Anthony Dale, CEO and president of the Ontario Hospital Association, issued a statement Saturday morning to address growing pressures on pediatric hospitals and asked people in the province to wear masks indoors.
“Children often wait longer than adults for surgery and access to specialized clinical and diagnostic procedures.  “Unfortunately, children’s hospitals are being forced to cancel many of these services to free up doctors, staff and clinical space to care for children with severe respiratory conditions,” Dale said in a statement.
“A large number of hospitalized children do not have COVID, are not immunocompromised, and do not have underlying health problems.”
His remarks follow news from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children on Friday afternoon notifying the public that they are suspending some surgeries in an effort to “maintain critical care capacity.”
Before the announcement, the hospital said the intensive care unit had been at least 127 percent over capacity for several days.

	— Jooyoung Lee (@theyoungjoo) November 12, 2022
“Yesterday when we went to some pharmacies and it had been a long time since I knew they were going to be out, I started to panic,” Lee told CTV News Toronto.  For three of the past four weeks, he said his three-year-old son had a fever, cough and runny nose.
Their dwindling supply at home was brought across the border by a family visiting California over the summer, as children’s bottles of Advil and Tylenol were already disappearing from drugstore shelves.
Those alarming signs followed a statement from the Ontario Pharmacists Association in September, which warned that liquid and chewable forms of painkillers for children are becoming scarce.
Since then, the shortages have only grown in severity with Health Canada confirming a national shortage and approving the “exceptional importation” of ibuprofen from the United States and acetaminophen from Australia last month.
At this rate, Lee said he’ll run out of medication to make his son’s fevers drop dramatically, and he’ll be forced to start popping pills or making his own acetaminophen at home.
“There are so many red flags that the health care system is collapsing around us,” Lee said.
“I worry about what could be on the horizon this winter.”