After consultations with our partners and discussions with internal teams, Ottawa Public Health has transitioned current COVID-19 reporting to the more comprehensive Respiratory and Enteric Surveillance Dashboard and archived the COVID-19 Dashboard on March 6th, 2024. This move was taken to address the reemergence of other viruses amidst the ongoing burden of COVID-19 and provide a one-stop shop for the public to access this information.
Our commitment to ongoing COVID-19 surveillance reporting
- We will continue updating COVID-19 data on Open Ottawa.
- We will continue updating outbreak listings weekdays on our Ottawa Outbreak Dashboard.
- We will continue providing long-term trends (wastewater signal, outbreaks, hospitalizations, testing) and comparisons to historical data in the Respiratory Viruses page of the Respiratory and Enteric Surveillance Dashboard.
- We will continue providing context on COVID-19 levels on social media and responding to media inquiries.
- The COVID-19 Dashboard will still be available as an archived version on the OPH website, preserving the first four years of COVID-19 surveillance in Ottawa.
Why are changes needed? |
Everything is in one place:
- Integrating COVID-19 data into the existing Respiratory and Enteric Surveillance dashboard creates one easy-to-find resource and avoids duplication. This will provide a one-stop shop for the public and address the reemergence of other viruses amidst the ongoing burden of COVID-19.
- The Respiratory and Enteric Surveillance Dashboard provides comprehensive content, including data on other respiratory viruses beyond COVID-19. The public can easily compare reliable, accurate, and user-friendly data for decision making.
Updated content and visuals to support interpretation:
- The Respiratory and Enteric Surveillance Dashboard provides interpretations for various indicator levels, such as wastewater levels and hospitalization data for COVID-19, influenza, and RSV. This interpretation helps convey overall risks more effectively and was not available in the COVID-19 dashboard.
- Visuals and graphs comparing data across weeks and seasons facilitate the identification of short and long-term trends.
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Summary of changes
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Daily counts
Number of Ottawa LTCH residents tested by day & 7-day average % positivity
- The daily number of tests administered to LTCH residents is small and varies considerably, thus leading to highly variable daily percent positivity values. Outbreak statistics, included in the Respiratory and Enteric Surveillance Dashboard, also provide information on how COVID-19 is affecting LTCHs.
- We’ll continue to share the weekly total number of COVID-19 tests administered to all Ottawa residents, along with the weekly COVID-19 percent positivity in the Respiratory and Enteric Surveillance dashboard.
- Daily counts of COVID-19 tests and percent positivity in LTCH will still be available on Open Data.
Healthcare system occupancy
- Many factors influence healthcare system occupancy and Ottawa hospitals are best able to speak to hospital occupancy and capacity.
All patients in ICU due to COVID-19 in Ottawa hospitals
- The number of patients in Ottawa ICUs due to COVID-19 is now less than 2% of recent COVID-19 hospitalizations. These low numbers lead to highly variable daily values and are less reliable as a measure of severity.
- We will continue reporting the daily average number of patients in Ottawa hospitals with COVID-19 by week, the percentage of those who are admitted because of COVID-19 by week, and the number of new admissions due to COVID-19 by week.
Number of Ottawa residents with lab-confirmed COVID-19 by sex
- We are unable to separate actual differences in the risk of acquiring COVID-19 among males and females from the differences in males’ and females’ eligibility for and seeking of PCR testing.
- Cumulative rates of lab-confirmed COVID-19 by sex will still be available on Open Data.
Number of Ottawa residents with lab-confirmed COVID-19 by outbreak association
- COVID-19 testing eligibility is currently restricted to high-risk individuals and those working or living in high-risk settings (e.g. LTCHs). Thus, sporadic (non-outbreak related) cases are underrepresented, and comparisons between sporadic counts and outbreak-related counts are not useful.
- Data on outbreak association will still be available on Open Data to support historical analyses.
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Behind the statistics are people – family, friends, each of us - whose lives have been and continue to be impacted by the pandemic. OPH is committed to regular reporting on COVID-19 in ways that guide the public in understanding the current data in the broader context, assessing their own risk and making decisions accordingly.
Useful links:
Data in this dashboard are based on information extracted from the provincial Case and Contact Management (CCM) solution. The CCM is a dynamic disease reporting system that allows for ongoing updates; data represent a snapshot at the time of extraction and may differ from previous or subsequent reports. Data was extracted from CCM at 3 pm and loaded to the dashboard the following day. A confirmed case is a person with laboratory confirmed COVID-19. This dashboard applies to Ottawa residents with confirmed COVID-19.
To access data on COVID-19 vaccinations, visit our COVID-19 Vaccination Dashboard page.
Please note the CCM reporting system is a dynamic database and the data on the OPH dashboard represents a snapshot in time. The database is continuously being updated as cases are investigated and as more information becomes available. For more information about the daily number of COVID-19 cases reported to OPH by the date reported to OPH, please refer to column F of the following Open Ottawa dataset: COVID-19 Demographics and Source of Infection for Cases, Deaths, and Hospitalizations.
The following data tables are available for download on Open Ottawa:
Supporting documents:
To enter the Power BI report from the COVID-19 Dashboard webpage using a keyboard, press Tab once after the “full screen mode” link and press Ctrl + Enter. A small box will appear in the top left corner of the report. Press Tab three times to navigate through the options and you will then be inside the report. From here you can navigate the content of the report using Tab and the other keyboard shortcuts enumerated in the Keyboard Shortcuts document.
Having trouble viewing the report? Try viewing the report in full screen mode.
Archive of Dashboard Data Notes |
February 25, 2022 |
On February 25, 2022, as a result of a quality assurance process and following Ministry of Health direction, 16 deaths pre July 2021 have been determined to not be related to COVID. These changes are reflected in the cumulative counts, change from previous refresh, and in all COVID-19 Open Data products. |
March 9, 2022 |
As of March 9, 2022, Ottawa Public Health is making changes to its COVID-19 Dashboard to better align with updated Public Health Ontario COVID-19 case reporting metrics and re-organized to emphasize the key information. These changes will help residents to better understand the COVID-19 situation in Ottawa by focusing on the most relevant and accurate data available.
The changes to the Dashboard include:
- Monitoring Indicators is now the first tab and includes some content from the former “Case Status” tab, now called Case Demographics:
- Change from previous refresh
- Cumulative COVID-19 cases and deaths
- Median age and age range of COVID-19 cases
- Active COVID-19 cases
- Ottawa residents currently in hospital and currently in ICU due to an active COVID-19 infection
- Updated data notes and introductory texts to reflect updates.
- The dashboard no longer includes mutations or Variants of Concern because current data no longer represents the true incidence of variants in Ottawa. This is consistent with the updated provincial COVID-19 testing guidelines. You can find the results of whole genome sequencing at a local health unit level in Public Health Ontario’s regular reports, such as the SARS-CoV-2 Whole Genome Sequencing in Ontario
- A new section, “Custom timeline demographics and rates” has been added under the Case Demographic tab that allows users to aggregate data by month.
- The dashboard no longer includes COVID-19’s effective reproduction number R(t) — an indicator of how fast it’s spreading in the population based on changes in the number of COVID-19 cases. Because the Province restricted COVID-19 PCR testing to priority populations in December 2021, R(t) no longer represents the spread of COVID-19 in Ottawa.
- The dashboard will be moving to reporting on weekdays only. COVID-19 case data from Saturday and Sunday will be included in Dashboard updates on Monday. Data will still be available on a daily basis in the dashboard and in OpenData, but will be refreshed only on weekdays.
Finally, please note that a change to our COVID-19 Vaccine Dashboard came into effect this week. We have moved to a weekly update of the COVID-19 Vaccine Dashboard, moving to every Monday. This means that the next update to the dashboard will be on March 14, 2022, and then every Monday moving forward.
We wanted to make you aware of these changes to support your reporting of COVID-19 in Ottawa. Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact the media team.
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May 9, 2022 |
As of May 9, 2022, as a result of a quality assurance process, 174 COVID-19 cases were assigned to other health units. These changes are reflected in the cumulative counts, change from previous refresh, and in all COVID-19 Open Data products. |
June 3, 2022 |
As of June 3, 2022: For alignment with the Ontario Ministry of Health (MOH) reporting of COVID-19 laboratory testing data, OPH is changing how we access Ontario Laboratory Information System (OLIS) data. Instead of directly extracting reports from OLIS, we now access OLIS data using the MOH’s SAS Visual Analytics hub. As a result, historical counts of laboratory tests will differ from previous reports, however the overall trends remain the same. |
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Real World Contact Tracing Examples |
Please see below for real world contact tracing examples:
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Looking for more information on respiratory viruses in Ottawa? Check out the Respiratory and Enterics Surveillance Dashboard!