Ontario is reporting 3,469 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday. The cumulative provincial total now stands at 424,911.
Tuesday’s case count is lower than Monday’s which saw 4,447 new infections. On Sunday, 4,250 new cases were recorded. It is the first day in a week that cases were not above 4,000.
According to Tuesday’s report, 1,074 cases were recorded in Toronto, 775 in Peel Region, 406 in York Region, 197 in Ottawa, and 256 in Durham Region.
All other local public health units reported fewer than 175 new cases in the provincial report.
The death toll in the province has risen to 7,757 as 22 more deaths were recorded.
Meanwhile, 374,213 Ontario residents were reported to have recovered from COVID-19, which is about 88 per cent of known cases. Resolved cases increased by 3,369 from the previous day.
Ontario reported a record 2,360 people are hospitalized with COVID-19 (up by 158 from the previous day) with an all-time high of 773 patients in intensive care units (up by 18) and 537 patients in ICUs on a ventilator (up by 21).
Active cases in Ontario now stand at 42,941 — up from the previous day when it was at 42,863. At the peak of the second wave coronavirus surge in January, active cases hit just above 30,000.
The government said 40,596 tests were processed in the last 24 hours. There is currently a backlog of 29,217 tests awaiting results. A total of 13,616,626 tests have been completed since the start of the pandemic.
Test positivity for Tuesday was 10 per cent. That figure is down from Monday’s at 10.5 per cent, and is down from last week when it was 10.3 per cent.
As of 8 p.m. on Monday, a total of 3,995,187 COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered. That marks an increase of 90,409 vaccines in the last day. There are 347,597 people fully vaccinated with two doses.
However, the Ontario government said due to the Rogers outage issues on Monday, some vaccine clinics were forced to do paper-based reporting.
On Friday, Ontario officials released modelling data that indicated the only way to flatten the curve was a six-week stay-at-home order and administering at least 100,000 doses a day.
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. J & J vaccines have not yet arrived in Canada.
Variants of concern in Ontario
Officials have listed breakdown data for the new VOCs (variants of concern) detected so far in the province which consist of the B.1.1.7 (first detected in the United Kingdom), B.1.351 (first detected in South Africa), P.1 (first detected in Brazil), as well as mutations that have no determined lineage.
The B.1.1.7 VOC is currently the dominating known strain at 39,276 variant cases, which is up by 2,697 since the previous day, 105 B.1.351 variant cases which is up by one, and 211 P.1 variant cases which is unchanged.