Welcome to
Ron’s COVID-19 Page
What’s new on this site
The COVID municipal wastewater PCR testing results for each province, which are updated weekly on our Canada page, have all been revised to accommodate a restructuring of the Canada Public Health Infobase from which we draw the data.
Who We Are
This site shares the results of an ongoing personal project to better understand why the pandemic developed in such a damaging way in Canada, what other jurisdictions have done to better protect their citizens from those impacts and what we can collectively do to reduce the possible carnage from futures wave caused by this rapidly-evolving virus. It neither represents nor receives funding from any other person or organization. The sole purpose is to provide the latest and most meaningful data and insights related to the pandemic and its impact on our society in a readily accessible format. You will find many meaningful charts and analyses which provide context for the statistics summarized in the above table by clicking on the Global, Canada, Ontario and Kingston menus. For more details, see the About page.
Weekly Pandemic Update
August 31 to September 6
The later-than-usual seasonal rise in new COVID infections is continuing. Ontario PCR test positivity rates, while still running at only about a third of last year’s numbers, have climbed sharply since early August 2024. As you can see in this week’s composite chart, COVID hospitalizations are also rising, albeit still less sharply, while the ICU admissions rate has barely budged.
Canada-wide, the more independent statisticians at COVID-19 Resources Canada have raised their pandemic severity index back to “high”, with Ontario still among the least severe provinces and both Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland are rated at “very high”. Their most recent estimate of one in every 74 Ontarians being currently infected and therefore infectious is considerable higher than the previous one-in-129.
With respect to currently-circulating COVID variants, Public Health Canada’s latest estimate is that the XFG recombinant strain is now utterly dominant, accounting for almost 82% of all new infections. That number includes two of its even more recent offspring: XFG.2 at 5.9% and XFG.3 at 26.5%. Neither of the latter two subvariants appear to be as successful as the original XFG, which continues to increase its percentage while they remain mostly stagnant.