Ontario reports multi-month high of nearly 900 COVID-19 cases; 14 more deaths

Ontario reported 865 new COVID-19 cases and 14 deaths on Thursday, the highest count of cases seen since early June, with the greatest number of infections among unvaccinated people since the province started keeping track earlier this summer.

The Thursday tally is the highest standalone case count recorded in Ontario since June 4 when 914 cases were reported.

The province reported 656 new cases on Wednesday and 525 on Tuesday.

The seven-day rolling average of new cases now stands at 728, up from 646 one week ago.

The Ministry of Health says 540 people, representing 62 per cent of all cases detected Thursday were unvaccinated.

It’s the highest count of unvaccinated infections recorded since the province began publicly disclosing vaccination status of infected individuals on Aug. 10.

The Ministry says partially vaccinated, unvaccinated and those with unknown status made up 692 cases, or 80 per cent of the infections detected.

One-hundred and seventy three fully-vaccinated people tested positive for COVID-19, making up 20 per cent of the total.

Unvaccinated and partially vaccinated people make up 33 per cent of Ontario’s population.

Provincial labs processed 27,293 specimens, generating a positivity rate of at least three per cent.

Across the GTA, Toronto reported 175 new cases, Peel Region reported 104 new cases and York Region reported 91 new cases.

Durham Region reported 22 new cases, Hamilton reported 89 new cases and Halton reported 19 cases.

The high case count comes as the province took concrete steps to solidify its pandemic response yesterday, with Ontario Premier Doug Ford belatedly announcing a vaccine certificate system for indoor dining, gyms and other non-essential indoor activities, to become fully active on Oct. 22.

He and members of his cabinet publicly opposed such a system for domestic activity for months, saying it was not necessary and would further divide society.

The COVID-19 Science Advisory Table also released updated modelling for the first time in two and a half months, suggesting that even in a middle scenario with moderate daily case growth, the province could see 4,000 infections per day by October if no further measures are implemented.

Advisory Table Director Dr. Peter Jüni told CTV News Channel that the vaccine passport and maintaining some other public health measures will likely be enough to avoid another lockdown.

“Now we have the vaccine certificates, that is great, and we need to continue with masking social distancing et cetera. We might see that there will be some high-risk setting that we may need to restrict again more but we don’t talk about the renewed lockdown,” he said.

“I think we can really do this without another lockdown like what we had in April or so. I don’t think it will happen - but it will all depend on us.”

The province continues to not report recent COVID-19 deaths in real time. On Thursday, a spokesperson for the minister of health said four the deaths occurred in the last seven days, with the remaining 10 occurring “more than a week ago.”

Of 82 deaths reported in the last two weeks, 39 reportedly occurred more than two months ago but were just disclosed recently due to ongoing investigations, 23 occurred last week or earlier and 20 occurred in the past week.

There have now been 9,530 deaths due to COVID-19 across the province since March 2020.

The Ministry said there were 320 people in acute and intensive care in hospital due to COVID-19 on Thursday, down from 336 two days ago.

Of those, 162 were in intensive care and 105 were breathing with the help of a ventilator.

Jüni said there are still enough vulnerable unvaccinated people in Ontario to cause problems for the healthcare sector.

“All those unvaccinated people out there will still be able to overwhelm our ICUs and that is what we see in the projections.”

The province administered 35,152 vaccine doses on Wednesday, with 15,692 first doses and 19,460 second doses.

Eighty-three per cent of Ontario residents age 12 and up now have had at least one dose of a vaccine, and 76 per cent are fully vaccinated.

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.