Not much can be said about how COVID infection rates have been affected by the more intense person-to-person contacts inherent in the holiday season because Ontario chose not to publish any of the relevant official statistics. As a result, the two graphs included in this week’s composite chart cover only the period ending December 14.
The more independent Canadian COVID-19 Hazard index lends some hope that this year’s holiday surge may be on the mild side, but their accuracy will inescapably have been impacted by the gap in official data. Their estimates suggest that the rate of new infections had been declining across most of Canada, but rising in Ontario to third-highest in the country. Nonetheless, their estimate of the number of Ontarians infected and hence infectious is down to one in seventy.
Public Health Canada did deliver its weekly report on the relative incidence of the currently-circulating COVID variants. The XEC recombinant continues to increase its dominance to nearly 40% of all new infections, with the previously-dominant KP3.1.1 having dropped to 26%.