Ontario reports more than 2,100 COVID-19 cases; ICU admissions climb at sharpest rate since January

Ontario reported 2,169 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, almost the same as what was reported on Thursday, as the count of active cases and ICU admissions hit new multi-month highs.

Ontario reported 2,380 new cases on Thursday – the highest in two months – even accounting for 280 of those cases being from previous days.

There are now 16,563 active cases of novel coronavirus infection across Ontario, up from 13,200 one week ago.

The province last saw this many active cases of COVID-19 on Feb. 4.

Across the GTA, Toronto reported 613 new cases, Peel Region reported 397 cases, York Region reported 254 cases and Durham Region reported 123 new cases.

Halton Region reported 40 new cases and Hamilton reported 122 new cases.

The seven-day rolling average of cases now stands at 1,855, up from 1,480 one week ago.

None of the 12 deaths reported Friday involved residents of the long-term care system.

There have now been 7,292 deaths due to COVID-19 in Ontario since March 2020.

Provincial labs processed 53,436 tests in the past 24 hours, down from 60,000 in the previous period.

Approximately 10 per cent of known active cases in the province involve primary and secondary students in public schools.

Hospitalizations climbed to 913, according to Ministry of Health data, with 359 people in intensive care and 215 breathing with the help of a ventilator.

But a count of data from local public health units and hospital networks found 967 people in hospital with COVID-19 as of Friday morning.

Also, data from Critical Care Services Ontario obtained by CP24 said there were 401 people in intensive care in Ontario hospitals due to COVID-19 on Thursday, with 38 new admissions in the past 24 hours, the highest number of daily admissions since early January.

Dr. Michael Warner, the medical director of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital, said that 12 Toronto ICU patients with COVID-19 were being airlifted to Kingston, where the hospital has no COVID-19 patients, to ease the burden in Toronto.

Warner told CP24 that he thought the province would need a new stay-at-home order style measure to curb cases.

“Only the stay at home order was efficacious in reducing COVID-19 numbers. Measures taken today will take weeks and weeks to help the ICU situation, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t implement them but it will take a while.”

“We can’t have talk of opening things up in a situation where things are getting much worse.”

The Ontario COVID-19 Science Table now says variants of concern make up 55 per cent of all new cases in the province, and the reproduction rate for both variant cases and older “wild” strain cases are both above 1, meaning the pandemic is growing on both fronts.

Forty-nine new variant of concern cases were detected on Friday, bringing the total confirmed through sequencing to more than 1,600.

Public Health Ontario said another 16,680 cases have screened positive for a variant of concern since late January.

Meanwhile, another 83,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered on Thursday, bringing the total to 1,838,592 shots administered since Dec. 2020.

More than 306,000 people have now completed a full two-dose inoculation.

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.