A New Plateau for Ontario?

Well, as of tomorrow, pretty much all of Ontario moves into Stage 2 of the post-COVID lockdown reopening and this has been fueled by the continued decline in daily cases in Ontario.  As the accompany figure below shows, after the mid May plateau around 400 cases, decline appears to have resumed and yesterday June 22nd was one of the lowest case days since late March coming at 161 new cases. However, I would venture that the decline is about to slow again again and we are about to have a second plateau at around 200 cases per day.  Indeed, today's numbers show a rebound to 216 and if you look carefully at the LOWESS curve, it has slightly flattened out about the same way as I noted before the last plateau in a post in mid-May.



If this turns out to be the case, then Ontario's daily COVID profile will soon come to resemble a series of downward steps rather than a steady decline. If we plateaued at 400 in mid May and then at half the numbers in mid to late June, by the end of July if we half yet again we will still be getting 100 cases daily. Ideally, the goal is to enter a "plateau"  where the daily case growth is actually 0, but that is unlikely given that so many people have really already relaxed their attitudes.  Baring zero new cases as a goal,  Ontario needs to see daily case growth of 0.1 percent or lower by the end of July. If that were the case today and the growth rate of cases was 1/10 of one percent, then there would be only about 34 new cases today.  We have a ways to go.