Enough!

Over the past two years I have commented a few times on the work of the Ontario Science Table, a group of experts set up by the Province to provide advice on dealing with COVID. The Table has regularly provided modelling-based forecasts for the pandemic, with results that we can reasonably describe as mixed. More often than not they have significantly over-estimated the severity of each successive wave, though it has to be said that they did rather better in predicting the fifth (aka omicron) surge in cases.  

The head of the Table is one Dr Peter Juni, and from where I am sitting he has done his colleagues, and thereby the government, few favours.  In speaking with the media, Juni always seems to jump straight to the worst case scenario identified by the modelling; not infrequently, he has seemed to go beyond that to scare people with numbers that he almost seems to have pulled out of the air.  

So, Ontario now seems to be in a sixth wave of COVID, not unexpected given that most restrictions on masking, indoor dining and such were removed a few weeks ago. Politicians and most doctors seem reasonably relaxed, or at least willing to see how things play out. After all, Ontario has close to 90 percent of its population double vaxxed, so the risk of severe outcomes is greatly reduced.

Someone who's not even a bit relaxed, however, is Dr Juni. PCR testing data shows a gradually rising case count in Ontario, with about 4200 cases reported in the latest daily data. This is known to be an underestimate, given reduced testing activity, but how much of an underestimate? Well, Dr Juni has been looking at waste-water data, and has reached the conclusion that the actual daily new case count is in a range of 100,000 - 120,000 per day! He asserts that one in twenty people in the Province currently has COVID, which implies that close to 750,000 people are currently stricken. Given that the official case count for the entire two years of the pandemic is about 1.2 million, that's a startling statistic indeed. 

I am not qualified to judge whether Dr Juni is right about this, but I can read numbers too. Scroll through to the bottom of the linked article and you'll see that the latest count of hospitalizations for COVID in Ontario is 1,126, with 159 patients in intensive care. The hospitalization number is rising, but the ICU count has actually fallen slightly in the last couple of days. I'd say that recording such small numbers of really sick people in the face of such a massive overall number of cases should count as good news, but what do I know?

Dr Juni is going to be leaving Canada very soon to take up a position at Oxford University, so this latest scare story may be his swansong. He is evidently a very smart man indeed, but his predilection for headline-grabbing has not always served Ontario well.