After holding steady heading into the weekend, COVID-19 hospitalizations in London saw a slight rise on Monday.
The London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) confirmed there are 41 inpatients with the virus in its care. That is up four from Friday. Hospitalizations in the London-area dropped to the high 30s late last week after nearly two weeks hovering in the low to mid-40s. According to hospital officials, only 15 of the COVID positive inpatients are being treated for the virus, while the remaining 26 are being treated for other ailments but have tested positive for COVID.
The intensive care unit has five or fewer patients with COVID-19 admitted, unchanged from Friday. There are currently five or fewer inpatients with the virus admitted to Children’s Hospital.
The LHSC currently has 151 workers who have tested positive for COVID-19. That is down from 155 on Friday.
The Middlesex London Health Unit logged 201 new COVID-19 cases over the weekend.
There were 55 new cases recorded on Monday, 66 new cases on Sunday, and 80 new cases on Saturday. However, public health officials caution that single-day case numbers are an underestimate of community spread due to eligibility changes that limit who can receive a test. The area’s total case count stands at 32,700 since the pandemic began.
There were no additional deaths recorded over the past 72 hours. The local death toll since the pandemic began stands at 352, with five of those deaths occurring this month and 49 occurring in February.
Resolved cases in the area went up to 31,684, while the number of active cases went up by 22 to 664 on Monday.
Southwestern Public Health, the health unit that covers Elgin and Oxford counties, reported 61 new cases since Friday. The latest infections bring the two counties’ total case count to 11,520. There was one additional death recorded, increasing the death toll to 152. The health unit said the total number of resolved cases in the area is 11,147. There are 221 known active cases locally.
Provincially, not a single COVID-19 related death was reported, the first time this year the death toll has remained unchanged.
Monday’s zero deaths leaves the overall death toll at 12, 256. The last time the province recorded no increase to the death toll was on December 20.
For the second straight day, public health officials did not report on the number of people in hospital with COVID-19. On Saturday, hospitalizations in Ontario were at 722. There are 228 people in intensive care with the virus.
Ontario logged 1,116 new infections over the past 24 hours. But single-day case counts are considered to be an underestimation of community spread as the Ford government restricted eligibility for publicly-funded COVID-19 tests at the end of December. The latest cases put Ontario’s total case count since the start of the pandemic to 1,126,456.
The number of resolved cases are up by 1,333 to 1,098,189.
In the last 24 hour period, 7,565 COVID-19 tests were processed. Ontario’s positivity rate is now 12.1 per cent, up from 11.8 per cent a week ago.
There have been 31,888,794 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine administered in Ontario as of Sunday night. Nearly 93 per cent of Ontarians 12 and older have received one dose of the vaccine, while 90.8 per cent have been given their second dose. To date, more than 7 million Ontarians have received a booster shot.
