Ontario reports highest COVID-19 case count in 7 weeks; 6 more deaths

Ontario reported 423 new COVID-19 cases and six new deaths on Sunday, the fifth straight day of case growth that saw positivity, active caseload and hospitalizations all start to inch upward from the lows notched last month.

The seven-day rolling average of new cases now stands at 261, up from 231 yesterday.

Ontario reported 378 new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday; a multi-month high, as well as 340 on Friday.

Sunday's count is the highest overall count recorded in the province since June 14 when 447 cases were reported.

Across the GTA, Toronto reported 109 new cases, the first day the city saw more than 100 cases since July 6.

Elsewhere, York Region reported 57 new cases, Peel reported 51, Durham reported 23 and Halton and Hamilton reported 17 and 42 respectively.

All common metrics of the pandemic in the province appear to be increasing, albeit slightly, after months of declines caused by lockdowns and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines.

The known active caseload throughout Ontario reached 2,242 cases, up from 1,667 one week ago.

Test positivity reached two per cent, its highest point since mid-June.

And even hospital occupancy, which has been falling for months, started to increase again.

There were 115 adults in hospital ICUs on Sunday, up from a multi-month low of 106 on Aug. 3.

Of those, 85 were breathing with the help of a ventilator.

Epidemiologists predicted cases would rise as most public-facing businesses resumed indoor operations, with experts also pointing to the highly transmissible Delta B.1.617.2 variant as a cause for case growth, especially among the unvaccinated.

Infectious diseases expert Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti said that cases are growing all over Canada and the world due to the Delta variant.

“This Delta variant is certainly more contagious and tends to find groups of people who are not vaccinated,” he told CP24 on Sunday morning.

But he said that the high rate of vaccination in the province will mean it will be extremely unlikely that another blanket lockdown will come if cases continue to grow.

“In the past – when cases rose, this was always synonymous with lockdowns – because of the vaccine this won’t be the case.”

Through the end of July, Public Health Ontario said that only 0.5 per cent of new cases observed involved people who had received their second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine at least two weeks prior to testing positive, while 95 per cent of new cases involved completely unvaccinated people.

Ontario administered another 46,970 doses of COVID-19 vaccine on Saturday; with 8,715 being first doses.

A total of 10.5 million people have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 9.31 million people are now fully vaccinated.

The Ontario COVID-19 Science Table estimates 81 per cent of eligible residents have received one dose of a vaccine, and 71.5 per cent are fully vaccinated.

The table also estimates Ontario’s effective reproductive number now stands at 1.29, meaning every 100 new infections would transmit to create 129 future infections.

Even with numbers nearing what health officials earlier cited as the point where the province could shed most of its remaining public health restrictions, Chakrabarti says some will be in place for many months to come.

“(The) mask mandates will be here probably until next spring."

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.