It has been a while since I have plotted the COVID-19 daily
case counts for both Ontario and the Thunder Bay District but with the
gradually mounting numbers of recent days, now is as good a time as any to look
back at the big picture for both the province and our region. The evidence
suggests that for the time being matters are well in hand likely the result of
Ontario’s high double vaccination rates as well as the gradual easing of restrictions
with the maintenance of mask wearing in public indoor spaces.
Figure 1 plots Ontario’s daily cases since the start of the
pandemic and there have indeed been four waves with the second and third waves
the most severe. Our fourth wave is underway, but it is subdued relative to the
second and third waves. Yet this fourth
wave seems to have two components based on Figure 1 – a first upswing that
appears to have peaked about mid-September and followed by a short decline and
then a second upswing that does seem to coincide with the broader reopening of
Ontario in mid-October. Figure 2 does a
better job of separating out these two components of the fourth wave with the
current upswing starting at about day 640 which corresponds to the last week of October – several days before Halloween.
Similar charts are presented for Thunder Bay District in
Figures 3 and 4. Figure 3 reveals that
over the course of nearly two years, Thunder Bay only had one very long wave that
started circa Day 250 (around the first week of October 2020) and then rose
over the course of the next four months to peak during the first week of March 2021
before starting a gradual decline to the current daily levels. However, Thunder Day district also appears to
be in the process of seeing a gradual upswing as Figure 4 illustrates with numbers
over the last few weeks distinctly higher than they were in August. Still, over the course of the long haul, Ontario has had four distinct waves while Thunder Bay's relative isolation in the end resulted in only one.
So, going into the Christmas season and the winter, the
current trends show there is likely to be a continued increase in cases though
we should hopefully be spared the surges of previous waves provided vaccine provided
immunity does not wane, school children begin to be vaccinated in large numbers,
and booster shots make their way into the older population in a timely manner. Many recent cases are in the school age
population and given that COVID-19 is generally not very severe in the very young,
that has also spared hospital ICU capacity.
So, for the time being this is what the pandemic looks like – ever present
and persistent- but likely to stay in abeyance provided new and more lethal
variants do not emerge.
