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 accommodate a restructuring of the Canada Public Health Infobase from which we draw the data.
Who We Are
This site shares the results of an ongoing personal project to better understand why the pandemic 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 possible carnage from futures wave caused by this rapidly-evolving virus. 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
June 1 to 7
As a result of the current paucity of reporting by governments on COVID statistics, the only possibly significant change over the past week has been an initial sign that the seasonal low in new infections may be endings. Most respiratory viruses are seasonal, and it makes sense that new infections surge in September when back-to-school and back-to-work provide a lot more indoor opportunities for transmission. For whatever reason, COVID appears to also have a summer surge. In fact, as you can see in the Ontario graph contained in our composite chart, for Ontario that rise began in March of last year and continued through September. While one week’s data is insufficient to draw any firm conclusions, this year’s surge was definitely later and may have just started. We’ll be better positioned to draw conclusions next week.
For the second week in a row, the more independent Canadian COVID-19 Resource Canada COVID hazard index hasn’t been updated. Their last estimate was one in every 136 Ontarians being infected and hence infectious at that time.
Since both Public Health Canada and the US Centers for Disease Control have adopted the same two-week cycle for reporting on the “market shares” of the currently-circulating COVID variants, it’s impossible to provide you with an update this week. As reporting here in last Saturday’s blog, the previously-dominant LP.8.1.1 was utterly upstaged by the new NB.1.8.1 strain, the latter now clearly dominant in Canada, account for 70% of all new COVID infections. At this point in the pandemic, nearly everyone has some COVID immunity due to vaccination, prior infection of both. That rapid switch would not possible without NB.1.8.1 being considerably more adept than its predecessors at evading existing immunity. Its dominance therefore suggests that infection rates but likely not symptom severity could increase beyond simple seasonality.