Pediatric virus crisis, Canada, fall 2022?

A look at the data does not show a crisis?

Ideally, a full look at the pediatric virus crisis in Canada this fall would incorporate ER visits, hospital admissions, and ICU admissions. For some reason, this data is not available in real time - although presumably Ministries of Health have access - so it is rather challenging to contextualize somewhat alarming reports by CBC, CTV et al about the “tripledemic” (RSV, influenza, covid19).

However, one real-time data source is available from the Public Health Agency of Canada: the Respiratory Virus Report. This report is updated weekly, and is current up to December 10 at time of writing (4 days ago).

It is challenging to discern a crisis based upon reading this respiratory virus summary for December 10, 2022.

Let us examine the data more closely, as perhaps there is a different story.

It is not obvious that the percentage of positive tests is very different from usual historical range for this time of year, for influenza a, b, or RSV.

There is no graphical trend data for the volume of tests, however, it is stated in the summary that test volumes are slightly lower than previous years.

Rather difficult to discern the “tripledemic” based on this data.