Ontario reported 821 new cases of COVID-19 and three more deaths on October 20, a big increase over the previous day.
The province detected 704 new cases on Monday, 648 on Sunday, 805 on Saturday and 712 on Friday.
More than 24,000 tests were completed in the past 24 hours, Health Minister Christine Elliott said on Twitter – down from more than 31,000 on Monday.
That’s well below the province’s daily target of 50,000 tests. The testing backlog is now 24,129.
The lower number of tests has sent the testing positivity rate to more than 3.4 per cent.
Four hotspots continue to drive the case counts. More than half of today’s new infections are in the Greater Toronto Area.
“Locally, there are 327 new cases in Toronto, 136 in Peel, 64 in York Region and 79 in Ottawa,” she added. “There are 628 more resolved cases.”
The total number of active cases in Ontario is now 6,237.
The number of people in hospital rose by 22 to 274 in the past 24 hours. There are 72 people in intensive care and 45 on ventilators.
To date, there have been 65,896 known cases of COVID-19 in Ontario. Of those, 56,606 are resolved and 3,053 people have died.
New COVID-19 cases in Ontario on October 20
The following regions reported five or more cases of COVID-19:
Toronto = 327
Peel Region = 136
Ottawa = 79
York Region = 64
Halton Region = 46
City of Hamilton = 36
Durham Region = 32
Brant County = 14
Region of Waterloo = 14
Simcoe Muskoka = 13
Niagara Region = 12
Middlesex-London = 10
Windsor-Essex = 9
Southwestern = 6
