Welcome back everybody to post-dressling. It's John Pollock and waiting and

joining us once again who has been a

Consistent voice to join us over this past year of the pandemic. He is a clinical care physician here in the province of Ontario

Dr. Alex Patel returning to post-dressling. Dr. Patel, how are you doing tonight?

I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on

My first question. I just want to get to the heart of the matter. Do you have a publicist yet?

No, no. You know a good one. I could use it.

Alex is coming off of an appearance just earlier tonight on

CTV news and I thought we could maybe just start there of

What specifically you were talking about the kind of urgency that the province is facing now that you and your colleagues have actually

Signed this letter to the government of Ontario

Sure, so as you know, I'm a critical care physician in Ontario and over the past few weeks

We've noticed an exponential rise in the number of critical care patients in particular number of young patients that are coming in

With severe COVID infection and we're starting to see our capacity be exceeded

We've sent numerous patients out to other hospitals and for those of you not familiar with the Ontario area

We're talking about you know two to three hundred kilometers sometimes away

And it's becoming concerning because we're starting to see an increase in cases

We're starting to see more and more burnout from nurses in particular

So even if we have physical beds, they're not staff. So we felt there was some urgency to get the message

Of that we need to reduce transmission in this area

And that was the consensus sort of of most of the ICU physicians in our province who penned a letter and sent it out earlier today

Um the government of Ontario for those of you that reside here aware that there were some restrictions put in place

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