Ontario is reporting nearly 2,300 new cases of COVID-19 ahead of an announcement from the Ford government that could see new restrictions introduced in some regions.
The Ministry of Health says that there were 2,290 new cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus confirmed on Thursday as well as an additional 40 deaths. That is down from the record 2,432 infections reported one day prior but it still represents the second highest number that we have seen in a single day.
The rolling seven-day average also continues to rise and now stands at 2,089, which is up 11.6 per cent from this time last week and nearly 19 per cent from two weeks ago.
The latest cases do come on record 68,246 tests, which helped to push the overall positivity rate down to 3.9 per cent. That is the lowest that number has been since the weekend.
Meanwhile, the number of COVID patients in intensive care units declined slightly from 263 to 261 over the last 24 hours but still remains on the verge of eclipsing the record that was set during the first wave of the pandemic in April (264).
That, it should be pointed out, came during a time that the province’s ICUs were under significantly less strain due to the cancellation of elective surgeries and procedures provincewide.
“I believe quite strongly that we need to have further restrictions now to even stem the tide of a very difficult situation in our hospital system and a very difficult situation in terms of the trends and the numbers of people who are getting sick and dying,” Toronto Mayor John Tory told CP24 on Friday morning prior to the release of the latest numbers. “I don’t want to speculate but I do want to express the hope that the province does what I believe they should do and that is to have a region wide series of additional restrictions during a quieter period of time so we can really take advantage of that quieter period of time and have a sort of jolt to the system that stops these numbers growing the way they have been to new records every day. That is just not acceptable.”
Case growth starting to outpace optimistic scenario in modelling
Nearly 60 per cent of the latest cases are in the three GTHA regions under a lockdown with Toronto reporting 691, Peel reporting 361 and York reporting 296.
But cases continue to surge in other regions as well.
Hamilton is reporting another 126 new cases today and now has a weekly incidence rate per 100,000 residents which is actually worse than that of York Region, which was placed under a lockdown on Monday.
Windsor-Essex is also reporting another 207 new cases, an all-time high.
The numbers provincewide also appear to be outpacing the more optimistic scenario foretold in modelling released by the Ford government last week.
That modelling suggested that daily case counts would only reach 2,500 by mid-January assuming a one per cent rate of growth but it warned that they could top 5,000 if cases were to continue to grow at a rate of three per cent.
“You can see with the numbers where we’re up to 2,100, 2,200, and now 2,300 cases in a day - that's moved us beyond the 1 per cent and we’re somewhere in the one per cent to two per cent growth (range). Is that a continuing trend or is that one that can be abated?” Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams said during a press conference on Thursday. “When we start to see those cases, when you see that while it starts off slow, it can pick up fairly rapidly and so we have to take this very seriously.”
The latest cases confirmed on Friday pushed the total number of lab-confirmed infections province wide since the start of the pandemic past 150,000 for the first time.
Nearly 18,000 of those cases are still considered active.
