Twenty-nine new cases of COVID-19 are being reported for the Sudbury district on March 23, according to Public Health Sudbury and Districts, which also said there are now 285 active cases being actively monitored.
So, since the health unit began tracking COVID-19 cases just over one year ago, there have now been 1242 total COVID-19 cases confirmed locally.
PHSD also said 957 of those cases have been resolved locally.
With respect to where the new cases might have occurred, the PHSD daily update page reported that 28 cases were found to have occurred within the Greater Sudbury Area. One additional case was reported to have occurred in the Manitoulin district.
With respect to possible causes of the new cases, PHSD reported 16 new cases as close contact of a confirmed case. Ten new cases were associated with an outbreak and three new cases had no known epidemiological link.
PHSD also reports general demographics each day about the people who are becoming infected.
This shows that the majority of cases are persons in the 20 to 39 age category with 431 total cases (Ten new cases).
The next highest group number was 294 cases for the 40 to 59 age group (Seven new cases).
Next highest number was 288 cases for the 19 and under age group (Seven new cases).
Seniors in the 60 to 79 age group had only 152 cases total (Three new cases),
and people aged 80 and over were the lowest category with 68 cases (No increase) and six cases where the age was not specified (No increase).
The numbers above may not completely correspond with the daily case count because PHSD does not always report changes on the day they occur.
VARIANTS:
PHSD is also reporting there are now five cases of "confirmed" variants of the COVID-19 virus.
This is a slight increase of two new confirmed variants. There are, however, 313 cases that are "screened positive" for variants of concern, an increase of 22 over the number reported for Monday.
PHSD said additional time is required to genetically-sequence the virus in a positive sample and confirm it as a COVID-19 variant of concern.
At Sudbury's Health Sciences North, the number of COVID-19 cases has dropped by one. As reported at noon today, Tuesday March 23, there are 18 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the hospital. According to the HSN website, this included seven COVID patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
There are 12 additional admitted patients currently being "investigated" for COVID-19. There are none of those patients in the ICU at this time.
The hospital is also coping with three distinct outbreaks, one on the fourth floor, one on the sixth floor, both in the South Tower and one on the seventh floor - North Tower.
On the provincial COVID-19 register for Tuesday, March 23 the Ontario government daily website reported there were 1,546 new confirmed COVID-19 cases across the province. Also today, the province reported nine new deaths had occurred in the previous 24 hours.