Ottawa adds 56 COVID-19 cases, will remain in orange zone next week

Ottawa’s COVID-19 monitoring indicators appear stable enough to keep the city in its current level of coronavirus restrictions.

Ottawa is not among the regions slated for a move to a new colour-coded zone next week, according to Ontario’s Friday afternoon announcement.

Dr. Vera Etches, Ottawa’s medical officer of health, had said Wednesday it was a “real possibility” that the city would be moved from the orange-restrict designation on Ontario’s colour-coded reopening framework to the stricter red-control zone amid rising levels of COVID-19 in the city.

The province’s threshold for putting a region into red is a weekly incidence rate of more than 40, a coronavirus positivity rate greater than 2.5 per cent and an R value greater than 1.2.

As of Friday, Ottawa’s weekly incidence rate was pegged at an average of 34.7, the percent positivity stood at 2.0 per cent and the city’s R number was estimated at 1.03 — all figures that are now lower than levels earlier in the week.

Meanwhile, Ottawa Public Health reported 56 new cases of the virus on Friday and no new deaths related to COVID-19.

There have now been 14,588 total cases of COVID-19 in Ottawa since the start of the pandemic with 486 cases currently considered active.

The seven-day average of new cases remained steady at 52 per day as of Friday.

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There are now 23 people in hospital locally with COVID-19, eight of whom are in the intensive care unit.

Extendicare’s Laurier Manor long-term care home declared its third coronavirus outbreak of the pandemic on Thursday after one member of its staff tested positive for the virus, according to OPH.

There are 33 ongoing COVID-19 outbreaks in Ottawa institutions as of Friday.

Ottawa received a fresh shipment of 4,000 Moderna vaccine doses on Thursday, according to OPH’s COVID-19 dashboard.

The city now has a stated inventory of 61,820 vaccine doses between Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccines.

So far, the city has administered a total of 49,125 vaccine doses, primarily to health-care workers and the residents of long-term care facilities and retirement homes. Ottawa plans to start vaccinating residents aged 80 and older in six high-risk neighbourhoods next week.