By now, we are quite used to seeing the daily numbers by province splashed across computer and television screens as the number of Covid-19 cases grows. As of 6pm on March 22nd, there were a total of 1430 confirmed cases in Canada. If we plot those ranked by province as in Figure 1 below, we see that the total number of cases is largest in Ontario at 425, followed by British Columbia at 424. However, what is interesting is that this does not convey the full impact of severity across provinces because this is not adjusted for population. Ontario, for example has approximately two and a half times the population of British Columbia which means on a per capita basis, British Columbia has more cases.
Figure 2 provides these same numbers in terms of cases per 100,000 population. It becomes quite apparent when the provinces are ranked in terms of cases per 100,00 population, that western Canada - particularly British Columbia and Alberta are the hardest hit in terms of cases at 8.3 and 5.9 cases per 100,000 of population. They are then followed by Ontario and Nova Scotia at 2.9 cases per 100,000 each. Saskatchewan clocks in next at 2.8, Quebec at 2.6, the Northwest Territories at 2.2, PEI at 1.9 and New Brunswick at 1.2. The remaining provinces and territories currently have less than 1 per 100,000 of population.
That is all for now.
