Ontario’s regional health units are reporting another 24 hours with more than 50 new deaths from COVID-19, according to the Star’s latest count.

As of 11 a.m. Monday, the health units are reporting a total of 15,824 confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19, including a jump of 52 more fatal cases from the same time Sunday morning, to a total of 962 deaths.

Even so, data on the growing number of deaths in Ontario seniors’ homes reveals the real toll of the COVID-19 epidemic is much larger even than the Star’s count.

That’s because many deaths the Star is aware of in Ontario care facilities are not yet included in either the Star’s count, or the province’s morning update on total confirmed deaths.

For example, Toronto Public Health has so far reported 274 COVID-19 deaths in the city. But, according to the Star’s separate tally of all publicly available records of an Ontario outbreak, at least 312 people have so far died counting only fatal cases in a Toronto long-term care home. Another 22 have died in a retirement home, according to the Star’s count.

The difference between the care-home data and the numbers reported by the health units exists due to several delays in reporting. The health units may take days to report comprehensive data on individual cases and deaths to the province’s central reporting system, the Integrated Public Health Information System (iPHIS), before updating their websites.

In the meantime, long-term care homes may have already reported more current but less detailed information to their websites or to residents’ family, or self-reported this information to a separate database maintained by the Ministry of Long-Term Care.

However, because the health units do not generally release case-by-case data that indicates when patients are residents of a long-term care home, there is no way to reconcile these two very different totals.

The true number of dead in the province overall is therefore impossible to calculate with available data.

According to the Star’s most recent count, at least 754 people have died in 256 outbreaks in an Ontario retirement or long-term care home.

The health units once again saw slow case growth on a day the province reported a large number of completed tests, a record 12,550.

The 477 new cases the health units reported from the same time Sunday morning represents a low, 3.1 per cent increase.

On a percentage basis, daily growth has slowed greatly from the rapid increases seen in late March. In the second half of last month, the province saw an average daily growth of 20 per cent, a rate that doubled Ontario’s case count about every four days. In the first half of April, that rate slowed to an average of 9.5 per cent daily growth, or doubling about every eight days. And the days since have averaged increases of less than 5 per cent daily, or a doubling time of around two weeks.

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Earlier Monday, the province also reported 945 patients are now hospitalized with COVID-19, including 241 in intensive care, of whom 191 are on a ventilator. The province also says 8,525 patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus have now recovered from the disease.

Because many health units and publish case data before reporting to the province through iPHIS, the Star’s count is more current than the data the province puts out each morning.

The province says its data is accurate to 4 p.m. the previous day. The province also cautions its latest count of total deaths — 892 — may be incomplete or out of date due to delays in the reporting system, saying that in the event of a discrepancy, “data reported by (the health units) should be considered the most up to date.”

The Star’s count, includes some patients reported as “probable” COVID-19 cases, meaning they have symptoms and contacts or travel history that indicate they very likely have the disease, but have not yet received a positive lab test.