Ontario is reporting close to 1,700 new COVID-19 cases but the province says today's count is an "overestimation" due to additional cases reported by Toronto Public Health.
Ontario logged 1,670 new cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus today, but officials say the tally is artificially high as 125 cases from Toronto should have been counted on previous days.
The province has reported inconsistencies with its daily reporting over the past week as a result of Toronto Public Health migrating to the provincial data management system.
According to today's data, 667 new COVID-19 cases are in Toronto, 317 are in Peel, 125 are in York Region, and 100 are in Halton Region.
Another 45 virus-related deaths were confirmed in the province over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths to 6,438. Of the deaths reported today, 14 were among residents of long-term care homes.
Nearly 63,000 tests were processed over the past 24 hours, resulting in a positivity rate of 2.5 per cent, the lowest positivity rate reported in Ontario since late October.
One week ago, the provincewide positivity rate was sitting at 3.3 per cent, according to data released by the Ministry of Health.
The rolling seven-day average of new cases has declined to 1,575, down from 2,010 last Friday, and the number of active cases also continues to drop in Ontario with just under 16,000 reported today, down from more than 20,000 last week.
Hospitalizations have dropped to 1,043, down from 1,291 last week, according to the province. Virus-related intensive care admissions rose to 325 today, up by two from Thursday but down from 360 last week, recent data from the province indicates.
While the decline in community transmission of the virus appears to have slowed, epidemiologists and other experts have cautioned that an uptick in infections involving more contagious variants of COVID-19 could cause cases to take off again if public health restrictions are not maintained.
As of Wednesday, 152 cases of the B.1.1.7. variant, which was first detected in the United Kingdom, have been confirmed in the province, along with dozens of other highly probable variant cases tied to outbreaks at long-term care homes in Simcoe County.
One case of the B.1.353 variant, which was first found in South Africa, has been confirmed in Ontario.
According to recent data released by Public Health Ontario, of 1,880 positive COVID-19 samples from January 20, 103, or 5.5 per cent, were confirmed or highly likely to be either the UK or South African variant.
"If you look at the case numbers in Ontario, they have been going down steadily... Obviously we are still getting too many infections per day, but hospitalizations and ICU capacity is improving," Dr. Isaac Bogoch, a member of the province's COVID-19 vacine task force, told CP24 on Friday morning.
"We are not out of the woods yet by any means and we are still walking a bit of a tightrope and if we do let up, it is not impossible, things can get out of hand pretty quickly."
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 as local units report figures at different times.
