Ontario reports drop of nearly 1,000 COVID-19 cases day over day, hospitalizations climb

Ontario is reporting 3,469 new COVID-19 cases and 22 additional deaths on Tuesday.

The province reports a test positivity rate of 10 per cent, down from the a record rate of 10.5 per cent a day ago.

There were 40,596 tests completed in the last 24 hour period, down slightly from the nearly 43,000 tests completed a day ago. Testing numbers are typically down earlier in the week on Monday and Tuesday.

Locally, there are 1,074 new cases in Toronto, 775 in Peel, 406 in York Region, 256 in Durham and 197 in Ottawa.

The province reported 4,447 cases and 19 deaths on Monday.

The rolling seven-day average of cases drops slightly to 4,319. That number is up more than 450 cases from one week ago.

There are now 2,360 people hospitalized in the province due to COVID-19 with 773 in the ICU. Both numbers are records since the start of the pandemic.

GTA hospitals now overflowing with COVID patients have transferred over 550 patients to other areas of the province.

A new field hospital at Sunnybrook Hospital is opening beds this week with a total of 20 beds being available by the end of the month. The beds will be used for COVID-19 patients who are recovering or have recovered and are awaiting to go home or to be transitioned to an alternative care setting.

There were 90,409 vaccine doses administered in the last 24 hour period.

Due to the Rogers outage on Monday, some vaccine clinics were forced to use paper-based reporting. As a result, today’s reported vaccine numbers are an underestimate of the total doses administered the previous day.

As of 8:00 p.m. Monday, 3,995,187 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered.

People aged 40 and older are now getting the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at some 1,400 pharmacies across the province.

The province announced the change on Sunday after federal health minister Patty Hajdu said in a new conference that it was within the provinces’ jurisdiction to change the age limits for the vaccine.

According to the latest provincial numbers, there are 2,697 additional cases of the B.1.1.7 variant.

There are now 39,276 cumulative cases of the B.1.1.7 variant, 211 cases of the P.1 variant and 105 cases of the B.1.351 variant.

Peel Region has announced sweeping new measures to help battle the third wave of COVID-19 in essential workplaces.

Peel Public Health has issued an order that will force any business with five or more cases of the virus in the last 14 days to temporarily shut down.

The updated Section 22 order directs those businesses to close for at least 10 days in situations where the cases in question could have “reasonably been acquired” at the workplace, or if no “obvious source of infection” can be traced outside of the workplace.