Premier Doug Ford and other Ontario officials are set to hold a 1 p.m. news conference. You’ll be able to watch that live in this story.
Ontario reported another 2,202 cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday as the number of patients with the illness in intensive care climbed to its highest at any point during the pandemic.
It’s the eighth consecutive day of more than 2,000 new cases in Ontario, and comes one day after Premier Doug Ford announced a provincewide shutdown set to begin on Boxing Day.
According to Critical Care Services Ontario (CCSO), there are now 285 people with COVID-19 being treated in intensive care units. The previous high of 284 came in April, during the first wave of the pandemic.
The ICU figures from the CCSO were posted publicly to Twitter by members of the Ontario Hospital Association. The numbers in CCSO reports often vary slightly from those in the province’s daily COVID-19 updates because of differences in how each is compiled. Even by the province’s official numbers, however, ICU admissions are at a record high.
There are now 1,005 people hospitalized with COVID-19, 90 more than in yesterday’s provincial update. It also marks the first time that figure has surpassed 1,000 since May. During the peak of the first wave of the illness in Ontario, 1,043 COVID-19 patients were in hospital.
In a briefing yesterday, public health officials said that in the last four weeks there has been a 69.3 per cent increase in overall hospitalizations of patients with COVID-19, and an 83.1 per cent jump in the number of patients requiring intensive care. Under any modelling scenario, ICU admissions are expected to exceed 300 by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, today’s new cases include 636 in Toronto, 504 in Peel Region, 218 in York Region, 172 in Windsor-Essex and 101 in Waterloo Region.
Other public health units that saw double-digit increases were:
- Hamilton: 95
- Middlesex-London: 93
- Durham Region: 86
- Halton Region: 48
- Simcoe Muskoka: 46
- Niagara Region: 41
- Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph: 34
- Southwestern: 23
- Ottawa: 19
- Lambton: 15
- Huron Perth: 14
(Note: All of the figures used for new cases in this story are found on the Ontario Health Ministry’s COVID-19 dashboard or in its daily epidemiologic summary. 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.)
The seven-day average of new daily cases dropped somewhat to 2,266.
There are currently 19,300 confirmed, active cases of the illness in Ontario, also a new record high.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic’s second wave, Ford and other Ontario health officials have suggested they were seeing the rate of increase slow down or plateau.
That still hasn’t happened, and now the province is moving into another lockdown.
Here’s a look at some of those comments and when they were made, compared with the climbing case numbers.
