Toronto's COVID-19 incident commander will be returning to his role as the city's fire chief as "the situation with COVID-19 continues to stabilize," he announced Thursday.
Matthew Pegg, who has led the city's COVID-19 strategic response team for the past two years, says the time has come for him to return to his regular job as the chief of Toronto Fire Services.
"I am pleased to report as the situation with COVID-19 continues to stabilize, we are continuing scale back a number of aspects of our COVID-19 incident management system," Pegg said at a news conference on Thursday morning.
"While our emergency operations centre continues to be activated and continues to provide support to Toronto Public Health and other city divisions, our team has also resumed a number of normal emergency planning and operations as well."
He said effective March 15, he will transfer command of the city's COVID-19 incident management system and leadership of the COVID-19 strategic command team to the director of Toronto's office of emergency management.
"From the initial creation of our immunization task force that led to the design and establishment of our vaccine clinic operations, through to our ongoing return to normal life in our city and the continuing removal of COVID-19 related restrictions that we are enjoying today, this has been an incredible journey," he said.
Pegg had previously returned to his role as fire chief but was called back to resume his position with the city after the COVID-19 situation worsened.
Over the past two months, the province has been easing public health measures, including lifting capacity restrictions in indoor settings and scrapping Ontario's vaccine passport system.
On Wednesday, the province announced that mask mandates would be lifted in most indoor public settings in less than two weeks.
