Ontario reports 1,371 new coronavirus cases, 18 more deaths

Ontario is reporting 1,371 new coronavirus cases on Friday, bringing the provincial total to 314,891.

Friday’s case count is higher than Thursday’s which saw 1,092 new infections. On Wednesday, 1,316 new cases were recorded and 1,185 on Tuesday.

According to Friday’s provincial report, 371 cases were recorded in Toronto, 225 in Peel Region, 111 in York Region, 109 in Hamilton and 83 in Ottawa.

All other local public health units reported fewer than 50 new cases in the provincial report.

The death toll in the province has risen to 7,127 as 18 more deaths were recorded.

Meanwhile, 296,252 Ontarians were reported to have recovered from COVID-19, which is 94 per cent of known cases. Resolved cases increased by 1,124 from the previous day.

Active cases in Ontario now stand at 11,512 — up from the previous day when it was 11,283, and up from March 5 at 10,378. At the peak of the coronavirus surge in January, active cases hit above 30,000.

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The government said 64,611 tests were processed in the last 24 hours. There is currently a backlog of 36,744 tests awaiting results. A total of 11,649,060 tests have been completed since the start of the pandemic.

Test positivity — the percentage of tests that come back positive — for Friday and Thursday was 2.4 per cent for both, up from last Friday when it was 2.3 per cent.

Ontario reported 676 people hospitalized with COVID-19 (down by four from the previous day) with 282 patients in intensive care units (up by five) and 189 patients in ICUs on a ventilator (up by five).

As of 8 p.m. on Thursday, the provincial government reported administering 1,062,910 COVID-19 vaccine doses.

Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson are the vaccines currently approved in Canada. The first three require two shots administered several weeks apart while the fourth requires only one.

— More to come.

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