The COVID-19 pandemic

[jeffster]

On the regional website where they report all the covid information they have a section related to variants and mutations. So the region reports the variants including the delta variant of which we have 14 cases of but the provincal government isn't reporting delta cases for whatever reason and Tom is getting his data for variants from the provincal data which is why there is no delta cases on his daily report.

All the quantitative variant reporting is pretty useless. The Alpha/Beta/Gamma processing is slow, and half the results are from who-knows-how-long ago, so about all we can tell is that Alpha is still the most common, and there are a lot of those.

As I recall, testing for Delta requires a full RNA analysis so it is substantially slower yet. Don't know why the province doesn't publish those at all.

Overall, we know Delta is impacting the case rates, but at least from my point of view it's not critical to know the percentage of Delta cases. The total cases (and hospitalization etc) tell the tale anyway, either we are getting this thing under control or not, regardless of the current set of variants.

I think we will get things under control, eventually. We just may end up lagging the province by a month or 2. As I said, I heard through the grapevine no Stage 2 for us until late July or August. The region needs to pull up its bootstraps and figure a way to get more people vaccinated. A lot of the ones getting sick aren't typical.

As I mentioned before, I think having our clinic on the extreme west side of Waterloo was stupid. Bad location for Waterloo, but not even a location in Kitchener. Relaying information to the public has also been poor. I got one flyer in a utility mailer regarding the vaccination program (on the opposite side of page -- I didn't even notice until I had tossed it). On the flyer the region sent out, it said that you MUST have identification (other than health card). Unsure why this was a condition. I do know when I took my mom to the clinic, we had to show the health card and ID to about 4 or 5 different people. So much better at the pharmacy with none of that BS.

Anyway, here is the 7-day total per 100K. Region of Waterloo is now solidly the top of the list:

• Region of Waterloo Public Health and Emergency Services 57.3
• Peel Public Health 43.1
• City of Hamilton Public Health Services 38.0
• Brant County Health Unit 34.1
• Thunder Bay District Health Unit 33.3
• Niagara Region Public Health 31.5
• Toronto Public Health 29.2
• Durham Region Health Department 27.9
• Windsor-Essex County Health Unit 24.0
• Halton Region Public Health 23.9

• TOTAL ONTARIO 26.7