Five of six COVID deaths reported on Friday occurred at the same residential aged care facility in May.
One woman in her 70s died in the latest reporting period, while the other deaths - a woman in her 70s, a man in his 70s, and three women in their 90s - all occurred at Canberra Aged Care in Lyneham.
At a Friday press conference, ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said the delay in reporting the five deaths were "primarily due to a processing delay within the ACT Health Directorate".
"Those deaths were reported by the residential aged care facility in early June and there was unfortunately human error within the system in ACT Health Directorate that those weren't processed through to the notification process until yesterday and cleared for reporting today," she said.
"We've been very well aware of the outbreak at that facility, you'll have seen through the epidemiological reports that a ... large number of aged care facilities in the ACT have reported outbreaks over the last few months.
"The ACT Health Directorate team have been working very closely with all of those, but with this particular aged care facility, they did work very closely through their outbreak, it was a significant outbreak at that facility."
Case numbers hit a landmark 1015 in the 24 hours until 8pm on Wednesday. The last time daily cases surpassed 1000 was on May 18 when 1098 were recorded. On Friday, there were 962 new COVID-19 infections, bringing the active total to 2456.
High hospitalisations have been a significant issue for Canberra. On Thursday morning, Ms Stephen-Smith described the hospitals as being in "bed block" due to demand from COVID and other health issues.
"It's largely about the fact that there is such a high level of demand on our hospital services at the moment that we have essentially bed block - a lot of very full wards and we're really working very hard to ensure that people are discharged in a timely way," she said on ABC Radio Canberra.
On Friday there were 87 people hospitalised with the virus, two of whom are in intensive care and one requiring ventilation.
The latest weekly epidemiology overview was released on Friday, reporting on the period from Monday, June 6 to Sunday, June 12.
Of all the COVID positive cases recorded since the start of the pandemic, 79 per cent have been detected in the time period since December 2021, when the Omicron variant was first identified in the ACT.
For the week ending June 12, 5014 cases were reported in the ACT compared to 4959 cases the week before, an increase of 55 COVID cases. Of the cases reported in the week ending June 12, 54 per cent were from positive PCR tests and 46 per cent were from positive RATs.
Twenty-five to 39-year-olds made up almost 29 per cent of case numbers last week. The next age group with the highest percentage of cases was 40 to 49-year-olds making up 17 per cent of the total cases.
The previous week's hospital admissions were down at 14 individuals compared to the 29 in the week ending June 5.
In the week ending June 5, 18 disability support providers were affected by COVID-19 exposures, while an additional 11 service providers reported exposures to ACT Health in the week ending June 12.
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