Ontario reported 18 new COVID-19 deaths on Friday, as the province’s ICU load caused by coronavirus infection fell to its lowest point in more than a month.
The Health Ministry says the 18 deaths occurred in the last 30 days.
Three of the deaths involved residents of the long-term care system.
131 deaths were reported in the last week and 480 in the last 30 days, out of a total since March 2020 of 13,052.
positivity Test, sewage prevalence and hospitalizations continue to fall, giving health officials confidence that the province is cementing its exit from the sixth wave.
Ontario’s chief medical officer, Dr. Kieran Moore, told CP24 that he is “cautiously optimistic” that the province will have a summer free of new COVID-19 outbreaks.
“We are in a better place than we were. I am cautiously optimistic that we will have a better summer as the weather improves,” she said. “It’s much better to be outdoors than indoors – we all need to regain our mental, physical and social well-being.”
He said the province has successfully administered 14,000 cycles of Pfizer’s antiviral drug Paxlovid since the end of January, with an average of 20,000 people receiving the third or fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine each day.
Previous projections on the sixth wave of COVID-19 pointed to as many as 600 patients in the ICU during May, something Moore said he never agreed was possible.
“While some people said we were going to have 600 or 700, I never thought that would be the case.”
The Health Ministry said there were 1,453 people who had tested positive for COVID-19 admitted to Ontario hospitals on Friday, up from 1,662 a week ago.
Of them, 168 were in intensive care, seven less than yesterday and 32 compared to a week ago.
It is the lowest overall ICU load caused by COVID-19 the province has seen since April 9.
Yesterday, the Ministry of Health published Moore’s response to a request earlier this month from three local health medical officials who called for the mandatory use of masks to return to settings such as schools, workplaces and universities, arguing that the spread of the virus was beginning to affect the capacity of the area. hospitals to complete the necessary surgeries.
Moore denied their request and said Friday that they could act on their own.
“I also want to acknowledge that they have always had the ability to issue an order like I can issue an order.”
Of the 1,969 cases confirmed in the last 24 hours by PCR tests, the Ministry of Health says that 212 people were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, 370 had two doses of vaccine, 1,264 had three doses of vaccine, and the vaccination status of another 123. .
Provincial labs processed 16,020 test samples in the previous period, generating a 12 percent positivity rate.
Average positivity in the province among those eligible to test has fallen to about 12 percent, from 14 percent the previous week.
Ontario administered 28,144 doses of COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday.
Of these, 1,159 were first doses, 1,409 were second doses, 2,689 were third doses, and 22,887 were fourth doses.
Across all age groups, 84.6% of people have at least one dose of vaccine, 81.5% have two doses of vaccine, and 49.1% have at least three doses of vaccine.
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