Ontario is once again reporting a week-over-week rise in virus-related hospitalizations as experts caution that the province has entered a new wave of the pandemic.

Provincial health officials say there are now 804 COVID patients receiving treatment in hospitals, down slightly from 807 on Thursday but up from 667 one week ago. That includes 167 COVID patients in the ICU, an increase of six week-over-week.

The province says 49 per cent of patients in hospital were admitted for COVID-19 while 51 per cent were admitted for other reasons. About 71 per cent of ICU patients were admitted for COVID-19 while 29 per cent were admitted for other conditions but subsequently tested positive for the virus.

Another 18 virus-related deaths were confirmed today, including nine that occurred within the past month and another nine that occurred more than a month ago.

Despite the rise in transmission and hospitalizations, Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott said Thursday that the province is "staying the course," noting that it is unlikely public health measures will be reintroduced by the provincial government.

Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist with Toronto General Hospital, told CP24 on Friday that while the province is seeing an uptick in transmission, we are in a better place now than we were months ago when public health restrictions, such as vaccine passports and mandatory masking, were necessary.

"In all fairness, we can acknowledge that we are in a wave right now and cases are going up and there is even early indications that hospitalizations are going up, but when you sort of take a step back and look at where we are at in Ontario and Canada right now, I mean we have about 90 per cent of our population over the age of five with at least a first dose of a vaccine, about 86 per cent of population over five with two doses of vaccine," he said on Friday morning before the release of today's data.

"A significant proportion of the population has been infected and recovered. What I am trying to say is we are not the same as we were six months ago or a year ago. We have tremendous community-level protection. That doesn't mean that this wave isn't happening. Of course it is and some people are going to get sick, and some people are going to land in hospital, and sadly, some people are going to die. But as a community we are certainly in a better place now to face a wave than we were three months, six months, a year ago."

Another 3,519 new cases of the virus were confirmed by provincial labs but that number is a significant undercount due to restrictions on testing.

With 17,468 tests processed over the past 24 hours, officials are reporting a provincewide positivity rate of 16.4 per cent, up from 12.6 per cent last week.

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.