Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David Williams, is scheduled to provide an update on the COVID-19 situation in the province beginning at 3 p.m. ET in Toronto. Premier Doug Ford suggested earlier Thursday that Williams would be making an announcement on whether or not schools will reopen next week.
You’ll be able to watch the news conference live in this story.
Ontario reported a single-day record of 3,519 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, as well as 89 more deaths of people with the illness — the deadliest day so far of the entire pandemic.
The news comes as Premier Doug Ford suggested that public health officials will be making an announcement this afternoon on whether or not students in the province will be heading back into schools next week.
At a photo opportunity this morning, Ford said he recently received new data that indicated COVID-19 positivity rates among children have been increasing. The data has caused concern about the reopening of schools, he said.
The additional cases reported today include 891 in Toronto, 568 in Peel Region, 467 in York Region, 208 in Windsor-Essex, 175 in Waterloo Region and 174 in Durham Region.
Other regions that saw double- or triple-digit increases were:
- Ottawa: 164
- Hamilton: 146
- Middlesex-London: 115
- Niagara Region: 112
- Halton Region: 95
- Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph: 90
- Simcoe Muskoka: 78
- Eastern Ontario: 36
- Brant County: 27
- Southwestern: 22
- Chatham-Kent: 19
- Haliburton, Kawartha and Pine Ridge: 17
- Grey County: 16
- Northwestern: 15
- Algoma County: 15
- Huron-Perth: 12
- Peterborough: 12
- Haldimand-Norfolk: 11
(Note: All of the figures used in this story are found on the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard or in its Daily Epidemiologic Summary. The number of cases for any region may differ from what is reported by the local public health unit, because local units report figures at different times.)
Combined, the additional infections reported Thursday push the seven-day average of new daily cases to a new high of 3,141.
There are currently 26,718 confirmed, active cases of COVID-19 in Ontario, the most at any point during the pandemic.
They come as the province’s network of labs processed 65,772 test samples for novel coronavirus and reported a test positivity rate of 6.1 per cent.
The number of people in hospital with confirmed cases of COVID-19 and those being treated in intensive care also reached new highs and now sit at 1,472 and 363, respectively. Some 242 patients require the use of a ventilator, the province said.
The 89 deaths reported Thursday push the official toll to 4,856. The previous single-day high for COVID-19-linked deaths was on April 30, 2020, when 86 further deaths were recorded.
Nearly 76 per cent of all deaths in the province were residents in long-term care.
There are ongoing outbreaks of COVID-19 in 218 of Ontario’s 626 long-term care facilities. On Wednesday evening, officials at Tendercare Living Centre in Scarborough said that 71 residents have now died since early December, making it the single deadliest long-term care outbreak in Ontario so far.
LISTEN | The Current documentary on deaths of residents at Tendercare Living Centre:
The Current20:2371 dead in COVID-19 outbreak at Tendercare Living Centre in Ontario
We speak to families of some of the residents of Tendercare Living Centre in Scarborough, Ont., where a COVID-19 outbreak has killed 71 people. Dr. Samir Sinha discusses the failings that are allowing situations like this to continue, months after the horrors of the first wave. 20:23
Meanwhile, Minister of Health Christine Elliott said that as of 8 p.m. Wednesday, a total of 72,630 doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered in Ontario.
