Ontario is reporting more than 1,700 new cases of COVID-19, one of the highest daily case counts in the province in the last six weeks.
Provincial health officials logged 1,745 new cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, up from 1,553 on Thursday and 1,508 on Wednesday.
With the exception of the 1,747 new infections that were confirmed on March 14, a tally that the province said was not an accurate due to a data cleanup, this is the highest case count reported in Ontario since Feb. 1, when 1,969 new infections were confirmed.
More than 56,000 tests were completed over the past 24 hours, resulting in a test positivity rate of 3.3 per cent, up from 2.4 per cent last week.
Ten more virus-related deaths were logged today, bringing the total in Ontario to 7,212. The average daily death toll is now 12, unchanged from last week.
The rolling seven-day average of new infections now stands at 1,480, up from 1,269 last Friday and 1,063 two weeks ago.
There are now 13,253 active COVID-19 cases that have been confirmed by provincial labs, close to 2,000 more than the number reported one week ago.
Hospitalizations also rose to 759 on Friday, up from 730 one day earlier and 676 last week. There are now 309 COVID-19 patients in intensive care, according to the Ministry of Health, up from 282 last week.
Of the new cases today, 478 are in Toronto, 344 are in Peel, 174 are in York Region, and 116 are in Hamilton.
The new numbers come one day after Ontario's chief medical officer of health confirmed that the province has officially entered the third wave of the pandemic as more transmissible variants continue to circulate widely.
Today Ontario logged another 39 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant, which was first detected in the United Kingdom, and one new case of the B.1351 variant, first discovered in South Africa. There are fewer than 1,300 confirmed variant cases in the province but another 11,000 have screened positive and are still awaiting whole genome sequencing to confirm the lineage. The province has previously acknowledged that variant cases make up the majority of new infections in Ontario.
New data released this week estimates that each person with a variant case is now infecting 1.35 other people, an alarmingly high reproductive number Ontario as a whole hasn’t seen since April of last year.
This week, Dr. Peter Juni, the director of Ontario’s science advisory table, called for a hard three-week lockdown in the Golden Horseshoe to help prevent the explosive growth in cases that some experts believe is likely to occur in the next few weeks.
Despite this warning, the province is considering easing some restrictions in COVID-19 hot spots, including Toronto and Peel Region, at the request of local officials.
Both Mayor John Tory and Toronto's Medical Officer of Health Dr. Eileen de Villa have said that even with the rising case counts, they believe it is safe to allow some new outdoor activities to resume in the grey zone of the provincial reopening framework, including patio dining and outdoor fitness classes.
"If outdoors the risk is considerably reduced, which it is (and) always has been, then why can’t we leave grey in place so we have all the restrictions on the social gatherings... but move to allow outdoor dining," Tory told CP24 on Friday morning.
"I think this is the sensible thing to do and we will see what the government decides. I’ll be understanding of whatever they do because we are in a situation where we have to be cautious but I think this is appropriately cautious."
Ford is expected to meet with his cabinet today to come to a decision on amending restrictions in the grey zone.
The numbers used in this story are found in the Ontario Ministry of Health's COVID-19 Daily Epidemiologic Summary. The number of cases for any city or region may differ slightly from what is reported by the province, because local units report figures at different times.
