TORONTO – Talking about a new (nth) wave of Covid-19 is perhaps premature, but the signs are all there: in recent weeks we had witnessed a rising of hospitalizations but the small number of swabs performed (reserved only for “at risk” categories) “) had not allowed an exhaustive tracing of the infections. However, there is one fact from which there is no escape: the presence of the virus in wastewater. 

Well, according to the Ontario Scientific Table, that presence has been steadily increasing since the end of May. The latest confirmed data arrived on 10 June and confirms that, after months of decline, the figure has started to rise again. A surge in sewage signal has usually heralded each new wave of the virus. For now, however, the rate of increase appears to be slower than previous waves caused by the Omicron variant.

Anyway, it is increasingly difficult to make an analysis or forecast, given that Ontario has officially switched to the weekly reporting of Covid-19 data, after more than two years of daily updates.

The Ministry of Health announced last week that its databases will be updated by 2pm every Thursday. A further “squeeze” on the data, therefore, after the limitation of laboratory tests only to the “at risk” categories that had already made it almost impossible to have a complete picture of the situation.

The only data available at the moment are those of last Thursday, when there were 491 people with Covid-19 in hospitals, of which 109 under intensive care: 55% of these were hospitalized due to the disease, while 45% were already in intensive care for other pathologies when they also tested positive for the virus. Over the past seven days, another 33 Ontarians affected by Covid-19 died: the province’s official death toll is 13,357.