Once again, there was relatively little change in reported Canadian COVID statistics over the past week. That absence of change is itself notable in that the next seasonal rise in new COVID infections has yet to definitively manifest. In 2024 and earlier years, the rate of new cases began to significantly rise in the May to June timeframe. While this week’s composite chart shows what may be the beginnings of an uptick, it is as yet far from definitive. The rates of COVID hospitalizations and ICU admissions remain essentially flat, which is expected since those almost always lag positive test results by one or more weeks.
As COVID-19 Resources Canada has not updated its severity estimates for well over a month, we will stop referencing them until and unless that changes. I regard that as a pity given that their statisticians were the only ones estimating the proportion of people with current COVID infections, a statistic which was very useful in deciding what if any precautions one should take while frequenting indoor public spaces.
From here on, our weekly reports on circulating COVID variants will be mostly Canada-focussed since the Trump-decimated US Centers for Disease Control stopped reporting a month ago with no explanation. But the biweekly reporting from Public Health Canada is more than sufficiently interesting. We have a newly-dominant variant, XFG, which accounts for 32% of all new Canadian cases. More significantly, that new recombinant strain is already spawning a family of closely-related variants, including XFG.2 at 6% and XFG.3 at 27%. Together, they represent almost two-thirds of the Canadian market. Recent history suggests that they may crowd out most competing strains while continuing to diversity, becoming the basis for the next stage of this pandemic’s evolution. Fortunately for us, they don’t appear to be significantly more infectious than their predecessors.