A woman in her 80s is the latest casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic in the London-area.
The Middlesex London Health Unit reported the elderly woman's death on Friday. She was not associated with a long term care or retirement home and details about her vaccination status were not released. Her death, the third from the virus to be reported this week, brings the local death toll to 255.
Another 42 new COVID-19 cases were recorded over the past 24 hours in the city and county. That is up from 40 on Thursday and 37 on Wednesday. The region has logged single-day case counts over 30 every day for the past week.
The local total of infections since the pandemic began now sits at 15,241.
The number of resolved cases rose by 13 to 14,648. There are 338 known active cases in the region, up 27 over the past 24 hours. The number of active cases in the community has nearly quadrupled in the past month.
The London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) has 12 COVID-19 inpatients in its care, down one since Thursday. Of those, five or fewer are listed in intensive care and five or fewer are admitted to Children’s Hospital. Currently, there are eight hospital staff who have tested positive for the virus.
There are now 12 area schools dealing with outbreaks of COVID-19. The three latest schools to declare outbreaks were Saint André Bessette Catholic Secondary, Princess Elizabeth Public, and Byron Northview Public in London. Of the schools with outbreaks all but four remain open. Princess Elizabeth Public, St. Marguerite, St. Nicholas and St. Mary Choir and Orchestra are closed to in-person learning
In Elgin and Oxford counties, there were 23 new COVID-19 cases reported Friday, down from 30 the previous day. Southwestern Public Health, the health unit for the region, said that brings the local total number of cases to 5,632 with 5,326 resolved. The death toll is unchanged at 105. There are currently 201 active cases in the two counties.
Ontario recorded it’s highest daily COVID-19 case count since the end of May on Friday.
Public health officials confirmed 1,452 new infections over the past 24 hours, up from 1,115 cases logged on Thursday, 1,009 cases on Wednesday, 928 on Tuesday, and 887 on Monday.
Ontario’s total case count since the start of the pandemic now stands at 629,064.
There were 11 additional deaths reported, leaving the provincial death toll at 10,065.
Despite the climbing number of infections reported daily, the number of patients with the virus in hospital and the ICU has remained relatively stable.
Hospitals in Ontario have 309 COVID-19 positive patients admitted to general wards. There are 151 patients in intensive care and 130 are on ventilators. Of those on the general wards, 103 were unvaccinated, 11 were partially vaccinated, and 75 were fully vaccinated. Only 29 of those in ICU were fully vaccinated.
The number of resolved cases are up by 910 to 609,806. There are currently 9,193 active cases of the virus in Ontario.
In the last 24 hour period, 39,941 COVID-19 tests were processed. Ontario’s positivity rate is now 4.4 per cent.
To date, the province has administered more than 24.3 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, with more than 11.3 million people having received both shots required to be fully inoculated.
