Note: Data in the charts last updated on June 5 at 9 a.m. EDT.
While charts can show the disparity in the COVID-19 crisis across Canada, sometimes it helps to focus on one particular period, such as the past week. In the seven days that ended on Wednesday, the nation reported a six per cent increase to the cumulative total of COVID-19 cases—5,700 new cases. This means Canada added an average of 812 cases each day in the past week.
Here is the provincial breakdown for the number of COVID-19 cases in the past week:
- British Columbia: 3% increase (average 11 cases/day)
- Alberta: 2% increase (22 cases/day)
- Saskatchewan: 2% increase (1.4 cases/day)
- Manitoba: 2% increase (0.9 cases/day)
- Ontario: 10% increase (382 cases/day)
- Quebec: 6% increase (392 cases/day)
- New Brunswick: 10% increase (1.7 cases/day)
- Nova Scotia: 0.5% increase (0.7 cases/day)
- No cases in P.E.I., N.L., Yukon, N.W.T. or Nunavut
New Brunswick’s caseload grew from 123 to 135 as it worked hard to snuff out an outbreak in Campbellton, caused by a medical worker returning from a trip to Quebec and going to work without self-isolating. The province’s one week increase of 10 per cent is the same as that of Ontario, which recorded an average of 382 new cases each day. While most other provinces have been able to wrestle their COVID-19 outbreaks down to a manageable size, Ontario still has a stubbornly high number of new cases. Sure, the numbers are decreasing—on May 19, it recorded 502 cases—but they aren’t going down fast enough to keep up with the rest of the nation.
Those still-high daily numbers mean the provincial government is in a bind. Ontario wants to further relax restrictions, but Premier Doug Ford promised that it first needed a “consistent two-to-four-week decrease in the number of new daily COVID-19 cases.” That hasn’t happened, especially in the COVID-19 epicentre of the Greater Toronto Area.
So now, Ford and his government are considering a regional approach: move forward with reopening plans, but only for non-GTA regions. Or Ontario can relax its guidelines for reopening, and hope that the municipal governments and medical systems in the GTA can handle any additional increases in cases.
(Patricia Treble and Lauren Cattermole)
That may be a real gamble. In a May 29 letter to Toronto’s Board of Health, the city’s medical officer of health warned that not only was the provincial information system 15 years old and straining under the COVID-19 volume of work, but that “laboratories’ reports are received all together in one large fax, sometimes containing hundreds of individual lab results, which must be taken apart for further processing. Duplicate reports, sometimes many for a single case and received over several days, are common.” As well, “many laboratory reports lack telephone numbers, leading to delays in making contact with the case,” Dr. Eileen de Villa wrote. The result is significant delays and obstacles to contact tracing, which is vital to containing the spread of any virus.
(Patricia Treble and Lauren Cattermole)
Why use logarithmic charts: COVID-19 is increasing at an exponential pace, which can overwhelm normal linear charts. In contrast, overall trends are apparent when compared using a logarithmic chart. To explain his popular COVID-19 logarithmic charts on the Financial Times website, data expert John Burn-Murdoch has this handy explanation: the space between 100 and 1,000 is the same as the space between 1,000 and 10,000, because exponential increases means it takes the same amount of time to go between those two milestones. That allows readers to easily see if jurisdictions are following the same path or doing better or worse.