The presence of COVID-19 in Quebec continues to slowly decline, but the pandemic refuses to go away. Every day, nearly 15,000 Quebecers continue to be infected on average and five end up dying.
The National Institute of Public Health of Quebec (INSPQ) estimates that between 11,000 and 19,000 Quebecers are currently infected every day. This estimate of the spread is obtained through surveys conducted online. The trend is declining, but this assessment demonstrates that the pandemic has not entirely disappeared.
In fact, the signal of COVID-19 in city sewers has been declining since the start of the year, but remains high.
Screening tests, the pace of which has been reduced since the start of the year, however only capture a fraction of the approximately 15,000 new cases occurring on average each day. Indeed, Quebec reported this Friday only 365 new cases by PCR tests. The daily average is now 363, down 6% over one week.
One thing is certain, the weight of COVID-19 on the health network is gradually decreasing. On Friday, Quebec counted 1,190 people hospitalized who tested positive, down 4% over one week. This is the first time since June 2022 that the number of hospitalizations with COVID-19 has fallen below 1,200.
Of the 1,190 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19, note that 382 patients were admitted directly because of their infection, the others having been admitted for another reason.
While hospitalizations are down, the number of deaths has remained relatively constant since the start of the year. The 10 deaths reported on Friday bring the daily average calculated over seven days to five, the rate observed since the beginning of the year. As since the start of the pandemic, these are mainly elderly people, on average 83 years old. The majority of people who have succumbed to COVID-19 in the past two weeks were living at home when they were infected.
As for hospital staff, the number of workers absent due to the pandemic is also continuing to decline. Friday, there were 1661 absences in the health network.
