It's back to triple-digits for the London region's daily COVID-19 case count.
The Middlesex London Health Unit logged 100 new infections on Monday. That is up from 90 on Sunday and 82 on Saturday. It also marks the 17th day this month daily case numbers have climbed to or above 100.
Since the start of the pandemic, there have been 9,993 COVID-19 cases in London and Middlesex County.
No additional deaths were reported on Monday, leaving the local death toll at 196. Resolved cases were up to 8,830, leaving 967 active.
There were 92 more cases involving variants of concern identified in the region since Friday, for a total of 1,561. The B.1.1.7 variant, which originated in the U.K., now accounts for 1,559 of the cases, while there are two cases of the P.1. variant from Brazil. Another 242 have tested positive for a mutation.
Hospitalizations in the region have increased with 90 people with the virus admitted to the London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC). Of those, 37 are listed in the intensive care unit. The LHSC announced last week it was opening more than half a dozen additional critical care beds as it expects to take in more patients from overwhelmed hospitals in COVID hotspots.
Outbreaks remain at five area schools, two daycares, and seven Western University residences.
There are currently no health-care facilities in the city or country with active outbreaks of the virus.
The number of new cases in Elgin and Oxford counties rose by 65 on Monday. The number includes infections identified both Saturday and Sunday, as Southwestern Public Health no longer updates its COVID-19 dashboard on weekends. The latest cases bring the two counties total case count to 3,340. The death toll was unchanged at 76. There is a single outbreak at a seniors’ facility in St. Thomas – Caressant Care Bonnie Place. Five people including three residents and two staff members have been infected there. The health unit said the total number of resolved cases is 3,104, leaving 160 known active cases in the two counties.
Provincially, there were another 3,510 new infections reported as the number of people with COVID-19 relying on ventilators to breathe reached a level nearly double that of the second wave.
Public health officials said Monday’s new cases are a decrease from the 3,947 logged on Sunday and the 4,094 recorded on Saturday.
Regions with the most new cases were Toronto with 1,015, Peel with 909, York Region with 391, Durham with 244, and Ottawa with 206.
According to the province’s daily epidemiologic summary, Ontario identified 2,030 cases of the B.1.1.7. variant over the past 24 hours for a total of 54,436. Four more cases of the P.1 variant were found for a total of 352, while the number of new cases of the B.1.351 variant is down by two for a total of 162.
The daily epidemiologic summary does not currently list the B.1.617 variant, originally found in India. However, Public Health Ontario confirmed 36 cases involving that strain on Friday.
The province’s total case count since the start of the pandemic now sits at 448,861.
Twenty-four deaths were reported over the past 24 hours, to increase the province’s death toll to 7,935.
At hospitals in Ontario, there are 2,271 patients with COVID-19, an increase of 145. That includes an all-time high 877 patients in intensive care and 605 patients on ventilators. The number of people across the province in the ICU has doubled since the start of April, while there are now nearly twice as many people on ventilators as there were during the peak of the second wave.
The number of resolved cases rose to 400,340. There are currently 40,586 known active cases of the virus in Ontario.
In the last 24 hour period, 33,800 COVID-19 tests were processed. Ontario’s current positivity rate has risen to 10.9 per cent. That is the highest the positivity rate has been since April 2020 when a much lower number of tests were being processed.
The province has administered 4,696,211 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, as of Sunday night. More than 361,166 people in Ontario have received their second dose of the vaccine to be considered fully inoculated.
