[ad_1]
Premier Doug Ford will hold a press conference starting at 1 p.m. ET in Toronto. Ford’s office says it will be joined by health and long-term care ministers.
You can watch it live in this story.
Ontario reported 1,009 more cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday morning, an artificially low number resulting from a data error that impacted today’s and yesterday’s daily counts.
A spokesperson for Health Minister Christine Elliott said yesterday’s figure of 1,589 cases (which appeared to be a record) inadvertently included eight and a half hours of extra data since November 22, meaning the total tally has been inflated. Today’s number adjusts to the mistake.
New cases include 497 in Toronto, 175 in the Peel region and 118 in the York region. The seven-day average now stands at 1,395.
Other public health units that saw double-digit increases were:
- Waterloo Region: 40
- Windsor: 31
- Simcoe Muskoka: 25
- Ottawa: 19
- Niagara Region: 19
- Durham Region: 16
- Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph: 16
- Hamilton: 10
Additional cases today include 270 school-related: 223 students and 47 employees. The education ministry said in a statement that the figure is not a one-day increase. Rather it reflects cases identified in schools from 2pm last Friday to 2pm yesterday, and also some others that were not reported on Friday due to professional learning days in some committees, including Toronto’s public and Catholic ones.
There are currently 703 publicly funded schools in Ontario, or about 14.6%, with at least one reported case of COVID-19. Four schools are closed due to the disease, including one in Windsor with 39 cases, the province’s largest school outbreak.
There are now 12,917 confirmed and active cases of the disease across the province, a slight drop from yesterday as 1,082 cases were marked as resolved today.
The additional infections in today’s update come as the Ontario lab network processed just 27,053 test samples for the novel coronavirus and added 29,316 to the queue to complete. The system currently has a capacity of up to 50,000 daily tests. Meanwhile, the province reported a 5.8 percent positive test rate.
The official death toll from COVID-19 has grown by 14, to 3,519. So far this month, 374 people with COVID-19 have died in Ontario.
The hospitalizations of people with COVID-19 have also increased, from 27 to 534. Of these, 159 are in intensive care and 91 with ventilators. Public health officials have identified 150 ICU patients as the threshold for when unrelated surgeries and procedures are likely to be postponed due to the burden on the hospital system.
Source link
