Ontario is reporting a dip in new cases of COVID-19 after a slight uptick in new infections on Wednesday but the province says today’s numbers exclude recent data from Toronto Public Health.

Provincial health officials said 78 new cases of the virus were confirmed today, down from the 95 reported one day prior.

The province said information from the Toronto Public Health CORES system was not available today, which has resulted in an “underestimation of the daily case count.”

It should be noted that if Toronto’s 19 new cases were subtracted from Wednesday’s total, only 76 new cases of the virus would have been reported in Ontario yesterday. That means that outside of Toronto, the province actually registered a slight increase in cases Thursday compared to Wednesday.

Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams said Toronto has been averaging about 19 to 20 new cases per day in recent weeks.

“I would estimate that… maybe would have to add some numbers to the 78. So we may be closer to our 95 anyways,” he said during a news conference on Thursday afternoon. 

“Most of our cases, even though they are documented in our thing today, are in Toronto, Peel, Ottawa, and still some in the Windsor-Essex area.”

The highest number of new cases was reported today in Peel Region, where 19 more infections were confirmed.

Ottawa recorded 10 new cases of the virus today and nine new cases were reported in Windsor-Essex.

Nearly 30,000 tests were processed over the past 24 hours.

Williams noted Ontario’s positivity rate has dropped down to between 0.4 and 0.6 per cent from close to 1 per cent just a few weeks ago.

“It gives us affirmation that we are not missing too much in that regard,” he said. “So we still have that low number and we still are moving in the right direction.”

Hospitalizations continue to decline while the number of patients in intensive care and on ventilators has remained stable.

“With 99 more resolved, the number of active cases in the province continues to decline,” Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott said in a tweet published on Thursday morning.

Forty-nine of today’s 78 reported cases, or about 60 per cent, were in patients ages 40 and under.

No new virus-related deaths were reported in the province today.

Excluding new data from Toronto Public Health, the province says there are now 40,367 lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ontario, including 2,787 deaths and 36,689 recoveries.

Only 891 cases are still considered to be active in the province.

New cases in the GTA:

Toronto: *data not available

Peel Region: 19

Halton Region: 2

Durham Region: 3

York Region: 0