Ontario reported more than 500 new COVID-19 cases for a third day in a row and two additional deaths on Saturday, as cases continue to rise amid the fourth wave of the pandemic.
Provincial health officials logged 578 new coronavirus infections today, up from 510 cases on Friday and 378 cases a week ago.
Today’s case count is the highest since June 10 when 590 infections were logged.
Among today’s new cases, 408 of those individuals are unvaccinated, 59 are partially vaccinated and 111 are fully vaccinated.
The province reported 513 new cases on Thursday, 324 on Wednesday and 321 on Tuesday.
The seven-day rolling average now stands at 428, up from 399 yesterday and a notable increase from 261 a week ago. The last time the average surpassed 400 was in mid-June.
Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Table estimates that cases are currently doubling every eight days, due to the dominant and highly-contagious Delta variant.
Two more people died due to the virus in the past 24 hours, raising the death toll to 9,418.
Another 260 people recovered from the disease, resulting in 3,426 active cases across the province.
Provincial labs processed more than 23,400 tests in the past 24 hours, bringing the positivity rate to 2.4 per cent, an increase from two per cent a week ago, according to the Ministry of Health.
In the Greater Toronto Area, Toronto reported 153 new infections, while 67 new cases were logged in Peel Region, 64 in York Region, 20 in Durham and 21 in Halton.
Elsewhere in Southern Ontario, 57 cases were reported in Hamilton, 42 in Windsor-Essex, 23 in Niagara and 18 in Waterloo.
The number of patients in intensive care units (ICU) across the province remains unchanged from a day ago at 111, and 72 of those patients are breathing with the help of a ventilator.
One of those ICU patients is fully vaccinated and the others are not fully vaccinated or have an unknown vaccination status, according to the ministry.
Infectious diseases specialst Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti spoke to CP24 on Saturday and said his biggest concern is how the healthcare system will be affected in the fourth wave.
"I do think the impact on the hospital system will be less, not to say that we won't feel strain, but I think that it's going to be fundamentally different, and the vaccination shows that and we saw that even in the second and third wave where the third time we didn't see a lot of nursing home patients, whereas, initially, our hospitals were filled with them," he said.
To date, there have been over 555,000 lab-confirmed coronavirus cases and 542,206 recoveries in Ontario since Jan. 2020.
Over 81 per cent of eligible Ontarians 12 years and older have received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 73 per cent have had two doses and are fully vaccinated.
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.
