Ontario reported no new COVID-19 deaths for the first time in nearly a month on Monday, as the number of people admitted to ICUs rose after three days of declines.
The last day the province reported no deaths was April 4.
Since then, the province has reported 370 deaths from COVID-19.
The Ontario COVID-19 Scientific Advisory Board says the prevalence of the SARS-COV-2 virus in Ontario wastewater has stabilized in all regions except central Ontario west of the GTA.
“Sometimes it goes up a little bit, sometimes it goes down a little bit, sometimes it plateaus, and of course this is a huge province, so it’s different in different areas of the province,” said Dr. Isaac Bogoch, a specialist in UHN Infectious Diseases, on wastewater data, which has shown a daily decline early in the sixth wave before rising again.
Without universal access to centrally documented free testing, Bogoch said it’s hard to say definitively where the province stands in its sixth wave of COVID-19.
“We don’t have widespread community testing, so it’s hard for us to know where we are in this wave with any degree of certainty.”
Provincial labs processed 11,849 test samples in the past 24 hours, generating a 14 percent positivity rate.
Positivity has fallen this week to an average of 14.2 percent, down from the previous week’s average of 17.5 percent.
Across all hospitals, the Health Ministry said 1,423 patients were admitted with COVID-19 on Monday. It’s actually slightly less than the 1,455 patients who were hospitalized with COVID-19 at this time last week.
Of the patients currently in hospital, 211 were in intensive care, 24 more than on Sunday but seven fewer than a week ago.
At least 10 percent of hospitals did not report COVID-19-related bed occupancy on Monday, as they do every week.
Despite the slight decline in hospitalizations and other public health indicators, outbreaks in the few settings with access to PCR testing continue to rise.
On Monday there were 224 active outbreaks in nursing homes and another 186 in nursing homes. That’s up from 195 and 167 at this time last week, respectively. There were also 104 active outbreaks in hospitals, up from 88 the previous week.
Meanwhile, of the 1,275 cases of COVID-19 detected by PCR tests in the last 24 hours, the Ministry of Health says that 160 involved unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people, 226 involved people with two doses of vaccine, 826 cases involved people with three or more doses. of vaccine and the vaccination status of another 63 was unknown.
The province says 6,015 doses of COVID-19 vaccine were administered on Sunday.
Of these, 354 were first doses, 526 were second doses, 1,097 were third doses, and 4,038 were fourth doses.
The numbers used in this story are from the Ontario Ministry of Health’s COVID-19. Daily epidemiological summary. The number of cases for any city or region may differ slightly from what the province reports, because local units report figures at different times.
Reference-www.cp24.com