • Prohibiting the use of facilities for indoor or outdoor sports and recreational fitness (e.g., gyms) with very limited exceptions;

  • Requiring day camps to close; and,

  • Limiting capacity at weddings, funerals, and religious services, rites or ceremonies to 15 percent occupancy per room indoors, and to the number of individuals that can maintain two metres of physical distance outdoors. This does not include social gatherings associated with these services such as receptions, which are not permitted indoors and are limited to five people outdoors.

The current COVID-19 Response Framework: Keeping Ontario Safe and Open, will be paused when the provincewide emergency brake comes into effect.

Jennifer Bennett