TORONTO – For the first time in almost three months, Ontario today recorded no victims from (or with) Covid-19: the last time the province had reported “zero deaths” was last December 20. Therefore, the death toll in Ontario remains steady at 12,256 since the beginning of the pandemic, from which 489 deaths have recently been removed because they are not related to Covid-19. 

Last week, the provincial health authorities announced that from Friday (last) they would begin to distinguish between deaths from or with Covid-19 (i.e. caused by the virus or other pathologies in coexistence with the virus) but, until yesterday – when there were 9 deaths – this distinction was not made. In addition, today for the second consecutive day the same provincial health authorities did not report how many people are currently in Ontario hospitals with Covid-19, limiting themselves to communicating that 228 patients are still present in intensive care (same number yesterday).

Also last week, the Province announced that starting from last Friday it would continue to report the data of hospitalizations both in the ordinary wards and in the intensive care units, considered more “indicative”, to the detriment of the data on the spread of infections, considered no longer reliable since the tests are reserved for the “at risk” categories, but also today – like Sunday – it did the opposite: it did not provide the data on hospital admissions and, instead, provided the data on infections: 1,116 new cases on 7,565 tests processed in the last 24 hours, with a positivity rate of 12.1%. Specifically, in the Greater Toronto Area, 244 new cases were reported in Toronto, 60 in the York region, 43 in the Peel region, 38 in the Durham region and 36 in the Halton region. Also recorded 58 new cases in Middlesex-London, 56 in the Waterloo region, 54 in Ottawa and 51 in the Niagara region. All other regions reported fewer than 50 new cases. 10 cases concern residents of long-term care homes and 2 concern staff in the same facilities. There are still 50 long-term care homes in Ontario that are still facing an outbreak.

There have been 1,333 healings in the last few days (the total since the beginning of the pandemic in Ontario is 1,098,189, out of a total number of laboratory confirmed cases of 1,126,456). The cases currently active and known are 16,011. But the data, as mentioned, is unreliable.

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay