Ontario reports lowest number of confirmed cases this week at 510

The amount of hospitalized patients suffering from the virus went up for the second day in a row. There are now 878 patients—up 19 from the previous day.

The number of patients in intensive care units is now slowly beginning to drop. With 243 patients—the lowest it’s been since April 7.

Testing being done in Ontario is continuing to rise after the province was last in the country, per capita. On Tuesday, Ontario completed 10,361 tests, which is the first time it has exceeded 10,000. By May 6, officials hope to be completing 16,000 tests per day. Currently, 184,531 tests have been completed.

This data follows an announcement by Ontario Public Health officials that the number of new daily cases in the province will have to drop to about 200 before the economy can begin to reopen.

"We can’t wait till we get no cases for two weeks,” said Dr. Barbara Yaffe, the Associate Medical Officer of Health. “We may be in our current state for a very long time if we do that, but we do need to have a very good system of active surveillance and identifying cases.”

Ontario now has 12,245 confirmed cases with 659 deaths and 6,221 recoveries. There were 8,447 cases at this time last week.

The majority of deaths continue to be seen in long-term care homes. The province has seen 400 deaths in the facilities, according to Yaffe. She added that there have been 1,618 confirmed cases among residents and 867 among staff.

Ontario recently released modelling that suggests that even though the pandemic seems to have hit a peak in the community, long-term care facilities are continuing to see an upward trend.

“We are probably at the peak but the peak is not just at one point in time, the peak can last a bit and we don’t want it to go up again,” Yaffe noted.

Among healthcare workers, there are 1,499 cases, which is 12.2 percent of all confirmed cases.

People over 80-years-old make up two thirds of the total deaths though they only make up 12.2 percent of cases.

There are currently around 38,413 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Canada and 1,834 deaths. Roughly 13,179 recoveries have been made and almost 600,000 individuals have been tested.