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 the minister of health and the head of Ontario’s vaccine task force.
You can watch it live in this story.
Ontario reported a single-day high of 1,925 new COVID-19 cases on Monday, following two consecutive days of record numbers over the weekend.
The additional cases include 601 in Toronto, 512 in Peel Region, 167 in York Region and 133 in Durham Region.
Other public health units that saw double-digit increases were:
- Hamilton: 76
- Waterloo Region: 61
- Simcoe Muskoka: 60
- Halton Region: 54
- Ottawa: 48
- Windsor-Essex: 46
- Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph: 30
- Niagara Region: 27
- Middlesex-London: 23
- Eastern Ontario: 22
- Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington: 11
- Huron Perth: 10
Also included in today’s new cases are 138 that are school-related: 109 students and 29 staff members. Some 803 of Ontario’s 4,828 publicly-funded schools, or about 16.6 per cent, have at least one case of COVID-19, while 10 schools are currently closed because of the illness.
(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 new cases push the seven-day average of daily cases to 1,820, the highest it has been at any point during the pandemic.
Further, the number of people in Ontario hospitals with confirmed cases of COVID-19 climbed to 725, even though about 40 hospitals did not submit data in time to be included in today’s provincial update.
Of those patients, 213 are being treated in intensive care and 121 require the use of a ventilator. All three figures are new highs for the second wave of the illness currently gripping swaths of the province.
Public health officials also reported another 26 deaths of people with COVID-19, pushing the official toll to 3,798.
Meanwhile, tighter public health restrictions came into effect in three regions today.
Middlesex-London and Thunder Bay moved into the “orange” zone of the province’s colour-coded, tiered pandemic response plan.
The Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit moved to the “yellow” category.
The change to orange includes restrictions on visitors to long-term care homes and beefed up testing in the facilities.
The change to yellow includes limiting events and social gatherings to 10 people indoors and 25 outdoors, while organized public events are limited to 50 people indoors and 100 outdoors.
The measures will remain in place for at least 28 days.