The province says today’s case count is higher than expected due to a data catch-up process related to the provincial CCM system.
Ontario is reporting 1,631 new COVID-19 cases and 10 deaths on Monday.
It is the largest daily increase the province has seen since Feb. 5 when 1,670 cases were reported.
Locally, there are 568 new cases in Toronto, 322 in Peel and 119 in York Region.
The province completed 38,063 tests in the last 24 hour period compared to over 46,000 tests a day ago. Testing numbers are typically down earlier in the week in the days following the weekend.
The test positivity rate jumps to 3.4 per cent from 3.1 from on Sunday. It is the highest positivity rate reported by the province in nearly two weeks.
The latest provincial numbers confirm 51 additional cases of the B.1.1.7 variant first detected in the UK.
There are now 879 cumulative cases of the B.1.1.7 variant, 31 cases of the B 1.351 variant first detected in South Africa and three cases of the P.1 variant first detected in Brazil.
The province reported 1,299 cases and 15 deaths on Sunday.
The rolling seven-day average climbs to 1,155, the highest number in over three weeks. The seven-day average has levelled off in the last three weeks after consistently declining each day since Jan. 11, where it peaked at 3,555.
There have been 309,927 cases in the province since the onset of the pandemic and 7,077 people have died as a result of the virus.
There are now 11,016 active cases in the province, it is the first time that active cases have gone over 11,000 since Feb. 16.
Among active cases, 626 have been hospitalized and 282 are in the ICU.
The Ford government announced Friday that Toronto and Peel Region would be placed into ‘Grey-Lockdown’, heeding requests from the top doctors in both regions.
North Bay Parry Sound District is returning to the ‘Red-Control’ level. The three regions are the last three in the province to return to the colour-coded pandemic response framework.
As of 8:00 p.m. Sunday, 912,486 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered and 273,676 have been fully vaccinated.
Canada is expected to receive more than 900,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses this week, though none of them will be of the newly-approved vaccines from AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson.
The Public Health Agency of Canada says the country will receive nearly 445,000 shots from Pfizer, along with another 465,000 from Moderna.
The country’s top doctor Theresa Tam expressed optimism over the weekend that brighter days were coming, thanks to the recent approvals of the Johnson & Johnson and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines.
“This week has been a very good week for Canada’s COVID-19 vaccination programs,” she wrote.
