Ontario is reporting just under 1,700 new cases of COVID-19 today as the provincewide positivity rate jumped above five per cent for the first time in more than six weeks.

Provincial health officials are reporting 1,699 new cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, down from 1,791 on Sunday and 1,829 on Saturday but up from 1,268 one week ago.

The rolling seven-day average of new cases has now climbed to 1,600, up from 1,350 last Monday. With just 31,098 tests completed over the past 24 hours, the provicewide positivity rate is 5.4 per cent, marking the first time that number has surpassed five per cent since Feb. 1.

Three more virus-related deaths were reported over the past 24 hours, bringing the average daily death toll to 12, down from 13 last week. None of the deaths confirmed today involved residents of long-term care homes in Ontario.

With nearly 1,200 more recoveries today, there are now 14,751 active infections in Ontario, up from 12,528 last week.

The province has also seen a jump in hospitalizations over the past 24 hours. The Ministry of Health says there are now 813 people in hospital, up from 760 on Sunday and 699 last week. Data provided by individual local public health units indicates that at least 901 people with COVID-19 are currently in hospital.

Provincial health officials say there are 298 COVID-19 patients in intensive care, down from 305 on Sunday and unchanged from the number of patients reported seven days ago.

But Dr. Kali Barrett, a critical care physician at University Health Network in Toronto, tweeted Monday that Critical Care Services Ontario puts the number of COVID-19 patients in ICU at 351 as of March 21.

"We are in the third wave. The numbers are slowly going up. They are not going as fast as predicted by the modelers," Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health said during a news conference on Monday afternoon.

"We are going up continually with our variants of concern and we are now starting to see impacts on our hospital rates.... that dip down where we had hoped to get to, we didn’t get to. Now it is picking back up again."

Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist and member of the province's COVID-19 vaccine task force, said intensive care units at Ontario hospitals are in a precarious situation.

"We are in a third wave. It's not a good place to be. It's avoidable and it's really unfortunate. If we look at the seven-day average from the very beginning of the month, it was around 1,000 new cases per day and here we are at the tail end of the month at 1,500 new cases per day," he told CP24 on Monday morning.

"I think one of the big problems here is that we never really fully decompressed the ICUs after the second wave. We just don't have that wiggle room in the intensive care units for a big third wave. We've got to be careful here."

The rise is daily case counts and hospitalizations come as the province continues to ease restrictions in its tiered COVID-19 reopening framework. Over the weekend, areas covered by the orange and red zones were allowed significantly higher capacity for indoor dining. For the first time since November, restaurants were allowed to reopen for patio dining in Toronto and Peel Region, which are located in the grey zone of the framework.

Of the new cases today, 500 are in Toronto, 318 are in Peel, 155 are in York Region, and 114 are in Hamilton.

Fifty-three new cases of the more transmissible B.1.1.7 variant, first discovered in the United Kingdom, were confirmed today, bringing the total number of lab-confirmed cases of that variant to 1,340. More than 13,000 cases have screened positive for a variant of concern but are still awaiting whole genome sequencing to determine lineage. The province has acknowledged that the B.1.1.7 variant is now the dominant strain here in Ontario.

"The per cent of the variants are moving up. We are going steadily up to 50 per cent... some day-to-day samples are even higher," Williams said.

"We are also concerned about how the variants of concern are presenting to our hospital sector as they seem to come with presentation of higher levels of ICU admission and unfortunately, some of the early indicators...(suggest) higher mortality rates."

Williams urged people celebrating Passover and Easter in the coming weeks to do so safely.

"We have Passover coming this Saturday and we ask that those individuals partaking in that will do all they need to do to protect themselves, their loved ones, and others as they undertake these celebrations.... right now we are still in the thick of it. We still have our third wave," he said. 

"Easter is coming as well. That’s another long weekend with other people partaking in activities in that time and needing to be very careful and planning ahead of time how you might undertake to do it in a safe way."

The province administered 31,335 COVID-19 vaccine doses over the past 24 hours and the total number of doses administered in the province to date is now 1,554,040.

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.