COVID-19 in Toronto Neighbourhoods
A deeper look at how the pandemic is impacting different parts of the City
This week’s newsletter has taken forever to write, in large part because I have gone down a rabbit-hole looking at COVID-19 data. After starting out the pandemic with very little useful data, we now have a wealth of it which can be overwhelming.
Rather than writing another long post about what I found, I’m simply going to share a few of the most interesting observations that it shows. Data geeks will love it, neighbourhood watchers may find it mildly interesting, but we all should be thinking about what it says.
Neighbourhoods are at very different stages of the second wave of COVID-19
The above is a snapshot of how Toronto’s neighbourhoods ranked as of October 31st according to the province’s new colour coding risk scheme using two of the key metrics: (1) Weekly cases per 100K population, and (2) Percentage of positive tests.
The results are all over the place, with some (mostly affluent) neighbourhoods showing little to no risk and others blinking red. This reflects a wide number of equity issues ranging from density, healthcare access, and income security. This makes setting policy for the Toronto region as a whole very hard, and probably implies that the City has to continue to move slowly to accommodate the harder hit areas…even if that means that certain (affluent) areas don’t reopen as quickly as they otherwise could.
Reopening right now is likely still premature for Toronto
The above chart looks at the 7-Day Average of new cases by the source of infection (which is the standard way of looking at the pace of growth of the pandemic). Two things jump out.
First, certain categories are nowhere near plateauing or declining. Policy makers typically are looking for (or, at least, should be) a decline in those curves before reopening as it shows that the rate of spread is slowing down.
Second, there is a huge surge in the number of cases where there is no known origin. Part of this is a data issue, as contact tracing takes some time to work through the background of cases. But it’s also a reflection of how the contact tracing system has simply been overwhelmed. This represents a huge risk: if we can’t track the origin of cases, we cannot stop the spread. The situation was similar in the spring where there was no contact tracing infrastructure in-place. The only way we were able to address it was through across-the-board lockdowns.