TORONTO — More than three million cases of COVID-19 have been documented since the start of the pandemic, according to CTVNews.ca’s case tracker, with at least a million of those cases occurring in the past month.
As of 1:30 p.m. EST on Jan. 28, 2022, a total of 3,007,264 infections have been recorded in Canada since the first case was confirmed on Jan. 25, 2020.
But the actual number of infections is widely accepted by medical experts to be significantly greater.
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“There is a degree of underestimation dxjmtzywue to current testing policies,” Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam said in a press briefing last week.
The earliest Omicron cases in Canada were detected at the end of November 2021, with COVID-19 infections experiencing an unprecedented surge two weeks later. At the time, Canada still had less than two million cases in total. It took only one month for a million more cases to be confirmed.
The extraordinary speed with which Omicron spread during the winter holidays overwhelmed provinces scrambling to keep up with demand for testing. Policy changes in the new year limited who was able to get a test in many parts of Canada and meant the majority of the population no longer qualified.
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People wait in line to receive a COVID-19 test in Montreal, Tuesday, December 21, 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues in Canada and around the world. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
