Ontario reports 1,677 new COVID-19 cases

December 13, 2020Julia Mastroianni

A photo of people wearing masks during the COVID19 pandemic in Toronto in October 2020

Ontario reported 1,677 new cases of COVID-19 and 16 more deaths on December 13.

Today’s count is a slight drop over the previous days.

The province detected 1,873 new cases on Saturday, 1,848 on Friday and a record high of 1,948 on Thursday. The seven-day rolling average is now at 1,839.

The Greater Toronto Area continues to lead the province in new cases. There are 456 new cases in Toronto, 356 in Peel and 143 in York Region.

A day after breaking a testing record, Ontario completed 58,190 tests in the past 24 hours, marking a 2.9 per cent positivity rate.

The reproduction rate – or R number – in the province is at 0.98 per cent, down 0.03 per cent from the week before.

The reproduction number indicates the average number of people that will contract a contagious disease from one infected person. If the number is higher than one, the virus is spreading. If it’s less than one, the epidemic is slowly dying out. One means the epidemic is neither getting worse or better.

During a modelling data presentation last week, provincial public health officials said Ontario’s R has been fluctuating around one.

“We’re in a really precarious stage here,” Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams said on December 10.

Toronto and Peel Region are the lockdown zone of the provincial COVID-19 framework. The measures are set to expire on December 21, but officials have not indicated whether the restrictions will be extended or modified.

York Region and Windsor-Essex will enter a 28-day lockdown on Monday, and Guelph will move up to the red zone.

Active cases dropped for the second consecutive day to 16,204 from 16,221 the day before.

The number of hospitalized patients dropped to 813 from 855. Of those patients, 253 are in intensive care and 142 of those are on ventilators.

Long-term care residents make up 10 of the deaths reported on December 13, with eight more long-term care homes reporting outbreaks in the past 24 hours. A total of 136 homes are currently in outbreak.

To date, there have been 140,181 total COVID-19 cases in Ontario, including 120,028 resolved – up 1,678 from the day before. The virus has resulted in a total of 3,949 deaths.