Ontario reports highest COVID-19 positivity rate since late January at nearly 18 per cent

Ontario’s test positivity rate for COVID-19 jumped to nearly 18 per cent on Monday, according to provincial data.

Health officials said that just over 6,200 PCR tests were processed in the last 24-hour period, marking the lowest number of tests processed in labs since last Monday.

This yielded a positivity rate of about 17.9 per cent, the Ministry of Health said.

The last time the positivity rate was this high in Ontario was in late January.

An additional 1,741 people tested positive for COVID-19 Monday, however, it’s important to note that Ontario continues to implement testing restrictions and this number is an underestimation as a result.

Wastewater data, provided by Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Table, appears to confirm this slight increase in infection. In nearly every region in the province the concentration of the disease in wastewaters has started to rise.

Four additional deaths were also confirmed Monday. Three of the deaths occurred over the last month while the remaining death was added to the cumulative tally following a data cleaning.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, at least 12,405 people have died after contracting COVID-19.

The number of people hospitalized with the disease has increased slightly from the day before, however, some hospitals do not report complete COVID-19 data on the weekend.

According to the province, there are at least 655 people being treated for the novel coronavirus in Ontario hospitals, including 124 in intensive care.

No further vaccination breakdown was provided for hospitalizations.

In total, there have been 1,115,046 lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ontario.