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
October 26 to November 1
This week’s composite chart is suggestive of a very similar pattern to last year’s monthly COVID statistics, with new infections rapidly increasing in September following the seasonal summer lows, then falling back somewhat in October and November before climbing higher to an annual peak during the Christmas holiday season. The difference is that this year’s numbers have been 50-to-60% lower than those of the same time last year. As you can see from this week’s composite chart, Ontario COVID PCR test positivity rates have plateaued after the recent drop, as have hospitalizations and ICU bed occupancy.
For whatever reason, the risk estimates by the more independent statisticians at COVID-19 Resources Canada are somewhat higher than those of the past two weeks, both nationally and for Ontario. Yet, their estimate one in 139 Ontarians being currently infected and therefore infectious represents an improvement over the previous one in 108.
The latest Public Health Canada data on currently circulating COVID variants again demonstrate the utter dominance of the rapidly-diversifying XFG family of recombinant variants. Nine of the twelve most common strains which infected Canadians last week were XFG and its derivatives, accounting for 70% of all new infections. The most prevalent is XFG.3 but it has only a miniscule lead over the original XFG. Based on the actual number of new infections, XFG’s symptom severity appears to be less than that of previous Omicron-derived variants.