As expected, the sharp and unusually-deep decline in new COVID infections appears to have reached its seasonal low, albeit the lowest thus far in the pandemic.
The Canada-wide municipal wastewater COVID testing curve shows that the seasonal drop in viral counts began in late February with a very sharp decline which slowed through April, briefly jumping at the end of that month but then resuming its declining curve through most of May and now flattening to its lowest level of the entire pandemic.
Ontario’s PCR COVID testing results have shown similarly-falling positivity rates which also reached their lowest-ever values in last-week’s report. Likewise Ontario COVID hospitalization and ICU bed occupancy rates. Unfortunately, the data repository from the online Ontario Respiratory Virus Tool from which I draw the data for those two graphs in our composite chart appears to be down, which means that I won’t be able to update them until next week.
Also, the more independent health statisticians at COVID-19 Resources Canada have not updated their estimate of one in every 367 people being infected and therefore infectious, the lowest-ever value for that indicator.
Public Health Canada’s biweekly report on currently-circulating COVID variants shows an unexpected development. In their last report of two weeks ago, the older XFG family of variant strains appeared to have reclaimed its dominance over the newer PQ family, in part thanks to a huge surge by the previously declining XFG.6 strain. The latter strain is back down to zero and the PQ family is again dominant, accounting for 47% of all new Canadian infections compared to the XFG family’s 40%. I suspect that this anomaly reflects some sort of statistical error.