Again, there is relatively little to report with respect to the spread of COVID this past week, with this year’s seasonal rise in the rate of new cases continuing its now-modest rise, but still not having reached last year’s November peak. 

My current composite chart is not especially informative, largely because I still haven’t found a useful replacement for the Canada wastewater COVID testing results graph which should in a more rational world constitute the best leading indicator for how the pandemic is trending. Unfortunately, it can now be quite misleading thanks to the Ford government as a result of the near-absence of Ontario data. The next most-current indicator is the PCR positivity rate among the small minority of Ontarians who still quality for accurate testing. 

The non-governmental COVID-19 Resources Canada has not updated its one-in-every-43 estimate of the number of infected and hence infectious Ontarians in more than a month. That’s not surprising, as I would imagine that their statisticians have been struggling to find meaningful COVID-related data due to our federal and provincial governments continuously cutting back on their reporting of critical public-health data. 

The most recent US Centers for Disease Control report on the spread of COVID variants confirms that the currently-dominant KP3.1.1 has peaked and will now likely lose “market share” to its more-infectious cousin strains. Its most likely successor remains the new recombinant XEC strain which is highlighted in yellow. XEC is now in second place in both the US and Canada, having grown by 750% over the past eight weeks according to the US data. All indications are that this season’s booster shot, which is now available from Ontario pharmacies, will be an effective preventative given that it was formulated against one of the cousin strains to the two which combined to create XEC.