The London region’s daily COVID-19 caseload appears to be slowly creeping back up to the triple-digits.
The Middlesex London Health Unit logged 81 new infections on Wednesday, an increase from 55 on Tuesday and 27 on Monday.
Since the pandemic began, there has been a total of 11,346 cases in London and Middlesex County.
The local death toll held steady at 210, with no additional COVID-19 deaths reported for three straight days. Last week there was at least one death related to the virus recorded every day except one.
Hospitalizations in the area continue to decline with 71 COVID-19 patients admitted to the London Health Sciences Centre, five fewer than on Tuesday. There are 37 COVID-19 patients listed in intensive care. Of the 71 in hospital with the virus, 32 were transferred to London from overwhelmed hospitals in other regions of the province – eight in acute care and 24 in intensive care. Two hospital employees are positive for the virus.
There were 21 more cases involving variants of concern in London and Middlesex County, for a total of 2,198. Of those, 2,177 have been identified as the B.1.1.7 from the U.K., 20 are the P.1. variant from Brazil, and one is the new B.1.617 strain from India. The health unit also noted 287 cases have tested positive for a mutation.
There are active outbreaks at five area seniors’ facilities, including a new one at McGarrell Place. One local daycare centre also has an outbreak.
Resolved cases are up by 75 for a total of 10,320. There are currently 816 active cases in the region.
The effort to get the vaccine into the arms of residents of London and Middlesex remains strong. A total of 188,511 doses have been administered locally since Sunday. The number of people who can get the shot goes up on Thursday as the eligibility age at mass vaccination clinics will be lowered to adults born in 1981. Vaccine appointments can be booked online at www.covidvaccinelm.ca.
Southwestern Public Health recorded 20 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday. That is up from five new infections the previous day. The latest cases puts Elgin and Oxford counties’ total up to 3,592. There were no additional COVID-19 related deaths reported in the region, leaving the death toll at 77. Resolved cases rose to 3,379. There are now 136 active cases locally. An outbreak at Tillsonburg District Memorial Hospital has grown again. There are now 12 patient and five staff cases of the virus at the facility. One death is associated with this outbreak. The only other outbreak in the region is at Caressant Care Nursing Home in Woodstock, where four residents and six employees have been infected.
There was a bit of a jump in the number of daily COVID-19 cases reported in Ontario.
A total of 2,320 new infections were confirmed on Wednesday, up from Tuesday’s 2,073 cases.
Regions with the highest new case counts continue to be Toronto with 712 and Peel with 452. That is followed by York Region with 157, Durham with 139 and Hamilton with 113.
Ontario’s total case count since the start of the pandemic now sits at 499,412.
According to public health officials, there were 32 additional deaths related to the virus on Wednesday. The official death toll now sits at 8,374.
The daily epidemiologic summary indicates Ontario found 2,949 more lab confirmed cases over the past 24 hours of the B.1.1.7. variant. There are now a total of 98,495 cases of that strain, which was first discovered in the U.K. Another 91 cases of the P.1. variant has been confirmed for a total of 1,683 and there were 38 more cases of the B.1.351 variant for a total of 568 in Ontario. The province does not currently list how many cases involving the B.1.617 variant, originally found in India, have been identified in Ontario.
Hospitalizations in the province have gone down with 1,673 COVID-19 positive patients admitted. That's a drop of 109 patients from the previous day. Of those in hospital, there are 776 in intensive care and 559 on ventilators. ICU admissions across the province have been steadily decreasing since the start of the month.
Resolved cases across the province are up to 461,076. That leaves 29,962 known active cases of the virus in Ontario, down from 34,976 a week ago.
In the last 24 hour period, 45,681 COVID-19 tests were processed, up from 28,109 on Tuesday. Ontario’s positivity rate has dropped to 6.4 per cent from 8.5 per cent.
The province has administered 6,491,666 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine as of Tuesday night. A total of 402,258 people in Ontario have received their second dose of the vaccine and are considered fully inoculated.
