Ontario reported nearly 800 new COVID-19 cases and 10 more deaths on Thursday, as students in the province’s largest school boards returned to class.
Provincial health officials logged 798 new coronavirus cases today, a significant day-over-day rise from 554 on Wednesday, but down from 865 a week ago.
Among the latest cases, 497 of those individuals are unvaccinated, 57 are partially vaccinated, 178 are fully vaccinated and 66 have an unknown vaccination status.
Unvaccinated and partially vaccinated people made up 69 per cent of Thursday’s cases but only 32 per cent of Ontario’s population.
The province reported 564 new cases on Tuesday, 581 on Monday and 811 on Sunday.
The seven-day rolling average now stands at 723, compared to 728 a week ago.
Provincial health officials confirmed 10 more deaths today, with seven of those deaths occurring more than a month ago.
Over the past week, the province has added 49 more fatalities to Ontario's overall death toll, however officials say 21 of those deaths occurred more than a month ago.
For the past few weeks, the province has been reporting deaths that happened over a month ago due to “data cleanup,” the Ministry of Health says.
Ontario's confirmed death toll now stands at 9,579.
Another 772 patients recovered from the virus yesterday, resulting in 6,056 active cases across the province.
Ontario labs processed nearly 29,700 tests in the past 24 hours, bringing the positivity rate to 3.1 per cent compared to three per cent a week ago.
Toronto logged 159 new cases today, while 73 were logged in Peel Region, 72 in York Region, 25 in Halton and 19 in Durham Region.
Elsewhere in Southern Ontario, 72 new cases were reported in Ottawa, 55 in Hamilton and 38 in Niagara.
There are currently 365 COVID-19 patients receiving treatment in hospitals across the province and 185 of those patients are in intensive care units, according to the ministry.
Of those patients in ICUs, 174 are not fully vaccinated or have an unknown vaccination status and 11 are fully vaccinated.
To date, there have been more than 572,100 lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases and 556,495 recoveries in Ontario since Jan. 2020.
So far, 84 per cent of eligible Ontarians 12 years and older have received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, while 77.5 per cent have received two doses and are fully vaccinated.
The steady rise in cases over the past few weeks has many parents concerned as students head back to school across the Greater Toronto Area this week.
Infectious diseases specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch reiterates that there are layers of protection that schools should be enforcing to limit virus spread in classrooms.
“The more layers of protection that you have the safer it is. The more layers you peel away the more risk you're going to add,” Bogoch said to CP24 Thursday morning.
“In this case, you have more people in a confined indoor space, that's going to add a little bit of risk. Hopefully some of that risk will be mitigated by the teacher being vaccinated, by better ventilation, by consistent mask use, by cohorting,” he added.
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.
