Welcome to
Ron’s COVID-19 Page
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
February 8 to 14
This has been another of our “off” weeks due to many of the official sources from which I draw the pandemic-related data behind our graphs and analysis publishing only biweekly. The graph of the various strains of COVID currently circulating in Canada is therefore unchanged, and won’t be updated until next week.
This week’s composite chart suggests that the recent seasonal surge in new COVID infections may not have been receding as quickly as appeared to be the case at the time of last week’s update. As you can see from the composite chart, Ontario COVID PCR test positivity rates among seniors and health-care workers have stabilized at roughly their level of late December. Likewise, Ontario COVID hospitalization and ICU bed occupancy rates. Not shown in this version of the composite chart, national municipal wastewater COVID viral counts have actually been moderately rising since November.
One interesting update which I included in this week’s composite chart is that of the more independent statisticians at COVID-19 Resources Canada. Most official sources are based on ever-sparser information still being tracked. The most egregious of those omissions was the result of a number of provinces choosing to stop publishing data on COVID death rates. The federal Public Health agency then followed suit, perhaps because they were longer receiving the data required to tally national totals. As a result, nobody knows their risk of dying from a COVID infection.
The percentages shown in the chart are the statisticians’ estimate of “excess mortality”; that is, the percent of total deaths which exceed what could be expected from all other known causes and may therefore be attributed to severe COVID infections. Those numbers were always significantly higher than recorded COVID deaths because actual deaths often result from a mix of immediate causes and prior weaknesses, rendering attribution to COVID a judgement call. Since death rates were especially political at the height of the pandemic, some provinces appear to have put pressure or restrictions on medical examiners to err on the side of other causes.
The current Canada-wide percentage of 13.1 would represent up to 600 excess deaths per week across Canada. Disturbingly, that suggests that actual deaths involving COVID infections may still be in the tens of thousands.