There wasn’t much change in COVID statistics over the past week. While the rate of new COVID infections seemed in recent weeks to have flattened out at about half of last year’s seasonal low, Ontario’s PCR test positivity rate, it’s COVID hospitalizations and ICU bed occupancy all appear to have declined slightly further.
The more independent Canadian COVID-19 Resource Canada COVID hazard index, which is based on excess-mortality calculations, shows essentially no change since their projections from last week. That includes their estimate of one in 138 Ontarians being currently infected and hence infectious.
There is also little to report on the respective “market shares” of the currently circulating COVID variants. I would normally be reporting on the biweekly US data from the Centers for Disease Control because yesterday was their scheduled reporting day. However, they failed to do so, possibly because, tragically, that hugely valuable institution appears to be in the process of being trashed by the Trump administration. The Canadian data from Public Health Canada indicates that the LP.8.1.1 variant remains the nearest to dominance with 39% of all new cases, a number which has hardly changed in the past week. The puzzling “other” category has risen minutely to 15.3%. Since that data doesn’t differentiate the new XFC recombinant variant which, as of two weeks ago, has soared to second place in the US, I suspect that it may be a significant component of the “other” and had been hoping to see whether that rate of grown had continued in the US.