The official COVID-related statistics released this past week tend to confirm my hypothesis that the rate of new COVID infections has already passed its seasonal low and is again rising at levels considerably higher than last year at this time.
The clearest indicator among those displayed in our weekly composite chart is Public Health Ontario’s two-week estimate for COVID viral counts in municipal wastewater PCR test results, which has jumped sharply higher since last week at this time. Ontario-wide, positive human PCR positive test results continued their moderate rise of the past several weeks and Ontario COVID-related hospital admissions and ICU occupancy, which had previously remained steady, are now mirroring that rise. As you can see from the charts on our Kingston page, COVID-related hospitalizations in Kingston reported a very sharp rise, to the highest weekly number in more than a year.
While the two-week estimate by the more independent COVID-19 Resources Canada statisticians of the number of currently-infected Ontarians won’t be updated until next week, the above official statistics suggest that it was correct in having raised its estimate from one in every 86 people being currently infected to one in 76. That number is likely to worsen in coming weeks.
We alternate the latest US Centers for Disease data on circulating COVID variants with those of Public Heath Canada because the former frequently serves as a good preview of what we can expect here. The degree to which the prevalence of the nine most common variants has changed over the past two weeks clearly underlines the unprecedented speed of viral evolution within the currently-utterly-dominant JN.1 family of Omicron variants. The KP.3 strain, which has been the “market leader” for less than two months, is already decline, now accounting for less than a third of new US infections. The prevalence of it’s likely successor, KP.3.1.1, soared by a factor of 20 over the past 8 weeks, from less 1% to nearly 18%.