The strong upward trend in COVID-19 continues in Quebec, as the province reports 902 new cases and five additional deaths on Thursday, but records a slight drop in hospitalizations. Meanwhile, vaccination is on the rise again, in the wake of the start of the campaign among 5-11 year olds.
These 902 new cases bring the daily average calculated over seven days to 777. The trend is thus upwards by 20% over a week. As for them, the five deaths bring to three the daily average, a trend which is up slightly over a week.
In the health network, however, there has been a slight decrease in hospitalization, ie 20 new admissions and 21 discharges. Currently, 210 patients remain hospitalized in connection with COVID-19, including 45 in intensive care, a drop of one case in 24 hours there too.
As for vaccination, we clearly see that the effect of the launch of the campaign among 5-11 year olds is being felt, while more than 16,200 additional doses were administered during the day of Wednesday in Quebec, to which In addition, nearly 300 vaccines given before November 24 that had not been counted.
This is significantly more than the average for the last few weeks; the rate of administration of the number of doses was slow, reaching only a few thousand per day. However, we are still far from the pace of last spring, when more than 100,000 doses were administered per day.
As of Thursday morning, no less than 163,000 appointments had been made through the Clic Santé platform for children aged 5 to 11, or more than 25% of this age category. The vaccination campaign will be deployed in schools from next week.
Earlier on Tuesday, Quebec performed 32,265 screening tests, a figure slightly higher than the weekly average in this regard.
It all comes as a new variant of COVID-19, potentially very contagious and with multiple mutations, has been detected in South Africa, which is seeing signs of a new wave of pandemic, scientists announced Thursday. This variant, called B.1.1529, has an “extremely high” number of mutations and “we can see that it has a potential for very rapid spread,” virologist Tulio de Oliveira told a press conference. by the National Ministry of Health.
So far, 22 cases have been reported, mostly affecting young people, according to the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD). Cases have also been reported in neighboring Botswana and Hong Kong, in a person returning from a trip to South Africa.
With Pierre-André Normandin