Ontario reported 16 net new COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, as the number of people in hospital testing positive for COVID-19 fell by nearly 100 in the past 24 hours.

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

Nine of the deaths reported on Wednesday involved residents of the long-term care system.

There have been 108 deaths reported in the past seven days and 467 in the past 30 days.

Ontario has documented 13,099 deaths due to COVID-19 since March 2020.

Meanwhile, the number of hospitalized patients testing positive for COVID-19 fell by 97 to 1,248 on Wednesday, down from 1,528 one week ago and 1,698 two weeks ago.

Of those, 163 were in intensive care, down from 176 one week ago.

UHN infectious diseases specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch said every metric still used to track the course of COVID-19 in the province is pointing “in the right direction.”

“Just about every metric is pointing in the right direction, things are getting better. We had a big wave and this wave is receding,” he told CP24 “We’re seeing even the later metrics start to get better – the per cent of positive cases is starting to decline, it’s been a couple of weeks now. Wastewater signals have been in decline for a while as well.”

“And now what you’re starting to see is those later metrics like the actual numbers of people in hospital are in decline.”

Of the 1,692 cases confirmed through PCR testing on Wednesday, the Ministry of Health says 201 involved unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people, 270 involved people with two doses of vaccine, 1,087 involved people with three or more doses of vaccine and the vaccination status of 134 others was not known.

Provincial labs processed 15,599 test specimens on Wednesday, generating a positivity rate of 10.5 per cent.

Positivity has fallen from a weekly average of 17.2 per cent one month ago to 11.1 per cent today.

Ontario administered 27,019 COVID-19 vaccine doses on Tuesday.

Of those, 1,168 were first doses, 1,357 were second doses, 2,466 were third doses and 22,028 were fourth 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.