There was another jump in the number of staff at London hospitals who have tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday.
The London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) said it currently has 199 staffers who have contracted the virus, up from 172 on Wednesday and 167 a week ago.
COVID-19 hospitalizations also increased in London for a third straight day. The LHSC reported it has 27 inpatients with the virus, up four over the past 24 hours. Of the 27 people currently in hospital, there are six being treated for COVID-19 and 21 being treated for other ailments but who have also tested positive.
Intensive care unit admissions related to the virus remained at five or fewer, as did the number of COVID-19 patients in the care of Children’s Hospital. Those two figures have held steady for more than a week.
The Middlesex London Health Unit logged 116 new cases on Thursday, up from 102 on Wednesday. However, daily infection tallies are believed to be an underestimate of community spread since the provincial government limited eligibility for PCR testing at the end of December. The total number of cases locally since March of 2020 is now 33,435 according to the health unit.
The local death toll was unchanged at 356.
The number of resolved cases is up to 32,381. Currently, there are 698 known active cases in the region.
Southwestern Public Health, the health unit for Elgin and Oxford counties, does not update its COVID-19 cases dashboard on Thursdays. Its next update will be released on Friday.
Provincially, the number of people infected with COVID-19 in intensive care units continued on its downward trend.
There are 165 people with COVID-19 in intensive care units across the province, a decrease of nine since Wednesday, according to the latest figures released by the province.
A total of 661 people with COVID-19 were admitted to Ontario hospitals on Thursday, up 50 over the previous day. The provincial breakdown of hospitalization numbers shows 45 per cent of those admitted were because of COVID-19 and 55 per cent are being treated for other reasons but also have tested positive for COVID-19.
Public health officials said there were 2,561 new cases in Ontario on Thursday. Public health officials cautioned those numbers are considered an underestimate of the spread of the virus though, as eligibility for free PCR tests in Ontario have been extremely limited.
The province’s total case count since the start of the pandemic now sits at 1,145,575.
Ten additional deaths related to the virus were reported on Thursday, to bring the death toll up to 12,366. The province said seven of the latest deaths occurred over the past 30 days and three occurred more than a month ago.
The number of resolved cases rose by 1,990 to 1,116,378.
In the last 24 hour period, 15,515 COVID-19 tests were processed. Ontario’s positivity rate is now 13.4 per cent, up from 12.3 per cent last week and 11.2 per cent two weeks ago.
The province has administered 32,004,466 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, as of Wednesday night. Nearly 93 per cent of Ontarians 12 and older have received one dose of the vaccine, while 90.9 per cent have been given a second dose. More than 7.1 million booster shots have been administered.
