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.