Welcome to
Ron’s COVID-19 Page
What’s new on this site
The COVID municipal wastewater PCR testing results for each province which are updated weekly on our Canada page have all been revised to accomodate a restructuring of the Canada Public Health Infobase from which we draw the data. Note as well that, while Canadian COVID death rates have long been underreported, whole provinces which together amount to 25% of Canada’s population have stopped reporting them. That implies that Canada is becoming a country whose official statistics will be viewed as increasingly unreliable on the world stage.
Who We Are
This site shares the results of an ongoing personal project to better understand why the pandemic has developed in such a damaging way in Canada, what other jurisdictions have done to better protect their citizens from those impacts and what we can collectively do to reduce the carnage of the unnecessary third wave which is now upon us. It neither represents nor receives funding from any other person or organization. The sole purpose is to provide the latest and most meaningful data and insights related to the pandemic and its impact on our society in a readily accessible format. You will find many meaningful charts and analyses which provide context for the statistics summarized in the above table by clicking on the Global, Canada, Ontario and Kingston menus. For more details, see the About page.
Weekly Pandemic Update
February 2 to 8

The most recent week’s worth of official COVID-related data is relatively unchanged from the previous week’
As you can see from this week’s composite chart, Ontario’s PCR COVID test positivity rate continued to decline from its winter holiday peak and is new roughly similar to last year at this time. New COVID-related hospitalizations have followed suit and ICU bed occupancy somewhat less so.
On the other hand, the more independent statisticians behind the Canadian COVID-19 forecast predict some worsening in the number of Canadians likely to be infected and hence infectious over the next couple of weeks, with Ontario somewhat worse than the national average and Quebec the current worst. Their most recent estimate is that one in every 36 Ontarians is currently infected, which suggests caution with respect to shopping in crowded supermarkets and the like without an N95 mask.
Turning to currently-circulating COVID variants, the latest US Centers for Disease Control estimates show unusually little change in recent weeks. The US “market share” of the still-dominant recombinant XEC strain has been essentially static at 40% of all new COVID infections. The main change is in the number 2 position, now occupied by JN.1 derivative LP.8.1, the incidence of which has tripled to 20% over the past 6 weeks. The only other rapidly-rising contender is the latest recombinant, XEC.4, which has quadrupled to 4% in that same period.