The most recent published official data on COVID infections paints something of an unexpected picture of how the pandemic has been unfolding so far this year. While the recent holiday season saw more of a moderate rise in new infections as opposed to the sharp peaks of previous years, this far in January and February we have yet to experience the typical seasonal drop. Whereas the level of new infections had been running at half those of the same period in 2025, they now appear to be stabilizing at roughly the same level as a year ago. 

As illustrated in this week’s composite chart, national municipal wastewater COVID viral counts have been maintaining roughly the same average since late December. Ontario PCR test positivity rates for seniors and seniors and health-care workers (the only people who remain eligible for definitive testing) have stayed remarkably constant since early October. Ontario COVID hospitalization rates showed a very brief post-holiday peak but, again, are now relatively unchanged from those of mid-December. 

The more independent statisticians at COVID-19 Resources Canada have not updated their previous estimate of one in every 108 Ontarians being currently afflicted by a COVID infection and therefore infectious. 

While the above numbers show relatively little change, Public Health Canada’s biweekly report on circulating COVID variants paints an intriguing and perhaps concerning picture of the current state of the pandemic. What we’ve been seeing in recent weeks is an unusual proliferation of new Omicron strains stemming from recombinants, with no one family or strain even close to dominance. Currently, the XFG (blue shadings in the bar graph) and PQ (Red shadings) lineages are running neck-in-neck. The most prevalent among the 21 strains in the current Public Health Canada report, the five in the PQ lineage (including its NB.1.8.1 original) account for just under 44% of all new infections. The eight in the previously-dominant XFG lineage add up to just over 38%. Fastest growing is and currently most prevalent at 14.8% is PQ.2.8.1, the incidence of which is responsible for more than 36 times the number of new infections than 12 weeks ago. By contrast, the incidence of the original XFG strain (a near-identical 14.7%) is less than half of where it was in that same period. The second-fastest growing at 20% is XFZ (purple shading), a new recombinant which came from nowhere 12 weeks ago and will likely spawn a new family. 

It’s important to note that, while comparative advantages in infectiousness (including the ability to evade our existing immunities) are what drive the spread of all these new strains, there appears to remain relatively little variation in the seriousness of the resulting symptoms. That has been true since the appearance of the initial Omicron strain (B.1.1.529) in November 2021, which quickly out-competed the far more deadly, then-dominant Delta variant. What is glossed over by the politicians, who like to pretend that the pandemic is over, is the degree to which the advent of Omicron was a stroke of good luck for all of us. A single one of its 50 to 60 mutations rendered it more susceptible to human interferon, which is concentrated in the deep lungs. That made Omicron mostly a disease of our upper respiratory systems, with typically far less serious symptoms. However, one difference in the new strains appearing at an ever faster rate is that most of them stem from relatively recent recombination events (two different strains infecting the same human cell at the same time, causing them to randomly reshuffle their respective genes, analogous to sexual reproduction in mammals). There is no reason to believe that the beneficial mutation in a single Omicron gene couldn’t and won’t be reversed at some random time. If it happens to occur in a strain heading for dominance, our current complacency could and would prove tragic.