Ontario reported 563 new COVID-19 cases and five additional deaths on Friday, with all leading indicators of transmission now pointing slightly in the wrong direction.
The seven-day rolling average of new cases now stands at 390, up from 383 yesterday and 355 one week ago.
The province reported 438 new cases on Thursday and 378 on Wednesday. It’s the highest daily case count Ontario has seen since Oct. 9.
The COVID-19 Science Advisory Table now calculates Ontario’s effective reproductive rate is back up over one, at 1.09 on Monday, meaning every 100 new cases will go on to generate 109 secondary infections.
One week ago they calculated the reproductive rate to be 0.99.
The Ministry of Health says 259 of Friday’s cases involved unvaccinated people, 15 involved people with one shot, 249 involved fully-vaccinated individuals and 40 involved people with unknown vaccination status.
The proportion of daily cases in unvaccinated people has been falling steadily for weeks now, accounting today for 46 per cent of the case count. As recently as the summer, close to 80 per cent of all daily cases would involve the unvaccinated.
About 23 per cent of Ontario residents are unvaccinated by choice or ineligible due to age.
UHN infectious diseases specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch says the turnaround in trends is real and sustained, and the province must be prepared to take steps to stop it.
“(Numbers) are trending in the wrong direction, it’s not out of control now by any means yet but we still have to acknowledge that instead of having this low, low, low case rates, they are starting to go up,” he told CP24.
“If we compare it to last week, it’s going up. It’s only November, there’s a lot of fall and winter left in front of us, there’s opportunities for this virus to be transmitted especially in indoor settings.”
He said it is likely the province will see “peaks and valleys” in cases through the winter period.
“The key here is the size of the peak of course is completely on us. We know how to keep this virus at bay as a community. We have the tools to do this with vaccinations, with masks, with ventilation, with crowd control, with rapid tests.”
The province of Ontario lifted its last sector-specific occupancy restrictions on restaurants and fitness centres 11 days ago.
Provincial labs processed 30,187 test specimens, generating a positivity rate of at least 1.8 per cent once errors and duplicate tests are accounted for.
There are now 3,395 known active cases across Ontario, up from 3,189 yesterday and 3,038 one week ago.
There have been 32 deaths reported in the past week, and 9,896 deaths confirmed since March 2020.
Across the GTA, York Region reported 52 new cases, Toronto reported 44 new cases, and Peel Region also reported 44 new cases.
Durham Region reported four new cases, Halton reported 13 and Hamilton reported 12 cases.
The Ministry of Health says there are 129 people in hospital ICU due to COVID-19, with an unspecified number of those patients transferred here from Saskatchewan.
Eighty-one patients are breathing with the help of a ventilator.
There are 225 people in hospital due to COVID-19 overall.
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.
