The number of COVID-19 patients in the intensive care unit rose to over 200 for the first time in more than a month.
While wastewater monitoring data increasingly suggest that community transmission may have reached around 100,000 new cases per day, hospitalizations are considered a lagging indicator and may continue to increase in the short term.
The latest figures released by the Ministry of Health on Monday show that there are now at least 1,301 people hospitalized with COVID-19, up 19 percent from last week.
This includes 202 people treated in intensive care units, nearly half of whom breathe with the help of a ventilator (91).
This is the largest number of people in the intensive care unit with COVID-19 since March 16.
It should be noted that hospitalization figures are likely to be underestimated, given that some hospitals do not usually report weekend employment.
The Ontario Scientific Advisory Table said it expects hospitalizations to continue growing until May. They say that according to their most likely scenario, the number of patients with COVID-19 will reach about 3,000, including approximately 500 in the intensive care unit. There were more than 4,000 people with COVID-19 in Ontario hospitals in January. The number of people in the intensive care unit with COVID peaked at 626 on 18 January.
“If you look at the monitoring of wastewater, it shows very early, early signs that (transmission) is either on a plateau or declining in many parts of the province. This is obviously a very positive sign. But you want to see this trend continue before you are confident that we are working our way out of this wave, “Infectious Diseases Specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch told CP24 on Monday. “I think we always have to be careful, you can’t have a ton of confidence in the COVID era about how things are going. But at least there are some very early signs that things are getting better in Ontario.
Hospitalizations have been rising for weeks, but not at the same rate as the province saw during the height of the fifth wave last winter.
As early as January, when there were 266 people in intensive care with COVID-19, Ontario suspended election operations and procedures for about three weeks in an attempt to conserve health care resources.
However, Dr. Kieran Moore, chief medical officer of health care, believes he believes hospitals will have the resources to cope with the growing volume of patients during this wave.
“Hospitalizations have risen significantly since a few weeks ago, but they are not close to what they were in January and February,” Bogoch told CP24 on Monday.
Three net new deaths
Ontario has added three more new deaths to its number in the last two days after not publishing any Easter data. The total number of deaths since the beginning of the pandemic is now 12,632.
Meanwhile, the number of new cases confirmed by PCR testing in the last 48 hours was 4,669, compared to 5,882 in the same period last week.
The positive percentage remains high with more than 19% of all samples returning positive in the last 48 hours.
Outbreaks continue to be observed in at least some of the places that have access to government-funded PCR tests.
According to the latest data, there are now 182 active outbreaks in long-term care homes and 137 active outbreaks in retirement homes, compared to 137 and 103 outbreaks at the time last week.
The number of outbreaks in hospitals is also slightly increasing every week (79 vs. 74).
The numbers used in this story are in the Ontario Department of Health’s daily epidemiological summary COVID-19. The number of cases for each city or region may differ slightly from that reported by the province, as local units report figures at different times.
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