Ottawa Public Health’s latest COVID-19 case report shows 94 new coronavirus infections in the past 24 hours, the city’s first day with fewer than 100 cases since March.
Despite the low number of new cases, OPH reported five new deaths related COVID-19 on Tuesday, raising the city’s death toll of the pandemic to 515.
Active COVID-19 cases in the city fell to 1,777 in the past day.
Tuesday tends to be the lowest day for new COVID-19 cases during the week as testing volumes drop over the weekend. OPH’s COVID-19 dashboard shows only 1,218 swabs were taken at local assessment centres over the past week.
The number of new cases is a departure from the surge in COVID-19 cases seen in April, with some days seeing more than 300 new infections locally.
Those volumes overwhelmed OPH’s contact tracing capabilities, though the local health unit says those efforts are returning to form.
OPH’s dashboard shows that staff were able to contact a resident within 24 hours of getting a positive test result back from the lab only 17 per cent of the time in the past week — well short of its 90 per cent target.
The surge in April saw a “backlog” in contacting residents, OPH told Global News in a statement.
The record number of cases to follow-up with, combined with a transition to the province’s case and contact management system, exacerbated that backlog.
With that transition complete and case volumes declining, OPH said in its statement that its metrics for reaching cases within 24 hours stand closer to 80 per cent as of Tuesday.
There are currently 101 Ottawa residents in hospital with COVID-19, 28 of whom are in the intensive care unit, with 34 ongoing coronavirus outbreaks across the city.
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