Montreal's Notre-Dame Hospital cancels non-urgent surgeries due to COVID-19 outbreak

After a COVID-19 outbreak affected five members of its operating room staff, non-urgent surgeries will be suspended as of Thursday at Notre-Dame Hospital in Montreal.

"We are living in a timethat isvery similar, strangely, to what we experienced in March-April 2020," Dr. Stanley Vollant, a surgeon at the hospital, told Radio-Canada.

He confirmed the hospital's plan to cancel surgeries for the time being, saying the operating rooms will be operating at the bare minimum with those five staff membersout sick.

Urgent and oncological surgeries will continue.

The community hospital is located on Sherbrooke Street East, across from Montreal'sLa Fontainepark. It has been there for nearly a century.

Montreal recorded 844 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday, and the city's public health director,Dr. Mylne Drouin, saidshe expects the daily number to increase in the coming weeks.

Currently, most cases are still of the Delta variant. But there are now 95 cases of the Omicron variant in the city, and 90 per cent of them involve people who were fully vaccinated.

In total,Quebec reported 2,386 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and four new deaths.