Welcome to
Ron’s COVID-19 Page
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
August 9 to 15
There is little new on the COVID front to report this week. Many of the publicly-available official agencies only report every other week, and this was one of the off-weeks.
The Canada-wide municipal wastewater COVID testing curve continues to show a very slight upward trend in circulating COVID virus counts. Likewise Ontario PCR COVID testing results, with positivity rates approaching but remaining below 1%. COVID hospitalization and ICU bed occupancy rates have risen slightly above their summer troughs, but remain at historically-low levels.
The more independent health statisticians at COVID-19 Resources Canada also didn’t report this past week. Their most recent Ontario estimate was one person in every 280 being currently infected and therefore infectious.
While Public Health Canada was also not reporting on the respective “market shares” of currently-circulating COVID variants, I realized that I had missed the fact that the PQ-labelled variants are in fact part of the NB.1.8.1 family of Omicron variants. That changes the picture which I had painted last week. The newer XFG family remains the nearest to being dominant, accounting for just under 38% of all new Canadian COVID infections. However, it is running almost neck-to-neck with the second-place NB.1.8.1 family, which has a more-than-34% share. The real news is the “other” category of unspecified variants which has been rapidly rising in the past months, having now reached nearly 26%. That suggests that a new candidate for dominance is likely to manifest sometime in the next few weeks, one which may have different characteristics than those for which the current vaccines have been optimized.