The number of active COVID-19 cases in Canada has more than doubled this month, as the total number of Canadians infected by the virus since the start of the pandemic nears one per cent of the country's population.
There were 364,810 confirmed cases in Canada as of end-of-day Saturday, according to a CTV News tracker, including 61,421 cases that were classified as active – an increase of 113 per cent over the 28,875 cases that were active as of Nov. 1. The current number of active cases is greater than the population of Fredericton, New Brunswick.
Every part of the country has helped contribute to that surge. The Atlantic "bubble" has popped, with New Brunswick being the first Atlantic province to show COVID-19 activity at similar rates to the spring. There have also been significant ramp-ups in virus detections in the North, with Yukon reporting record numbers and Nunavut just starting to fall back from a worrying period that left it with the highest per capita infection rate in Canada.
It's Central Canada and the West that are carrying the lion's share of this phase of the pandemic, with the four most populous provinces all reporting record single-day infection totals since Friday.
Ontario and British Columbia set their records on Friday, logging 1,855 and 911 cases of the virus respectively. Alberta and Quebec took their turns on Saturday, with 1,731 new infections recorded in Alberta and 1,480 in Quebec.
All of this activity helped push Canada to a record single-day total of 5,967 new cases on Friday. That number fell to 5,743 on Saturday, albeit without any data from B.C.
Modelling data released by Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, has projected that there could be 10,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day diagnosed in Canada by mid-December if Canadians do not do more to curb their interactions with others.
--with files from CTV News--