COVID-19 Rates by Ward/Neighbourhood

In response to the rapid transmission of the Omicron variant, starting December 31, 2021, the Ontario Ministry of Health further limited testing eligibility in order to preserve capacity. The cases identified since these changes went into effect provide a less accurate picture of overall COVID-19 activity, or activity by Ward or neighbourhood, in Ottawa. Therefore, we are pausing updating the COVID-19 Rates by Ward/Neighbourhood dashboards, including the COVID-19 cases dashboard on the ONS website. Historical data will remain available on the OPH, ONS, and Open Ottawa websites.

OPH will continue to monitor and provide relevant and timely information on the evolving COVID-19 pandemic including hospitalization and death rates, outbreaks in institutional settings, vaccination rates, and wastewater surveillance.

COVID-19 is present in every single community within Ottawa. The map below provides a snapshot of COVID-19 across Ottawa, based on Ward geography. Wards are administrative boundaries and do not reflect the natural ebb and flow of Ottawa residents within the municipality nor the communities in which they live, work, play and raise their families. Areas with lower or higher rates are not more or less “safe” from COVID-19 transmission. OPH continues to work with the health care sector and community partners to ensure we support the needs of at-risk populations. OPH is sharing this information in the interest of transparency. 

This information needs to be balanced with a recognition that it may stigmatize people and communities who have been impacted by COVID-19. Please take a moment to review OPH’s position statement on stigma, which provides guidance on language to use when communicating about COVID-19.

OPH has also partnered with the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study to map neighbourhood-level COVID-19 rates and case counts. These data are available on a monthly basis on the ONS website. To access these data, please go to: 
https://www.neighbourhoodstudy.ca/covid-19-in-ottawa-neighbourhoods/

Factors that may be driving the observed rates of COVID-19 in Ottawa Wards: 

• Rurality: To account for differences in the size of urban and rural populations, rates (i.e. the number of COVID-19 cases per 100 000 population) are provided. Rates in rural wards will be more sensitive to changes in the number residents with confirmed COVID-19, as they have smaller populations.
• Testing: Testing is essential for monitoring COVID-19 in our community. Provincial testing criteria have varied throughout the response and been limited to priority groups when laboratory capacity was more limited. Only a small fraction of all the persons who were infected with the COVID-19 virus were tested and the number of reported confirmed community cases underestimates the actual number of infections. Information on overall infection rates in Canada will not be available until large studies on COVID-19 antibody presence in blood serum are conducted. Based on available information, the actual number of infections may lie from 5 to more than 30 times the reported number of confirmed cases. 
• Social determinants of health: The social determinants of health, such as income and ethnicity, can contribute to differences in disease prevalence and health behaviours. According to an ICES report, Ontarians who tested positive for COVID-19 were more likely to live in lower-income neighbourhoods or neighbourhoods with a higher percentage of visible minorities and recent immigrants. 

The map below is based on the place of residence of Ottawans with confirmed COVID-19 and does not necessarily reflect where the disease was contracted. Exposure to COVID-19 can occur anywhere people congregate, such as workplaces or services open to the public. The best way to limit your exposure to COVID-19 is to practice physical distancing, limiting your exposure to your immediate family, and washing your hands. 

As of December 31, 2021, PCR COVID-19 testing was strictly recommended for symptomatic individuals in high priority groups only, resulting in fewer individuals being tested. The data below should be interpreted with caution.

 

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Map is historical and based on data from CCM as of 3pm on February 14th, 2022.

Map Data Notes:  

• Data extracted by Ottawa Public Health from the provincial Case and Contact Management (CCM) solution. The CCM is a dynamic disease reporting system that allow for continuous updates of case information. These data are a snapshot in time, reflect the most accurate information that OPH has at the time of reporting, and the numbers may differ from other sources. 
• Cases are assigned to Ward geography based on their postal code and Statistics’ Canada’s enhanced postal code conversion file (PCCF+) released in January 2020. Most postal codes have multiple geographic coordinates linked to them. Thus, when available, postal codes were attributed to XY coordinates based on the Single Link Identifier provided by Statistics’ Canada’s PCCF+. Otherwise, postal codes that fall within the municipal boundaries but whose SLI doesn’t, were attributed to the first XY coordinates within Ottawa listed in the PCCF+. For this reason, results for rural areas should be interpreted with caution as attribution to XY coordinates is less likely to be based on an SLI and rural postal codes typically encompass a much greater surface area than urban postal codes (i.e. greater variability in geographic attribution, less precision in geographic attribution). 
• Population estimates are based on the 2016 Census. 
• Rates calculated from very low case numbers are unstable and should be interpreted with caution. Low case counts have very wide 95% confidence intervals, which are the lower and upper limit within which the true rate lies 95% of the time. A narrow confidence interval leads to a more precise estimate and a wider confidence interval leads to a less precise estimate. In other words, rates calculated from very low case numbers fluctuates so much that we cannot use them to compare different areas or make predictions over time.

The data table for this map is available for download on Open Ottawa