The number of Ontario schools that have been switched to remote learning amid a worsening fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is back in the single digits for the first time in nearly two weeks.

The Ministry of Education says that there are now only nine schools that are closed due to COVID-19 outbreaks or for operational reasons related to the pandemic, down from a high of 17 at this time last week.

The decrease, however, comes against the backdrop of a steady increase in COVID-19 case counts with schools now accounting for more outbreaks than at any point other than the height of the third wave of the pandemic in April.

In fact, the latest data suggests that there are 207 Ontario schools with active outbreaks, including 190 elementary schools.

That is up from 82 schools with outbreaks at this time last month.

Meanwhile, the all-out effort to vaccinate school-aged children, who only recently became eligible to be inoculated, is continuing with the hopes that doing so will ultimately help to preserve in-person learning through the winter months.

On Friday, the City of Toronto announced that it has now administered first doses to more than 32,000 children aged five to 11, meaning that it has been able to vaccinate approximately 16 per cent of the 200,000 newly eligible children within the first week of its rollout.

There are also tens of thousands of additional appointments that have been booked at the city’s five mass vaccination clinics for the coming weeks.

“The Team Toronto Kids COVID-19 vaccination plan has already successfully helped thousands of families get vaccinated. These kids are superheroes who are helping their city bring this pandemic to an end by getting the best protection possible against COVID-19 and its variants,” Mayor John Tory said in a press release detailing the statistics. “The fact that 16 per cent of kids in Toronto have already been vaccinated in just one week is a sign of tremendous progress. I continue to encourage everyone who is eligible to get vaccinated as soon as possible.”

The latest data released by the ministry suggests that there were another 172 new school-related cases of COVID-19 confirmed over a 24-hour period ending on Thursday afternoon, up from 141 during the same time period last week.

There are now 1,815 active cases associated with the public school system, which is the highest that number has been all year.

Those cases are spread across 792 different schools, meaning that about 16 per cent of Ontario’s 4,844 public schools have at least one case.

At this time last year there were 755 different schools with at least one case but the number of active infections was roughly 28 per cent lower – 1,413.