Ontario is reporting its highest number of new cases of COVID-19 in nearly a week, prompting the province’s chief medical officer to question whether everyone is being as careful as they should be.

The Ministry of Health says that there were 477 new cases confirmed on Thursday as well as 63 more deaths in people who had contracted the virus.

It is the highest number of new cases since May 2, though it does remain well off the record 640 cases confirmed on April 24.

“It’s still perplexing to me that we’re not doing better,” Dr. David Williams said Friday, adding that of the 477 new cases, approximately 55 per cent of them were acquired in the community.

“It makes me wonder if people are being less than consistent in their physical distancing,” he said.

The concern is that the uptick in new cases comes as the province begins to allow some retail stores to reopen. Garden centres were permitted to reopen this morning while hardware stores will be allowed to reopen as of Saturday morning. All other retail stores must remain closed but can open for curbside pickup as of Monday morning.

Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott encouraged the public to look at the wider trend of a decline in the number of active cases, instead of going by day to day tallies.

“We are seeing a sort of shifting of numbers – we had several days where we are under 400 cases, today it increased to 477 but that it is more or less to be expected as we see a gradual reduction of cases.”

She said the majority of Ontario’s testing capacity is aimed at checking long-term care and retirement homes, which now account for the largest share of the province’s new cases each day.

“We are still seeing the majority of cases in long-term care and retirement homes. But there is still some community spread so that’s why we need to continue the testing in the community.”

Public health officials have previously said that COVID-19 has peaked in Ontario, though the number of new cases each day has continued to number in the hundreds.

So far this month an average of 426 new cases have been reported on a daily basis, though that number has been as low as 370 and as high as 511.

Williams also suggested that some infected people aren’t carefully retracing all of their previous steps when asked during the contact tracing process.

“We’ve asked some people who said initially no (about some previous contact) and later they say, yeah that was probably true. I didn’t think much of it. There’s a tendency to say over a period of time you let your guard down and then get some exposure.”

In more positive news, Williams said that for the first time, Ontario’s basic reproduction number has fallen below one, meaning that on average, each newly infected person is passing the virus on to less than one other person.

He said in some parts of the province, the reproduction number or R0 has fallen to about 0.8, but in other parts, it remains well above 1, closer to 1.3.

The 477 new cases confirmed on Friday translate into a positive rate of about 2.9 per cent on the more than 16,000 tests conducted. That’s up marginally from a positive rate of around 2.6 per cent on about 1,000 thousand fewer tests one day prior but is down from May 6 when there were 412 confirmed cases on just under 13,000 tests.

Elliott said the next milestone will to be to push the number of tests completed each day to above 20,000.

Williams said the network of labs across Ontario can now turn around a maximum of 20,700 tests in 24 hours, but it’s not yet known when they will actually do that.

Nine more outbreaks in long-term care homes

Encouragingly, the number of people taking up hospital beds is also holding relatively steady.

The latest data suggests that there are 1,028 people hospitalized with the virus, down by five from one day prior.

The number of those people in intensive care units, meanwhile, continues to slowly trend downwards after hitting a high of 264 on April 9 and now stands at 213.

Long-term care homes continue to be on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19, accounting for more than three-quarters of all deaths (1,150)

There has also been a rise in outbreaks at long-term care homes as the province works to conduct testing in all of those facilities ahead of a May 15 deadline to do so.

As a result, there are now 234 outbreaks in long-term care homes (up nine from one day prior). Those outbreaks have led to 2,783 confirmed cases among residents and 1,398 confirmed cases among staff.

There are also 83 outbreaks at retirement homes and 70 outbreaks at hospitals, though both numbers remains mostly unchanged from yesterday. .

There have now been a total of 19,598 confirmed cases of COVID-19 provincewide so far, including 13,990 recoveries.

Other highlights from the data:

• There are 3,230 cases among healthcare workers, accounting for more than 16 per cent of all confirmed cases

• The total number of people who have been hospitalized with the virus now stands at 2,428 (12.4 per cent of all cases)

• Greater Toronto Area public health units account for 61.3 per cent of all cases

• The province's 34 local public health units reported 1,629 deaths due to the virus by Friday afternoon.

• People over the age of 60 now account for 43.4 per cent of all cases