Over the past two days, more than 300 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Ontario and the rolling seven-day average of new infections has now surpassed 200.

Ontario health officials reported 168 new COVID-19 cases on Monday and 164 new infections on Tuesday, down slightly from 218 on Sunday but up from 129 one week ago.

The rolling seven-day average of new cases now stands at 201, up from 157 last Tuesday.

With 11,515 tests processed over the past 24 hours, officials are reporting a provincewide positivity rate of 1.3 per cent today, up from one per cent last week.

Of the new cases confirmed today, there are 45 in the Toronto, 23 in York Region, and 22 in Peel Region.

Two more virus-related deaths were confirmed over the past two days.

The number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care at Ontario hospitals continues to drop. The Ministry of Health says there are currently 106 COVID-19 patients in the ICU, down from 127 last week.

Sixty-eight new cases involving the Delta variant were confirmed in Ontario today, representing all but five of the cases where whole genomic sequencing was completed in the past two days.

"This Delta is much, much more transmissible. It infects way more people... you look at a place like the southern part of the United States where you have some pockets where there is just not the same degree of (vaccine) coverage and you are watching Delta explode in various counties," Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist and member of Ontario's COVID-19 vaccine task force, told CP24 on Tuesday morning.

"If you don't take this seriously, if you don't have steps to keep this under control, if you don't vaccinate as many people as possible, you are going see a rise in cases when you start to lift these public health measures." 

To date, 19,591,917 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Ontario, including 31,015 doses administered on Aug. 2 and 41,121 doses on Aug. 1.

Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, said Tuesday that more than 80 per cent of people 12 and older in the province have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Almost 70 per cent are fully immunized against the disease, he added.

“Since December 14, 2020, unvaccinated cases of COVID-19 accounted for 95.4 per cent of COVID-19 cases with breakthrough cases accounting for only 0.5 per cent. This shows how well vaccination is protecting people in Ontario from COVID-19,” he said.

“In the last month, people who were unvaccinated were approximately eight times more likely to get infected with COVID-19 compared to fully vaccinated individuals.”

He noted that unvaccinated people aged 60 and older were 15 times more likely to be hospitalized due to COVID-19 compared to fully vaccinated people in the same age group.

“We all know that the Delta strain, currently the dominant strain in Ontario, is more transmissible than the original COVID-19 strain and more likely to cause severe disease,” he said.

“This data shows that these vaccines are safe and very effective at preventing you from being hospitalized, admitted to the intensive care unit, or dying from this disease.”

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.