The Waterloo region on Monday reported five more COVID-19-related deaths, bringing the number of deaths since the pandemic began to 429.
This comes as experts warn that Ontario has entered a summer wave of COVID-19 driven through two subvariants of Omicron, BA. 4 and BA. 5.
According to the region’s dashboard, there are another 33 people in local hospitals with the disease lately.
That number has more than doubled since the last update on June 30, when another 15 people were reported to have been hospitalized.
Four patients are lately in intensive care.
(Waterloo Region)
The region says the deaths reported Monday are a man in his 50s, a man in his 60s, a man in his 60s and two men in his 90s.
The public fitness says the number of active outbreaks in high-risk settings rose from five to 15 on Monday.
Nine of those outbreaks occur in long-term care homes or retirement homes, 3 in hospitals and 3 in crowded services, a category that includes shelters, organization homes and correctional services.
The average seven-day positivity rate in the region is 14%.
Last week’s effects are intermediate and shown in red. (Waterloo Region)
Eighty-nine percent of other people over the age of five in the Waterloo region have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, 86 percent have gained two.
The region updates its COVID-19 dashboard weekly. As a rule, the new problems are on Fridays.
Infectious disease specialist Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti said this new wave could boost the immunity of the population as we head towards a cooler autumn.
“I know there’s a lot of communication about doing things on the ground, like masking up to check and avoid this wave,” Dr. Chakrabarti said. “We can’t help this. This is what a respiratory virus does. We know at this point, for those most at risk, what to do, how to wear a high-quality mask to stay safe. But if not, that vaccination works very well, there is a lot of immunity in the field, and a lot of what we see is a benign disease.
He adds: “This can have an accidental positive effect, because what it does provides the population with some immunity that can then continue from early to mid-autumn. “
The Ontario Scientific Advisory Board says the sewage signals are partly what they were recently when the wave of omicrons peaked in April.
(Waterloo Region)