Canada's daily COVID-19 cases surpass 8,000

A medical worker checks information outside a COVID-19 testing bus in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on April 13, 2021. Over the past week, there has been an increase of 33 percent in daily case counts with an average of almost 8,100 new cases reported per day, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada on Tuesday. (Photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua)

OTTAWA, April 13 (Xinhua) -- Over the past week, there has been an increase of 33 percent in daily case counts with an average of almost 8,100 new cases reported per day, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada on Tuesday.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to create stress and anxiety for many Canadians, said Theresa Tam, Canada's chief public health officer, in a statement on Tuesday.

Tam said that over the past week, the number of people experiencing severe and critical illness continued to rise. On average over 3,000 people with COVID-19 were being treated in hospitals each day, which represented a 29 percent increase over the previous week.

This included almost 970 people being treated in intensive care units, which was 24 percent higher than the week before.

There are almost 36,000 variants of concern cases reported to date across Canada, with the B.1.1.7 variant accounting for about 96 percent of these.

Specifically there are 34,404 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant, 1,222 cases of the P.1 variant, and 365 cases of the B.1.351 variant.

"These trends are discouraging, but they reinforce why we must strengthen precautions to bring this variant of concern-driven resurgence under control quickly," Tam said.

Canada has reported a cumulative number of 1,078,562 COVID-19 cases as of Tuesday evening, including 23,392 deaths, according to CTV.