Ontario is reporting more than 8,800 new COVID-19 cases and seven more deaths today as the Omicron variant continues to rapidly spread, causing testing backlogs across the province.

Provincial health officials logged 8,825 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday compared to 3,453 a week ago, according to Public Health Ontario’s Epidemiological Summary.

The latest numbers come amid record breaking case counts this past week with 9,418 new cases logged on Monday, 9,826 on Sunday and a record 10,412 cases on Saturday.

The seven-day rolling average of cases hit 8,318 today, more than double the average (3,153) recorded this time a week ago.

Public health officials, however, warn that today’s case numbers are an underestimate due to a backlog of tests waiting to be processed, as demand for tests outweighs available supply across the province.

“Due to changes in the availability of testing, driven by increasing COVID-19 cases related to the Omicron variant, case counts in this report are an underestimate of the true number of individuals with COVID-19 in Ontario. As such, data should be interpreted with caution,” officials wrote in the summary.

Data on the vaccination status among the infected individuals, the exact number of COVID-19 tests processed yesterday and the positivity rate is unavailable due to the Christmas holidays but will be available on Wednesday.

However, the summary does suggest that as of Dec. 26, roughly 65,000 tests were completed with a positivity rate of about 25 per cent.

Another 2,481 people recovered from the virus yesterday, resulting in nearly 70,400 known active cases across the province.

Public Health Ontario says seven more people died with the virus in the past month, raising the death toll to 10,168.

In the Greater Toronto Area, 2,797 new cases were logged in Toronto, compared to 2,763 cases yesterday, while 1,272 cases were reported in York, 886 in Peel, 399 in Halton and 389 in Durham.

Toronto now has the third highest rate of infection in the province on a per capita basis, trailing only Halton Region and Kingston.

There are currently 491 people with the virus in hospitals across the province and 187 of those patients are in intensive care units, according to a tweet from Health Minister Christine Elliott.

The seven-day rolling average of ICU patients rose to 171 today.

So far, over 90 per cent of Ontarians 12 years and older have received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 88 per cent have received two doses.

To date, there have been 715,405 lab-confirmed coronavirus cases and 634,846 recoveries in Ontario since the pandemic began in Jan. 2020.

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.