Ontario is reporting 3,800 new cases of COVID-19 today as the number of ICU patients infected with the virus hits another record high.

Provincial health officials logged 3,813 new cases today, down from the 4,227 infections confirmed Friday but up from 3,009 last Saturday.

The rolling seven-day average of new cases now stands at 3,213, up from 2,552 one week ago.

Nineteen more virus-related deaths were confirmed in the province today and the average daily death toll in Ontario is now 15, down from 16 last Saturday.

With more than 61,000 tests processed over the past 24 hours, the provincewide test positivity rate is now 6.5 per cent, according to the Ministry of Health. The test positivity rate was five per cent last Saturday. 

The province says there are 1,524 people with COVID-19 receiving care in hospital and a record 585 patients in intensive care.

At this point last week, there were significantly fewer patients hospitalized with the virus. Last Saturday, the province said there were 796 people hospitalized with COVID-19 and 451 COVID-19 patients had been admitted to intensive care units.

The alarming surge in ICU admissions has prompted one critical care doctor to urge Ottawa and the Ford government to coordinate the transfer of ICU nurses from other provinces to Ontario.

“We need to get ahead of this. We need to anticipate this and provinces need to work together and I think the federal government needs to get involved to help coordinate the transfer of health-care worker resources from less affected provinces to more affected provinces, especially Ontario,” Dr. Michael Warner, the medical director of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital, said in a video posted on social media on Saturday.

“We know the Atlantic provinces have done a great job because of their health-care policies and sacrifice of their citizens, but if we find ourselves in a situation where they are doing elective surgeries in Halifax and we a triaging patients in Toronto, that just can’t happen."

Of the new cases confirmed today, 973 are in Toronto, 669 are in Peel Region, 442 are in York Region, 289 are in Ottawa, and 281 are in Durham Region.

The number of known active cases is now 30,999, up from 23,190 seven days ago.

Premier Doug Ford implemented a month-long stay-at-home order and provincewide shutdown earlier this month in an effort to curb the surge in community transmission of the novel coronavirus. Experts have said that the rise in cases during the third wave is due, in large part, to the prevalence of new, more transmissible variants of concern.

Last week, Ford said he expects that when the stay-at-home order expires at the beginning of May, about 40 per cent of Ontarians will have received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

The province said Saturday that 104,783 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered over the past 24 hours. There have been a total of 3,044,949 doses administered in Ontario to date.

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.