Ontario reported 15 net new COVID-19 deaths on Friday, as the number of patients hospitalized with the virus fell to its absolute lowest point since April 1.

The Ministry of Health says 14 of the deaths occurred in the past 30 days and one occurred prior to that period.

Of those, eight involved residents of the long-term care system.

There have been 64 deaths reported in the past seven days and 460 reported in the past 30.

A total of 13,210 COVID-19 deaths have been confirmed in Ontario since March 2020.

Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, citing wastewater surveillance data, says virus prevalence is stable or on the decline in all regions of the province.

In the GTA, the table says wastewater signal of the SARS-COV-2 virus is at its lowest point since the arrival of the original Omicron variant in Dec. 2021.

GTA wastewater signal

The Ministry of Health said there were 948 patients in hospital testing positive for COVID-19 on Friday.

That’s the lowest overall count of COVID-positive patients reported on a weekday with full data available since April 1, 2022.

The number of patients in intensive care remained unchanged from Thursday at 154. It has fallen by seven since last Friday and declined by 57 in the past month.

Of those, 68 were breathing with the help of a ventilator, down 13 from one week ago.

Of the 1,096 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed through PCR testing, the Ministry of Health says 120 involved unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people, 167 involved people with two shots of COVID-19 vaccine, 732 involved people with three or more shots of vaccine and the vaccination status of 77 others was not known.

Provincial labs processed 13,316 test specimens in the previous period, generating a positivity rate of 8.4 per cent.

Average test positivity stood at nine per cent over the past seven days, down from 10.9 per cent during the previous week.

The province said 22,490 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered on Thursday.

Of those, 1,052 were first doses, 1,314 were second doses, 2,277 were third doses and 17,847 fourth doses.

Across all age groups, 84.6 per cent of Ontario residents have had at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, 81.5 per cent have had two doses and 49.2 per cent have had three or more doses.

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.