Ontario is reporting just under 500 new COVID-19 cases today as hospitalizations and intensive care admissions continue to climb in the province.
Provincial health officials recorded 486 new cases of COVID-19 today, up from 348 last Tuesday but down from 639 on Monday.
The rolling seven-day average of new infections now sits at 600, up from 473 one week ago.
Of the new cases logged today, 128 are in Toronto, 83 are in Peel Region, 47 are in Windsor, 45 are in Hamilton, and 45 are in York Region.
Another 18 virus-related deaths were reported today but the province says 16 of those deaths should have been counted more than two months ago.
With 17,369 tests processed over the past 24 hours, the Ministry of Health is reporting a provincewide positivity rate of three per cent today.
The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 outside of intensive care units jumped to 295 today, up from 204 on Monday and 98 last Tuesday, according to the Ministry of Health.
The number of patients with COVID-19 in intensive care is now 156, up by five since Monday and 29 over the past week.
There are 85 COVID-19 patients breathing with the assistance of a ventilator, up from 78 seven days ago.
Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott noted Tuesday that 149 of the 156 COVID-19 patients in the ICU are not fully vaccinated.
"At this point with 156 we have capacity to be able to provide care to these individuals. It is certainly a key marker that we are monitoring. It bothers me deeply that the majority of these individuals continue to be individuals who haven’t taken advantage of the immunization to protect them," Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario's chief medical officer of health, said during a news conference on Tuesday afternoon.
"I think over the next several weeks we have to make a decision as a society to embrace prevention as the key strategy. We can build more intensive care units or we can immunize and prevent illness and to me it is all about prevention, prevention, prevention. Our fate is in our hands."
Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist and member of the province’s vaccine task force, said with the Delta variant now responsible for the vast majority of infections in Ontario, it is clear cases will continue to rise in the coming weeks.
“I think it is fair to say that those numbers are climbing and we are expecting them to continue to climb. As great as it is that over 82 per cent of eligible people have been vaccinated, there are still millions of millions of people in Ontario that are unvaccinated,” Bogoch told CP24 on Tuesday morning.
“We have the Delta variant which is very, very transmissible and now there are many opportunities for the virus to be transmitted given the current stage we are at of reopening…. So it should come to no one’s surprise that we are going to see cases rise.”
According to the province, 372 cases today are in individuals who are not fully vaccinated or have an unknown vaccination status and 114 are in those who are fully vaccinated.
About 75 per cent of people 12 and older have received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in Ontario.
Bogoch said the province should be able to avoid another lockdown amid the fourth wave of the pandemic if the proper steps are taken and we continue to boost vaccination rates.
"Whether or not there is a lockdown, I don’t know. Obviously we all hope that is not the case. There really shouldn’t be a lockdown," he said.
"I think there are levers that can be pulled to keep this virus under control at the community level to help curb community transmission."
On Monday night, Dr. Peter Jüni, the head of Ontario's Science Advisory Table, said Ontario could see a spike in new infections within the next month.
“Three weeks from now, if we continue the way we do we will probably be at around 1,300 cases. That's a fact,” Jüni told CP24.
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.
