Ontario reported at least 3 new deaths due to COVID-19 across a 48 hour span, and said that the number of COVID patients requiring ventilators to breathe in hospitals hit a multi-year low.

The Ministry of Health said it detected two new COVID-19 deaths on Sunday and one more on Monday.

There have been 92 deaths reported in the past seven days and 436 in the past 30 days.

There have been 13,164 COVID-19 deaths reported in Ontario since March 2020.

But hospitalizations continue to be declining significantly, especially among patients requiring the most critical types of care.

Dr. Alon Vaisman, infectious disease specialist at UHN in Toronto says all leading indicators continue to appear positive in the province.

“I think the overall story is quite positive in Ontario that cases are coming down including hospitalizations and deaths associated with COVID-19,” he told CP24.

He said the detection of a new largely Ontario-specific Omicron subvariant, dubbed BA.2.20, was unfortunate but not a cause for immediate concern, a view shared by several other epidemiologists quoted in recent days.

“It’s unfortunate that a variant did arise in Ontario probably or may have come elsewhere in Canada but is more concentrated here.”

It seems to be rising in prevalence throughout the province over the last few weeks. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s bad news headed for us in the near future, i.e. it doesn’t necessarily mean that cases are on the rise or there will be a new wave in June or July for example.”

Across the province, the COVID-19 Science Advisory Table said Tuesday that wastewater surveillance data continues to suggest virus transmission is declining in all regions except for northern Ontario.

Overall hospital admissions data was incomplete on Tuesday, but there were 157 patients in intensive care, up five from Saturday but down eight from one week ago.

Of those, 65 were breathing with the help of a ventilator, the lowest number of vented patients seen in the province since Nov. 11, 2020.

Of the 1,287 cases of COVID-19 confirmed through PCR testing over the past 48 hours, the Ministry of Health says 165 involved unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people, 217 involved people with two doses of vaccine, 844 involved people with three or more doses of vaccine and the vaccination status of 61 others were not known.

Provincial labs processed 6,534 test specimens in the past 24 hours, generating a positivity rate of 10.5 per cent.

Average positivity was 10.1 per cent for the past 7 days, and 11.6 per cent for the week prior to that.

The Ministry of Health says 7,467 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered between Sunday morning and Monday evening at 8 p.m.

Of those, 415 were first doses, 635 were second doses, 1,241 were third doses and 5,176 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.