More than half of adults in Ontario are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and the province expects to receive about five million additional vaccine doses this month to administer more shots into arms.

In an update on the province’s vaccination rollout plan today, provincial officials said over 51 per cent of people ages 18 and up have received two doses of approved vaccines in Ontario.

“Vaccines are our ticket out of the pandemic. And that is why as we prepare to enter Step 3 in our roadmap to reopen it is critical that we all get vaccinated as soon as possible,” Health Minister Christine Elliott said in a news conference Thursday morning.

As of Monday, youths 12 years and older were eligible to book an early second dose of the vaccine on the provincial booking site.

This means that all eligible residents in Ontario ages 12 and up are now eligible to book their second dose, roughly a month ahead of schedule.

More than 78 per cent of adults in the province have received at least one shot against the deadly disease.

Meanwhile, 59 per cent of youths ages 12 to 17 have received one dose, while 14 per cent are fully vaccinated.

The province has administered 16.3 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines since mid-December.

Elliott also said today that primary care physicians will play a bigger role in administering vaccines going forward.

She said onboarding more physicians will allow for the eventual closure of hospital clinics and mass immunization clinics, many of which are held in arenas and other recreational areas that will be allowed to open in Step 3.

“We are depending on our family doctors and our public health units in order to do that, because we know at some point our hospitals will need to go back to their usual businesses, that some of the places where we have the mass vaccination clinics now, which are in arenas and so on and municipalities, they will need to use them again as arenas,” Elliott said.

Solicitor General Sylvia Jones added that the goal is to eventually allow hospitals to resume their normal functions and to provide COVID-19 vaccines at more traditional vaccination settings.

“We do have to acknowledge that hospitals also have a lot of other business that they need to be focused on. And as we return to that system we're going to be able to get hospitals out of the vaccine business, so to speak, and put it where it historically and traditionally is, which is with the public health units, with our pharmacy and primary care practitioners,” she said.

Primary care providers are currently providing vaccines in roughly 700 settings, including in doctors' offices and pop-up clinics.

The government has not said how many more primary care providers are expected to assist with the vaccine rollout.

Ontario is set to enter Step 3 on July 21, allowing for larger indoor and outdoor gatherings. The government has not specified if or what capacity limits will be placed in Step 3.

Provincial health officials continue to emphasize that getting fully vaccinated significantly reduces a person’s risk of becoming infected with the virus.

From May 15 to June 12, the province says there were 29,380 COVID-19 cases reported and of these cases, 83.2 per cent had not been vaccinated at all. Meanwhile, 15.6 per cent of those cases were partially vaccinated and 1.2 per cent were fully vaccinated.

Over the last six months, over 396,000 coronavirus cases were reported and 96 per cent of those infected did not receive any shots, while 3.6 per cent were partially vaccinated and 0.4 per cent were fully vaccinated.

A person generates the full immune effect of the vaccine 12 to 14 days after their second dose and maximum effectiveness can take 30 days, according to provincial officials.

FIVE MILLION DOSES COMING IN JULY

The province anticipates that it will receive roughly five million vaccine doses this month from the federal government.

Doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are expected to come in weekly with more than 350,000 this week, over 558,000 the week of July 12, more than 1.2 million doses the week of July 19 and over 1.4 million doses the week of July 26.

This week the province is set to receive more than 1.6 million doses of the Moderna vaccine.

Meanwhile, the province is waiting for 250,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that were requested at the end of June.

Provincial officials say the strategy continues to be to increase first doses while accelerating second doses to areas with a high prevalence of the Delta variant, a highly-contagious COVID-19 variant of concern that was first identified in India.

From June 14 to July 5, 10 public health units that have been designated as Delta hot spots in Ontario received over 772,000 extra doses, in addition to their regular per capita allocations.

The province also announced today that Grey Bruce has been added to the list of Delta hot spots as the region has been experiencing an increase in the Delta variant.