
Ontario is reporting 2,380 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, bringing the provincial total to 336,070.
However, Thursday’s case count is an overestimation by about 280 cases due to data catch-up related to the provincial system, the Ontario government said.
Despite the inclusion of older cases, Ontario still recorded more than 2,000 new infections. The province hasn’t seen a figure that high since the tail-end of the surge at the end of January.
According to Thursday’s provincial report, 1,016 cases were recorded in Toronto, 294 in Peel Region, 244 in York Region, 152 in Ottawa, 90 in Durham Region and 79 in Hamilton.
All other local public health units reported fewer than 70 new cases in the provincial report.
The death toll in the province has risen to 7,280 as 17 more deaths were recorded.
Officials have listed breakdown data for the new VOCs (variants of concern) which consist of the B.1.1.7 (first detected in the United Kingdom), B.1.351 (first detected in South Africa), and P.1 (first detected in Brazil) mutations.
Of the variants detected so far in the province, the B.1.1.7 VOC is currently the dominating known strain at 1,458 variant cases, which is up by 69 since the previous day, 51 B.1.351 variant cases which is up by one, and 54 P.1 variant cases which is up by seven.
Meanwhile, 311,380 Ontario residents were reported to have recovered from COVID-19, which is about 93 per cent of known cases. Resolved cases increased by 1,531 from the previous day.
Active cases in Ontario now stand at 16,081 — up from the previous day when it was at 15,047, and up from March 18 when it was at 12,814. At the peak of the coronavirus surge in January, active cases hit above 30,000.
The government said 60,077 tests were processed in the last 24 hours. There is currently a backlog of 36,916 tests awaiting results. A total of 12,258,432 tests have been completed since the start of the pandemic.
Test positivity — the percentage of tests that come back positive — for Thursday was 3.8 per cent. That figure is the same as Wednesday’s, and is up from last week when it was 3.1 per cent.
Ontario reported 894 people are hospitalized with COVID-19 (up by one from the previous day) with 332 patients in intensive care units (down by one) and 212 patients in ICUs on a ventilator (up by two).
As of 8 p.m. on Wednesday, the provincial government reported administering 1,755,596 COVID-19 vaccine doses, representing an increase of 79,446 in the last day. There are 304,386 people fully vaccinated with two 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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