When will Canada pass the peak of COVID-19 Even the experts don’t know

TORONTO -- As millions of Canadians spend their days at home, avoiding getting too close to anyone outside their households, one question rises above all: When will this be over? Ashleigh Tuite is about as wellpositioned as anyone to know the answer to that question. She’s an expert in developing mathematical models to forecast the spread of infectious diseases. Not only that, she’s part of a team at the University of Toronto that has been given federal money to specifically model the COVID-19 pandemic. But when it comes to what may happen next in Canada, Tuite has no special insight.

“’I don’t know’ is the honest answer,” she told CTVNews.ca Thursday via telephone. “It’s a little bit too early, at least here and with the data we have, to be able to do the forecasting work that I think there’s a huge appetite for.” Even knowing exactly how far Canada is into its COVID-19 outbreak is difficult. The number of cases in Canada rose by 42 per cent on Monday, 34 per cent on Tuesday and 22 per cent on Wednesday -- but there are so many factors at play that it is impossible to reach any useful conclusions on whether the country is flattening its curve.

Testing activity is ramping up, but not at the same rate in every province, and not every part of the country is prioritizing the same cases for testing. There’s also inequity in processing backlogs -- and that there are backlogs at all means today’s new cases involve people who first contracted the virus several days ago.

It takes even longer for the effects of closures, movement restrictions and other government actions to show up in the data. Because it is generally believed that the virus has an incubation period of up to two weeks, experts say it is only safe to assume that one day’s case number represents the results of actions taken 14 or more days earlier.