The COVID-19 pandemic’s economic toll came into sharper focus on Friday as several provinces revamped their efforts to root out the novel coronavirus and slow its spread.
Statistics Canada announced gross domestic product fell at an annualized rate of 8.2 per cent in the first three months of 2020 — the worst quarterly showing since 2009 — even though efforts to contain the novel coronavirus by shuttering businesses and schools didn’t begin in earnest until March.
Many of those businesses are now reopening in a bid to re-employ some of the three million people who lost their jobs, putting workers and clients in close proximity and lending new urgency to the testing and tracing process. “Moving forward it will become even more important to