Yahoo Movies Key COVID-19 numbers in the Ottawa area today
Ottawa Public Health's COVID-19 hospital count remains stable.
Ottawa's wastewater signal is high, but also stable.
Four more local people with COVID-19 have died.
Kingston's wastewater signal is dropping.
Today's Ottawa update
There are 84 Ottawa residents in local hospitals for treatment of active COVID-19, according to Thursday's update from Ottawa Public Health (OPH). That's one more than was reported Wednesday.
Eight of those patients are in an ICU, down from 10 reported Wednesday. This number has been generally stable for about a week.
These hospital numbers do not include people who came to the hospital for other reasons and then test positive for COVID-19. They also don't cover people with lingering COVID-19 problems, or patients transferred from other health units.
Hospitals are challenged on a different level by rising spread because staffing shortages lower their capacity. There are also 35 hospital outbreaks reported by OPH, which has stabilized this week.
The average level of coronavirus in Ottawa's wastewater, which doesn't rely on COVID-19 testing, reached its highest point on record last week and has stabilized at a very high level.
The case count has surged to record levels in many places this winter — and as the Omicron variant's spread overwhelms and limits testing, the actual number of cases in Ottawa is many times higher.
On Thursday, OPH reported 332 more COVID-19 cases and the deaths of two people in their 60s who had COVID.
The rolling seven-day average of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases expressed per 100,000 residents is around 240, but limited testing capacity makes that metric less reliable.
Of the recent COVID-19 tests that are done outside long-term care homes, about 20 per cent were positive.
Ninety-one per cent of Ottawans age five and up have had at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, 84 per cent have had at least two and 57 per cent at least three.
OPH is expected to provide its next update on testing and vaccines on Friday.
Across the region
The wider region has about 300 COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 34 of them needing intensive care. Those numbers have been relatively stable and don't include Hastings Prince Edward Public Health, which has instituted a different way of reporting.
Quebec reported two more COVID-19 deaths in the Outaouais Thursday and 125 hospitalizations, 10 fewer than on Wednesday.
Wastewater coronavirus levels are dropping in the City of Kingston as of the last update Jan. 17.
