Ontario is reporting 2,998 new cases of the coronavirus on Friday, bringing the provincial total to 231,308.
Friday’s case count is lower than Thursday’s, which saw 3,326 new infections. On Wednesday, 2,961 new cases were recorded and 2,903 on Tuesday.
“Locally, there are 800 new cases in Toronto, 618 in Peel, 250 in York Region, 161 in Waterloo and 153 in Niagara,” Health Minister Christine Elliott said.
The death toll in the province has risen to 5,289, after 100 more deaths were reported — marking the highest number of daily deaths.
However, the Ontario government noted some of the deaths included in Friday’s report are from one public health unit and are also from earlier in the pandemic that the provincial database had missed.
“Due to a data cleaning initiative, 46 deaths reported by Middlesex-London Health Unit that occurred earlier in the pandemic are included in today’s report,” the government said. “We send our deepest condolences to all those who have lost a loved one to COVID-19.”
Middlesex-London Public Health Unit said those deaths have already been reported in their reporting.
Subtracting those previous deaths, the one-day death toll would be 54 and is around what Ontario has been seeing over the last few weeks.
Ontario reported 1,647 people hospitalized with COVID-19 (down by 10 from the previous day), with 387 patients in an intensive care unit (down by one) and 280 patients in ICUs on a ventilator (unchanged).
The government said a single-day record number of 76,472 tests were processed in the last 24 hours. There is currently a backlog of 63,728 tests awaiting results. A total of 8,791,388 tests have been completed since the start of the pandemic.
Test positivity — the percentage of tests that come back positive — for Friday was 4.6 per cent, down from Thursday’s 5.1 per cent and down from one week ago when it was 6.2 per cent.
As of 8 p.m. Thursday, the province has administered 174,630 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. A total of 17,094 people have been fully vaccinated so far with two doses.
Meanwhile, 197,194 Ontarians have recovered from COVID-19 which is about 85 per cent of known cases. Resolved cases increased by 3,380 from the previous day.
There were more resolved cases than new cases on Friday.
Active cases in Ontario now stand at 28,825 — down from the previous day when it was 29,307, but up from last Friday at 28,203.
The seven-day average has now reached 3,273, down from yesterday at 3,452 and down from last week at 3,394.
