Ontario reports 94 COVID patients on ventilators

As most mask mandates lift today, provincial COVID hospitalizations, deaths, and new cases remain on a plateau with little change over the last week. 

Today the province reported three new COVID deaths that occurred in the last month, and one more death that occurred more than one month ago.

Over the course of the pandemic, province has reported 12,336 deaths that were either caused by COVID, COVID was a contributing factor to the death, or the cause of death was unknown or missing. 

As of today, Public Health Ontario has confirmed 1,139,418 cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, and reported 1,110,677 cases recovered or resolved.

There were 1,317 more recoveries and 1,217 new cases confirmed through lab testing in today's report. New case counts are underestimated due to limited testing.

The March 21 updates provided by the province's public health agency and the ministry of health also reported the following data:

Hospitalizations

• 551 COVID-positive patients in hospitals.
• 181 people are in ICU because of COVID-related critical illness, down from 182 reported yesterday. Of those, 43 no longer test positive for COVID-19.
• There are 94 patients on ventilators because of COVID-related critical illness.
• Hospitalization numbers are incomplete on Sunday and Monday, as more than 10 per cent of Ontario hospitals do not report to the bed census on weekends.
• Vaccination status of hospitalized patients is not published on Sunday or Monday.

Vaccination

• About 86 per cent of the population over four years old in Ontario is fully vaccinated (about 12 million people)
• More than 7.1 million people in Ontario have had three doses of a COVID vaccine.
• 10 per cent of the eligible population (aged 5 and up) is unvaccinated

Testing

• Provincial labs processed 8,644 tests for the latest report, which resulted in a 13.4 per cent positivity rate.

Northern Ontario 

In the north, the last couple of days the number of hospitalizations has dropped under 100 for the first time since early January. Provincial data shows 97 people hospitalized, although these numbers may be underestimated as not all hospitals report data on the weekends. There are 18 people in ICU with the virus, up from 17 yesterday, and four people on ventilators, up from three yesterday.

Not all health units update their websites over the weekend and the data for Northern Ontario health units is not up-to-date yet.