Ontario is reporting just over 3,500 new cases of COVID-19 today, the lowest daily case count recorded over the past week, but with just under 34,000 tests completed in the past 24 hours, the provincewide positivity rate has risen to a level not seen since the beginning of the pandemic.

Ontario logged 3,510 new cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus today, down from 3,947 on Sunday and 4,094 on Saturday. But with just 33,822 tests completed yesterday, Ontario's test positivity rate reached 10.9 per cent, the highest that number has been since last April.

Encouragingly, the rolling seven-day average of new cases has dipped from 4,345 last week to 4,023 today.

Ontario's active caseload also continues to decline. According to the province, there are now 40,586 active, lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ontario, down from 42,863 last week.

"The third wave is not to be taken lightly at all. It is challenging everyone and everyone has to do their part to monitor, to be careful, and to get assessed as soon as you can if you have had exposure," Dr. David Williams, Ontario's chief medical officer of health said on Monday afternoon. 

"We are starting to see the bending of the curve in some areas. We are seeing it actually coming down. Some others are still up there... Overall in the province, it looks like we are making progress but this is just a few days and I don’t want to be overly optimistic."

While new infections appear to be levelling off, virus-related deaths are not yet on a downward trajectory and hospitalizations continue to climb.

For the third consecutive day, 24 new virus-related deaths were reported in the province and the average number of daily deaths linked to COVID-19 in Ontario is now 29, up from 24 last week.

According to data released by the Ministry of Health today, there are at least 2,271 COVID-19 patients at Ontario hospitals and a record 877 patients are in intensive care units (ICU). At least 605 patients are breathing with the assistance of a ventilator.

Data released by individual public health units indicates that there are at least 2,733 people with COVID-19 receiving treatment at Ontario hospitals.

Of the new cases today, 1,015 are in Toronto, 909 are in Peel Region, 391 are in York Region, 244 are in Durham Region and 206 are in Ottawa.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has recently called for a ban on all non-essential travel into Canada due to the discovery of the B.1.617 variant in the province.

The variant has led to explosive case growth in India, which recorded more than 350,000 new infections on Monday alone.

On Thursday, the federal government temporarily halted all flights from India and Pakistan to Canada for 30 days.

Vaccine rollout ‘really picking up speed’

Speaking to CP24 on Monday morning, Dr. Isaac Bogoch, a member of Ontario's COVID-19 vaccine distribution task force, said he hopes the province’s vaccine rollout will help mitigate the potential impacts of more transmissible variants arriving in Ontario.

"Yeah of course you've got to be careful about importing virus and especially variants of concern. On the other hand, it looks like the vaccines really work and the impact of these (variants) might not be as significant as once thought," he said Monday. "Having said that, we don't have all the information. We don't. So we have to proceed with caution."

Bogoch noted that Ontario is on track to offer a first dose to everyone who wants one within the next two months.

"Almost 30 per cent of people in Ontario have had at least one dose of a vaccine. Vaccines are pouring into the province. We are vaccinating usually well over 100,000 people per day," he said. "This is really picking up speed."

On Sunday, 69,308 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine were administered in Ontario and to date, a total of 4,696,211 shots have been administered in the province.

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.