

Chris Fox, CP24.com





More than 9,000 COVID-19 tests were completed on Wednesday, suggesting that the province may finally be having some success in ramping up testing levels that have been among the lowest in Canada on a per-capita basis for weeks.

According to data released by the Ministry of Health, there was a total of 9,001 tests completed on Wednesday. That is up from the 6,010 tests the province completed on Tuesday and means that Ontario was able to hit the 8,000 daily tests benchmark that officials had promised to hit by this week.

The backlog in tests waiting to be processed, meanwhile, saw a slight decline after more than doubling in recent days as the province worked to increase testing. It now stands at 4,323.

It should be noted that the province changed the way it reports its testing data as of Wednesday and now only reports the total number of tests conducted and not the total number of people tested, making any direct comparison to previous testing volumes difficult.

"We have hit our first target and we are going to keep ramping up our efforts before we hit 14,000 (tests) a day by the end of this month," Premier Doug Ford said during a news conference at Queen's Park on Thursday afternoon. "We will continue to expand testing and will test more people and priority groups. We have also expanded our testing guidelines and we are making sure we are testing people who need our support the most."

514 new cases

The latest data released by the province includes 514 new cases of COVID-19 and 38 new deaths.

The number of deaths is down from the record 51 confirmed on Wednesday and the then record 43 reported on Tuesday but still represents the third highest single-day increase so far.

Of the 423 deaths attributed to the virus to date, more than a third of them have occurred in residents and patients at long-term care homes (162), where Ford has likened the spread of the virus to “wildfire.” That number is up 18 from one day prior, suggesting that about half of the deaths confirmed over the last 24 hours occurred in long-term care homes.

There have now been 933 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among residents and patients of long-term care homes and 530 among staff. There have also been 104 individual outbreaks reported at long-term care homes.

Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams said that of the 514 new cases confirmed over the last 24 hours, 271 were attributed to long-term care homes. That means only 243 were reported elsewhere in the community, he said.

“That is the first time we have seen more in long-term care than on the community side. That is more an artifact of the testing and what we are doing but also the fact that we are continuing to see the number on the community side dropping,” he told reporters. “Our travel-related ones are pretty well gone and the social and physical distancing is making an impact with bending the curve.”

Number of people in ICU with virus continues to decline

While the number of people hospitalized with the virus continues to trend upwards and now stands at 807 (up 12 from one day prior), the number of people in intensive care units does seem to be on the decline.

That number reached a high of 263 on Monday but has declined each day this week and is now at 248, a number that is somewhat encouraging given the province’s own projections released earlier this month.

Those projections suggested that Ontario would have approximately 1,200 people in ICU units by today in a “best case scenario” and nearly 1,600 as a worst case.

The projections also suggested that there would be 1,600 deaths by April 30 given current interventions, a grim number that the province no longer appears to be headed towards.

Meanwhile, on Thursday the province confirmed that it has more than doubled its number of critical care beds to approximately 3,500. The province also said that the number of critical care beds with ventilators has increased from 1,300 to 2,800 since the start of the pandemic.

“We planned for the worst case scenario, so we are ready and we are still building our capacity because we just don’t know,” Health Minister Christine Elliott said at Queen’s Park. “We haven’t hit the peak yet so we need to make sure that if we do have a significant increase in patients that our hospitals will be able to accommodate those patients.”

While Elliott told reporters that the province is ready for a “surge in cases,” should it develop,” Ford said that we are now in a “relatively half-decent place” with an apparent plateauing in the number of new cases.

He said that updated modeling that will give a better picture of where the province is heading could be released next week.

"This could still come back and bite us in the backside in about 10 seconds. We have to be very cautious moving forward," he warned.

The total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 provincewide is now 8,961, including deaths and recoveries.

That number is up about 55 per cent from the 5,759 cases that the province was aware of at this time last week.

Other highlights from the data: