Ontario reports 3,871 new COVID-19 cases, 41 deaths

Ontario is reporting 3,871 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday. The provincial total now stands at 459,477.

Thursday’s case count is higher than Wednesday’s 3,480 and Tuesday’s which saw 3,265 new infections but is the fifth day in a row cases have been lower than 4,000.

According to Wednesday’s report, 1,172 cases were recorded in Toronto, 901 in Peel Region, and 392 in York Region.

All other local public health units reported fewer than 200 new cases in the provincial report.

The death toll in the province has risen to 8,029 as 41 more deaths were recorded.

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Meanwhile, 413,010 Ontario residents were reported to have recovered from COVID-19, which is about 89 per cent of known cases. Resolved cases increased by 4,245 from the previous day. There were more resolved cases than new cases on Thursday.

Ontario reported 2,248 people are hospitalized with COVID-19 (down by 33) with 884 patients in intensive care units (up by seven) and 620 patients in ICUs on a ventilator (up by 15).

Active cases in Ontario now stand at 38,438 — down from the previous day when it was at 38,853, and is down from April 22 when it was at 41,962. At the peak of the second wave coronavirus surge in January, active cases hit just above 30,000.

The government said 56,939 tests were processed in the last 24 hours. There is currently a backlog of 31,914 tests awaiting results. A total of 14,052,764 tests have been completed since the start of the pandemic.

The test positivity rate for Thursday was 7.6 per cent, down from Wednesday’s which was 7.2 per cent.

As of 8 p.m. on Wednesday, a total of 5,027,770 COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered. That marks an increase of 120,567 vaccines in the last day. There are 368,403 people fully vaccinated with two doses.

Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson are the vaccines currently approved in Canada. The first three require two shots administered several weeks apart while the fourth requires only one. J & J vaccines have not yet arrived in Canada.

Variants of concern in Ontario

Officials have listed breakdown data for the new VOCs (variants of concern) detected so far in the province which consist of the B.1.1.7 (first detected in the United Kingdom), B.1.351 (first detected in South Africa), P.1 (first detected in Brazil), as well as mutations that have no determined lineage.

The B.1.1.7 VOC is currently the dominating known strain at 62,944 variant cases, which is up by 2,589 since the previous day, 243 B.1.351 variant cases which up by 23, and 501 P.1 variant cases which is up by 96.