

Chris Fox, CP24.com





Ontario is reporting 510 new cases of COVID-19 and 37 new deaths.

It’s the lowest day-over-day increase in new cases since April 18, when there were 485 new cases reported.

The Ontario government is now reporting a total of 659 people have died of COVID-19 in the province, but as of 1 p.m. Wednesday, the 34 local public health units were reporting 702 total deaths.

The number of people hospitalized with the virus did rise for a second straight day and now stands at 878 (up 19 from one day prior).

The number of those people in intensive care units, however, continues to slowly trend downwards. There are now 243 people in ICU units with COVID-19, which is the lowest that number has been since April 7.

Testing also continues to be ramped up after weeks in which Ontario was last in Canada on a per capita basis.

The province completed 10,361 tests on Tuesday, marking the first time that they have surpassed the 10,000 threshold.

Officials have said that they want to be completing 12,500 tests a day by today and 16,000 a day by May 6.

So far 184,531 individual tests have been conducted for COVID-19.

The latest data comes one day after Ontario public health officials revealed that the province will have to see the number of new cases confirmed each day go down to around 200 before steps can be taken to reopen the economy.

“Everything is conditional on the health and wellbeing of Ontario and conditional on (advice from) the chief medical officer of health,” Premier Doug Ford said at Queen’s Park on Wednesday afternoon. “I am going to be very, very clear, though. There is never going to be just one day that we open up the economy. We are going to open it up with a trickle and just let it flow from there while constantly measuring.”

Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams said the 200 number was chosen because it was at that point in the outbreak when full contact tracing could be completed for each case.

“When I say 200 cases, I want to be well below 200 because it was there where we started to lose the ability to do containment,” he said.

There are now 12,245 confirmed cases in Ontario, including 6,221 recoveries and 659 deaths. That number is up 45 per cent from this time last week when there were 8,447 cases.

It should be noted that long-term care homes continue to make up the majority of deaths.

On Tuesday, Yaffe said that there have been 400 deaths at Ontario long-term care facilities. She said that there have also been 1,618 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among long-term care home residents and 867 confirmed cases among staff at those facilities.

Modelling released by the province earlier this week also suggested that while the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be at its peak in the community, it is still on the upward trajectory in long-term care homes and other congregate settings, such as homeless shelters.

“We are probably at the peak but the peak is not just at one point in time, the peak can last a bit and we don’t want it to go up again,” Yaffe said at the time.

Other highlights from the data: