Ontario is reporting fewer than 200 new cases of COVID-19 for the fourth day in a row and it comes after the province’s labs turned around a record 33,492 tests over a 24-hour period.
Health Minister Christine Elliott says that there were 160 new instances of the virus confirmed on Friday.
That is up from the 111 new cases confirmed on Thursday but it still below the five-day rolling average of 168.
It also points to a positive rate of just 0.47 per cent.
At one point last month, Ontario’s positive rate had climbed to nearly seven per cent amid an uptick in cases and a decline in testing.
“Yesterday, the province processed a record-setting number of tests at 33,492. As a result, our positivity rate remains at all-time lows,” Elliott said in a message posted to Twitter on Saturday morning. “With 178 more resolved, we continue to see a persistent decline in the number of active cases in the province.”
More than half of new cases are in Toronto and Peel
Nearly 57 per cent of the new cases confirmed on Friday were in Toronto (56 cases) or Peel Region (35 cases), marking the continuation of a trend that has been apparent for weeks.
Meanwhile, half of Ontario’s 34 public health units reported no new cases at all over the last 24 hours and all but five reported five or fewer cases.
There were also another eight deaths confirmed on Friday, which is roughly in line with the five-day average of 8.6.
Encouragingly, hospitalizations appear to be continuing their steady decline after stubbornly hovering around the 1,000 mark as recently as May 19.
On Friday, there were just 252 people receiving treatment in Ontario hospitals for COVID-19 with 54 of those people in Intensive Care Units and 35 of them on ventilators.
Tory says people need to continue to exercise caution
The encouraging numbers come just days after Toronto entered stage two of Ontario’s recovery plan with restaurant patios and barbers now allowed to open.
Speaking with CP24 earlier in the day, Mayor John Tory said that it seems like “the city is coming back to life slowly” but he warned people to continue practicing physical distancing and to wear face coverings when that is not possible.
“The last thing we want is for those numbers to start to go the other way,” he said.
Tory said that he believes that the wider reopening that came with stage two of the province’s recovery plan “is going fine” and that people are by and large respectful of the need for continued physical distancing.
He said that he is hopeful that the numbers “will keep going the right way” so that diners can be allowed to return to restaurants that don’t have patios, perhaps as soon as the city enters stage three of the province’s recovery plan.
At this point it is unclear when Toronto will be permitted to advance to stage three but Premier Doug Ford said on Friday that the province is likely to continue using a region-by-region approach.
“The businesses are struggling and I will say that the restaurant and bar businesses while they are happy to have patios open, think about the restaurants that don’t have patios. They still need help because they can’t open,” Tory said Saturday.
Other highlights from the data:
- There are now just 1,892 active cases across Ontario
- There were three new outbreaks confirmed at long-term care homes over the last 24 hours. The number of active outbreaks now stands at 71. The total number of outbreaks reported at long-term care homes since the pandemic began is 359.
- The death toll now stands at 2,652. About 64 per cent of all deaths (1,698) have involved residents at long-term care homes
- People between the ages of 20 and 39 accounted for nearly half of all new cases confirmed over the last 24 hours (72)
- The total number of people who have been hospitalized with COVID-19 at any point now stands at 4,331, accounting for 12.6 per cent of all cases. Of those people, 934 of them have ended up in the ICU.
- There have been just 11 deaths reported in people between the ages of 20 and 39. That is compared to 1,830 deaths in people over the age of 80.
