Health Care System
This article (2026-10-21) reports that the province is cutting providers’ reimbursement rates for telehealth group medical visits — kind of the only thing that people with tired-all-the-time patients (ME/CFS, Long COVID, fibromyalgia, etc.) have available to them. The province is cutting both the per-patient reimbursement and the number of patients per session they are allowed to have.
This seems like a bad idea to me. If patients can’t get help from a group session, then they are likely to try harder to get an individual session — which will cost more!
Charts
From the Viral Respiratory Outcomes page (updated 22 October 2026 with data through 17 October):
From the Viral Pathogen Characterization page with data up to 10 October, as reported on 15 October:
COVID-19 case counts are down very slightly, positivity is flat, wastewater is down. Maybe that means we are at the peak?
Reported flu cases are down by a little, but I’m not sure I believe it. Recently, when the province gives numbers for the week, they also adjust the numbers from the previous week. The drop in the number of flu cases is smaller than what they’ve been adding to the “previous week” flu counts. In other words, I expect that next week, this week’s count will show that it increased relative to the previous week.
In the most recent data, among respiratory virus cases that the province has test data for:
- 55.1% were influenza A or B (almost exclusively A);
- 24.8% were COVID-19;
- 15.5% were entero/rhinoviruses;
- 1.5% were parainfluenza;
- 1.3% were adenoviruses;
- 1.2% were RSV;
- 0.6% were “common cold” coronaviruses;
- 0.0% were metapneumonia viruses.
Wastewater
💩💧 Here’s the past-year graph from Jeff’s wastewater spreadsheet, with data through 11 October 2026:
