Premier Doug Ford is scheduled to hold a news conference beginning at 1 p.m. at Queen’s Park. Ford’s office says he will be joined by several cabinet members, including the minister of health.
You can watch it live in this story.
Ontario reported 1,589 more cases of COVID-19 on Monday, another single-day record as Toronto and Peel Region move into a second lockdown.
The new cases include 336 in Toronto, 535 in Peel and 205 in York Region. They drive the seven-day average up to 1,423 after six consecutive days of increases.
Other public health units that saw double-digit increases in today’s update were:
- Waterloo Region: 83
- Hamilton: 61
- Windsor: 56
- Halton Region: 53
- Durham Region: 41
- Ottawa: 40
- Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph: 30
- Simcoe Muskoka: 25
- Niagara Region: 24
- Brant County: 16
- Thunder Bay: 16
- Middlesex-London: 13
[Note: All of the figures used in this story are found on the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard or in its Daily Epidemiologic Summary, which include data from up until 4 p.m. the previous day. The number of cases for any region may differ from what is reported by the local public health unit, because local units report figures at different times.]
Sixty of the new infections were school-related, including 51 students and nine staff members. A total of 676, or about 14 per cent, of Ontario’s 4,828 publicly-funded schools have reported at least one case of COVID-19. Three schools remain closed due to the illness.
The additional cases come as Ontario’s labs processed 37,471 test samples for the novel coronavirus, and 18,394 were added to the queue to be completed. The province reported an overall test positivity rate of 4.6 per cent.
With today’s update there are currently 13,004 confirmed, active cases of COVID-19 in the province, the most at any point since the outbreak began in late January.
Further, 19 more people with COVID-19 have died, the province said, pushing the official death toll to 3,505. The additional deaths include 11 residents of long-term care and a man in his 20s, the fifth person in their 20s to die with COVID-19 in Ontario. So far this month, 360 people with infections of the novel coronavirus have died provincewide.
The number of people with confirmed cases in hospitals grew by 23, up to 507. Some 156 of those patients are being treated in intensive care. Public health officials have identified 150 as the threshold for when unrelated surgeries and procedures are likely to be postponed because of burdens on the hospital system.
2nd lockdown begins for Toronto, Peel
Meanwhile, Toronto and Peel Region have entered the most restrictive tier of Ontario’s pandemic protection plan.
It means that for at least the next 28 days, non-essential retailers can only offer curbside pickup, while restaurants are closed to all but takeout and delivery orders.
Personal services have also been forced to close, but schools and child-care centres remain open.
Premier Doug Ford announced the move on Friday, but it didn’t come into effect until 12:01 a.m. today.
That gave residents of Toronto and Peel the chance to stock up over the weekend, and many did — flooding local malls, even as those facilities extended hours in an effort to prevent too many people from coming at once.
While Toronto and Peel face the strictest measures, other areas of the province are also seeing rules tighten.
Durham Region and Waterloo joined York Region in the red classification today. The rules limit restaurants, gyms and food courts to 10 indoor patrons with social distancing, with even tighter restrictions on private gatherings.
The areas around Huron, Perth, Simcoe, Muskoka, and Windsor-Essex have moved to the orange classification, which caps gatherings at staffed businesses to 50 people indoors, or four per table at restaurants.
