Ontario reports over 500 new COVID-19 cases for 2nd day in a row

Ontario is reporting 510 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, marking the second day in a row cases have been over 500.

The provincial total now stands at 554,472.

According to Friday’s report, 129 cases were recorded in Toronto, 61 in Peel Region, 51 in Hamilton, 41 in Windsor-Essex and 33 in York Region.

All other local public health units reported 25 or fewer new cases in the provincial report.

Of the 510 new cases recorded, the data showed 368 were unvaccinated people, 57 were partially vaccinated people and 85 were full vaccinated people.

The death toll in the province stands at 9,416 as four more deaths were recorded. However, the Ministry of Health said two of the deaths recorded are due to a data cleanup and occurred more than two months ago.

Active cases in Ontario now stand at 3,110.

The government said over 23,586 tests were processed in the last 24 hours. There is currently a backlog of 9,807 tests awaiting results.

Test positivity for Friday was two per cent, slightly down from Thursday’s which was 2.1 per cent.

There are currently 123 patients with COVID-19 in general hospital wards. There are 111 people in intensive care units and 72 of those ICU patients are on ventilators with COVID-19.

On Tuesday, provincial officials announced they would start including the vaccination status of those hospitalized due to COVID-19 as part of their daily COVID-19 information data portal.

They noted the new dataset will grow and improve over time as more information is collected.

On Friday, preliminary gathering of data showed for those in general hospital wards with COVID, 64 were unvaccinated, six were partially vaccinated and nine were fully vaccinated. For those in ICUs, three were fully vaccinated while 52 were unvaccinated and five were partially vaccinated.

As of 8 p.m. on Thursday, 48,682 vaccines (11,619 for a first shot and 37,063 for a second shot) were administered in the last day.

There are more than 9.45 million people fully immunized with two doses which is 72.81 per cent of the eligible (12+) population. First dose coverage stands at 81.31 per cent.

Meanwhile, 541,946 Ontario residents were reported to have recovered from COVID-19, which is up by 264 from the previous day.

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 (now named by WHO as “Alpha” and was first detected in the United Kingdom), B.1.351 (now named by WHO as “Beta” and was first detected in South Africa), P.1 (now named by WHO as “Gamma” and was first detected in Brazil), and B.1.617.2 (now named by WHO as “Delta” and was first detected in India).

“Alpha” the B.1.1.7 VOC: 145,656 variant cases, which is up by 15 since the previous day,

“Beta” the B.1.351 VOC: 1,493 variant cases, which is unchanged since the previous day.

“Gamma” the P.1 VOC: 5,176 variant cases, which is unchanged since the previous day.

“Delta” B.1.617.2 VOC: 6,019 variant cases, which is up by 146 since the previous day.