Welcome to
Ron’s COVID-19 Page
What’s new on this site
See our new Variants page, which is intended as a primer to promote understanding of the dizzying array of new variants which the pandemic is creating at an accelerating rate. The other charts on this site have been significantly pared down to those for which credible and reasonably timely pandemic-related statistics are still available. We have reluctantly dropped all international comparisons because the quality and availability of the data are now simply too poor.
Who We Are
This site shares the results of an ongoing personal project to better understand why the pandemic has 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 carnage of the unnecessary third wave which is now upon us. 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
April 21 to 27
Official statistics published this past week confirm a continuation of the modest uptick in new COVID infections which we reported after the seasonal surge starting last August finally ran its course.
For Ontario, that continuation is apparent in our weekly composite chart, both in the moderate rise in estimated municipal wastewater PCR viral counts and in slightly higher positivity rates among those still eligible for PCR testing. Sadly, we can no longer report on the important Canada-wide pandemic severity indicators of COVID hospitalization rates and ICU bed occupancy. Public Health Canada has discontinued that reporting because the number of provinces which continue to provide them with reliable data has diminished to the point that it is now no longer possible to reliably discern national trends.
The one trend that Canadians can still count on is governments choosing to provide as little factual information as they can get away with. It appears that the only lesson that our political class has learned from the now-nearly-60,000 Canadians who lost their lives in the pandemic is that public health has become politically fraught and must therefore be ignored to the extent possible. Never before in Canadian history has there been essentially no accountability for avoidable mass deaths or a total lack of the independent assessment necessary to prepare for doing better next time. And there will most definitely be a next time, either from the emergence of a more virulent COVID variant or some other novel virus capable of sparking the next pandemic.
The more independent COVID-19 Resources Canada Hazard Index continues to estimate one in 74 Ontarians being currently COVID-infected and hence infectious.
The most recent US Centers for Disease Control estimates of circulating COVID variants summarized in this week’s composite charts are all displayed in shades of blue, denoting JN.1 derivatives. The original JN.1 strain has dropped from 67% down to only 22% over the past eight weeks. Its KP.2 derivative now dominates, having soared from 1% to 25% in that same period. While still only accounting for less than 8% of new infections, KP.1.1’s market share mushroomed by 3,650% over that period. Overall, what we are seeing is an unusually rapid diversification within the JN.1 variant family, with ever-newer mutations showing their increased ability to evade existing human “herd immunity” against infection by outcompeting their predecessors. All that we can hope for is that none of the coming mutations convey increased virulence.