Forty-one new cases of COVID-19 are being reported for the Sudbury district on March 24, according to Public Health Sudbury and Districts, which also said there are now 316 active cases being monitored.
This is the highest number of active cases locally since the case tracking began.
Also, since the health unit began tracking COVID-19 cases just over one year ago, there have now been 1,283 total COVID-19 cases confirmed locally.
PHSD also said 967 of those cases have been resolved locally.
With respect to where the new cases might have occurred, the PHSD daily update page reported that 37 cases were found to have occurred within the Greater Sudbury Area. Four additional cases were reported to have occurred in the wider Sudbury district.
With respect to possible causes of the new cases, PHSD reported 23 new cases were described as close contact of a confirmed case. Seven new cases were associated with an outbreak, one case was travel-related, six new cases had no known epidemiological link and four additional cases are listed as under investigation.
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 446 total cases (15 new cases).
The next highest group number was 307 cases for the 40 to 59 age group (13 new cases).
Next highest number was 295 cases for the 19 and under age group (Seven new cases).
Seniors in the 60 to 79 age group had only 155 cases total (Three new cases),
and people aged 80 and over were the lowest category with 69 cases (One increase) and seven cases where the age was not specified (One 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 the same number reported yesterday. There are, however, 323 cases that are "screened positive" for variants of concern, an increase of 10 over the number reported for Tuesday.
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 increased by one. As reported by HSN at noon today, Tuesday March 24, there are 19 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the hospital. According to the HSN website, this included eight COVID patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
There are 17 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. The third outbreak is on the seventh floor - North Tower.
On the provincial COVID-19 register today, the Ontario government daily website reported there were 1571 new confirmed COVID-19 cases across the province. Also today, the province reported 10 new deaths had occurred in the previous 24 hours.