Ontario reported another 1,228 COVID-19 cases and 28 deaths on February 20.
It’s the third straight day cases have risen above 1,000. The province confirmed 1,150 cases yesterday, 1,038 on Thursday and 847 on Wednesday.
The seven-day rolling average for new cases – which public health official consider a more accurate indication of virus spread – is 1,016, down from 1,167 this time last week.
Labs in the province completed more than 57,000 tests, pushing the positivity rate up slightly to 2.2 per cent. A week ago the positivity rate was 2.3 per cent.
Of today’s deaths, 11 were residents of long-term care homes.
The Greater Toronto Area continues to report the highest daily case counts.
“Locally, there are 331 new cases in Toronto, 228 in Peel and 132 in York Region,” Health Minister Christine Elliott said on Twitter.
On Friday, Premier Doug Ford said Toronto and Peel will remain under the stay-at-home order for another two weeks, citing per capita case rates “well above the provincial average.”
York Region will move into the red zone of the COVID-19 response framework, which will allow eviction enforcement and indoor dining to resume and hair salons, gyms and other businesses to reopen with reduced capacity.
Another 1,313 people have recovered from COVID-19 in the past day. In total, there are now 10,437 known active cases across the province.
Hospitalizations have risen to 699 and there are 263 people in intensive care, including 181 patients on ventilators.
One more variant case has been confirmed as the UK variant B.1.1.7. bringing the total UK variant cases in the province to 386. There are nine confirmed cases of the South Africa variant B.1.351 and one confirmed case of the Brazil variant P.1.
As of 8 pm last night, Ontario had administered 540,129 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Ontario continues to face a vaccine shortage, the head of the provincial immunization task force said on Friday.
Retired General Rick Hillier told reporters at Queen’s Park that the province will get more than 300,000 Pfizer-BioNTech shots this week and next and major shipments expected to resume around April 1.
New COVID-19 cases in Ontario on February 20
The following regions reported five or more new COVID-19 cases:
Toronto = 331
Peel Region = 228
York Region = 132
Hamilton = 86
Ottawa = 54
Durham Region = 47
Thunder Bay = 41
Halton Region = 40
Region of Waterloo = 38
Simcoe Muskoka = 36
Windsor-Essex = 31
Middlesex-London = 24
Northwestern = 20
North Bay Parry Sound = 17
Brant County = 17
Lambton = 14
Niagara Region = 13
Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph = 11
Eastern Ontario = 8
Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge = 7
Peterborough = 6
Sudbury & Districts = 5
