TORONTO -- Following two days of case counts being below 100, Ontario has recorded a spike in the number of new COVID-19 infections.
Provincial health officials logged 134 new patients of the novel coronavirus on Friday, bringing the total number of cases in Ontario to 39,209.
Before the province recorded 89 new patients on Thursday and 76 on Wednesday, Ontario had not seen a daily case count of fewer than 100 since the end of March.
The rolling five-day average of new infections is down to 106 from 160 one week earlier.
Three additional deaths were confirmed in Ontario on Friday. The province’s death toll is now 2,775.
There are currently 78 patients infected with the disease in Ontario hospitals. Of those patients, 29 are being treated in the intensive care unit and 15 of those are breathing with the assistance of a ventilator.
The number of recovered patients in the province is now 35,074.
Where are the new COVID-19 cases?
Twenty-eight of Ontario’s 34 local public health units reported five or fewer cases of COVID-19 on Friday, with 16 of them recording no new infections.
Ottawa and Windsor-Essex recorded the most cases of the disease on Friday. There are 26 new infections in Ottawa and 24 in Windsor-Essex.
Responding to Ottawa’s case count on Friday afternoon, Ontario’s Associate Medical Officer of Health Dr. Barbara Yaffe said officials are “watching and monitoring and looking at the risk factors.”
“I actually contacted the medical officer of health for Ottawa because they are continuing to see numbers – just to see what are they finding, is it still private parties, bars, is it any impact potentially from opening Stage 3,” she said. “We have to figure out how these people are getting infected and implement strategies to reduce that transmission.”
Windsor-Essex is the only region to stay behind in Stage 2 of the province’s reopening plan.
Toronto, which recorded 19 new cases, and Peel Region, which recorded 20, both moved onto Stage 3 on Friday.
“As we open up the community, the businesses, the schools, the exposure notification app, these are all good things but we still have to remember the basics – you have your social bubble, and that’s the group you can be close with without protection, otherwise try to keep two metres away from people, if you can’t wear a face mask., wash your hands, don’t go out if you’re not feeling well, all the usual things,” Yaffe said.
COVID-19 testing in Ontario
More than 2.1 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted in Ontario since the start of the pandemic.
In the last 24 hours, more than 30,000 tests were conducted.
There are currently 29,215 tests under investigation in the province.