Ontario reported at least 3 new deaths from COVID-19 over a 48-hour period and said the number of patients with COVID requiring ventilators to breathe in hospitals had reached a minimum of several years.
The Ministry of Health said it had detected two new deaths from COVID-19 on Sunday and one more on Monday.
There have been 92 deaths in the last seven days and 436 in the last 30 days.
There have been 13,164 deaths from COVID-19 in Ontario since March 2020.
But hospitalizations continue to decline significantly, especially among patients who require the most critical types of care.
Dr. Alon Vaisman, an infectious disease specialist at Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington, says all major indicators continue to look positive in the province.
“I think the overall story is pretty positive in Ontario that cases are going down, including hospitalizations and deaths associated with COVID-19,” he told CP24.
He said the detection of a new subtype of Omicron, largely specific to Ontario, called BA.2.20, was unfortunate, but was not a cause for immediate concern, a view shared by several epidemiologists cited in the last days.
“It’s unfortunate that a variant has probably originated in Ontario or come from other parts of Canada, but it’s more concentrated here.”
Prevalence appears to have increased across the province in recent weeks. It does not necessarily mean that we will receive bad news in the near future, that is, it does not necessarily mean that the number of cases will increase or that there will be a new wave in June or July, for example.
Across the province, COVID-19’s scientific advisory board said Tuesday that wastewater surveillance data continue to suggest that virus transmission is declining in all regions except northern Ontario.
General hospital admission data were incomplete on Tuesday, but there were 157 intensive care patients, five more than on Saturday but eight less than a week ago.
Of these, 65 were breathing with the help of a ventilator, the lowest number of ventilated patients seen in the province since November 11, 2020.
Of the 1,287 cases of COVID-19 confirmed by PCR testing in the past 48 hours, the Ministry of Health says 165 involved unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people, 217 people with two doses of vaccine, 844 people with three or more doses of vaccine . and the vaccination status of another 61 people was unknown.
Provincial laboratories processed 6,534 test samples in the last 24 hours, generating a positivity rate of 10.5 percent.
The average positivity was 10.1% in the last 7 days and 11.6% in the previous week.
The Ministry of Health says 7,467 doses of COVID-19 vaccine were given between Sunday morning and Monday evening at 8 p.m.
Of these, 415 were first doses, 635 were second doses, 1,241 were third doses, and 5,176 were fourth doses.
The numbers used in this story are in the COVID-19 Daily Epidemiological Summary of the Ontario Ministry of Health. 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.