Ontario reports fewer than 200 COVID-19 cases, lowest positivity rate in 10 months
Posted July 9, 2021 10:09 am.
Last Updated July 9, 2021 3:07 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Ontario is reporting 183 new COVID-19 cases and nine additional deaths on Friday.
It is the fourth time in the last five days the province has reported fewer than 200 new infections.
The test positivity rate is 0.7 per cent, down from 0.9 per cent one week ago. It is the lowest test positivity rate since Sept. 6.
There were nearly 26,101 tests completed in the last 24-hour period.
Locally, there are 50 new cases in the Region of Waterloo, 24 in Peel Region, 24 in Grey Bruce, 22 in Toronto and 10 in Halton Region.
There were another 233 resolved cases, dropping the active case count once again.
The rolling seven-day average has dropped to 192. It is the first time the average has fallen below 200 since Sept. 13.
The province reported 210 new cases and four deaths on Tuesday.
There are now 202 people in the ICU with COVID-19 complications and 1453 ICU patients on a ventilator. The number of ICU patients has dropped to the lowest point since Dec. 2.
Graphics courtesy of @jwan_md
There were 224,864 COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the last 24-hour period.
As of 8 p.m. Thursday, 16,619,927 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered across the province – 78.1 per cent of Ontario residents 12 and older have received at least one dose while 50.4 per cent are now fully vaccinated.
The province outlined post-vaccination indicators on Thursday over a recent four-week period, highlighting the effectiveness of immunization on severe infections.
From May 15 to June 12 there were more than 29,000 new infections reported. Over that timespan, approximately 83 per cent of the cases were among people who were not vaccinated at all. Only 1.2 per cent of the cases were people who were fully vaccinated.
Toronto is launching a focused one-week vaccination push this weekend that will prioritize six neighbourhoods in the city where vaccination rates are low.
‘The Home Stretch Vaccine Push’ begins on Saturday and aims to encourage vaccine uptake and eliminate barriers to access in the selected neighbourhoods.
More than a dozen clinics are being planned during a blitz this weekend.
The city marked a milestone on Thursday surpassing one million vaccine doses administered at city-operated vaccine clinics.
Public health regions in Ontario will now have new data at their disposal to help target outreach of vaccinations.
Sociodemographic data that’s been voluntarily collected at vaccine clinics will be shared with public health units starting on Friday.
Data covers race, ethnic origin, language, household income and household size.
Officials say it can’t be used for purposes other than the vaccine rollout.
Graphics courtesy of @jwan_md
The Lamba ‘variant of interest’ has been confirmed in 11 Canadian cases to date – none of the detected cases are in Ontario.
Canada’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Theresa Tam says it’s too early to know how widespread the variant is or what impact it could have on the country’s fight against the virus.
The Delta variant has become the predominant strain in Ontario where it is most prevalent.
As of July 2, Delta’s effective reproduction number R(t), which corresponds to the average number of additional infections caused by one infection, is 0.98.
An R(t) of greater than one indicates exponential growth, per Ontario’s Science Advisory Table.
As of July 5, the R(t) of all combined COVID-19 variants is 0.86 but as of July 8, the estimated percentage of cases predominantly of the Delta variant sits at 83.8 per cent.
