Public health officials confirmed the region’s 137th COVID-related death Thursday in their daily update.
Public health officials confirmed the region’s 137th COVID-related death Thursday in their daily update.
The latest death – an Elgin County man in his 70s – was not related to any of the ongoing outbreaks at the region’s nursing and retirement homes.
The ongoing COVID-19 case count in the Southwestern public health region, increased slightly for the first time in almost three weeks, officials said, growing from 711 to 732 cases.
There were 85 new cases in the update, but only 61 recoveries.
The number of hospitalizations dropped slightly on Thursday, dipping to 28 patients, including 10 in intensive care.
There have now been 9,980 confirmed cumulative cases and 9,111 total recoveries in the Southwestern public health region since the pandemic began.
Seventeen long-term care and retirement homes in the region remained in some degree of outbreak Thursday. There were also smaller active outbreaks at the Arches Transitional Bed Program in Woodstock and Tillsonburg District Memorial Hospital.
The region’s two largest urban communities – Woodstock and St. Thomas – continued to have the most active cases in the region, with 214 and 197 respectively.
This active case count, however, has become increasingly meaningless during the recent Omicron-driven surge, public health officials have said. With testing and contact-tracing capacity overwhelmed by the growing number of cases – and focused more on high-risk patients and settings – officials across the province have warned that counts are an underestimate of the actual number of active infections.
As of Jan. 26, 86.8 per cent of area residents 12 and older had received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine while 84.8 per cent had been administered two doses. For residents five and older, the local vaccination coverage rates dropped to 82.7 per cent with one dose and 77.9 per cent with two.