Canada's chief public health officer said Friday that cases of the Omicron variant have peaked countrywide and the number of new infections has dropped significantly over the past week.

Canada's molecular testing system has been hampered by constrained capacity and staffing issues that have made PCR tests unavailable to many. But Dr. Theresa Tam pointed to other indicators — daily case counts, test positivity rates and wastewater surveillance trends — that she said suggest Canada is now through the worst of the Omicron wave.

As of Jan. 26, the seven-day average case count was more than 19,000 — a 28 per cent drop since the previous week. Caseloads are declining across all age groups. The lab positivity rate remains high — 19 per cent of all tests are coming back positive — but that figure has been gradually decreasing in recent weeks, which suggests the rate of community spread is slowing down.

"This reassures us that individual efforts, including layering on personal protections like masking and limiting in-person contacts, together with population-based public health measures, are helping to slow transmission and mitigate severe illness trends," Tam told a news conference.

The caveats as far as caseload would include an uptick in societal activity and movement in the coming days. Some Canadian students in Atlantic Canada will make their return to in-person learning next week, while the two most populous provinces are expanding capacity limits for some businesses.

As well, public health officials everywhere are tracking the subvariant of Omicron, BA.2. Health officials in Britain said Friday it appears the growth advantage of BA.2 over the predominant BA.1 type "is currently substantial," echoing beliefs of Denmark experts earlier this week.

The European experts haven't detected any notable difference in hospital levels but it is something they and officials in Canada — where there's been only 100 cases of BA.2. spotted so far — will be monitoring closely.

More importantly, the number of people in hospitals with COVID-19 is still at a record high, putting Canada's health-care system under severe strain.

There are more than 10,800 people with COVID-19 being treated in the country's hospitals each day. The number has averaged more than 8,000 per day in January, according to CBC's internal tracking, well above the previous average high of 4,400 in the same month last year.

There are 1,200 patients in intensive care units, federal health officials said, a precarious situation heading into February. The record months for average hospitalizations were in April and May 2021, where 1,140 to 1,288 were in ICUs on average during those eight weeks, when most of the adult population had just started receiving their first COVID-19 vaccine shot.

Canada is also reporting an average of 168 COVID-19-related deaths daily. According to World Health Organization tracking — which you can see illustrated in the graphic further down this newsletter — Canada in the past seven days has reported the 12th most deaths from COVID-19 in the world, and would rank in the 10 highest on a per capita basis given the much larger population bases of Argentina, France and Turkey. On the positive side, Canada's vaccination rate is significantly higher than most of the other countries currently with significant COVID-19 mortality, and also ranks far below them in terms of the pandemic-long death toll.

That said, as January nears an end, it's clear the month will ultimately rank as one of the deadliest for the country in the pandemic. We'll have more context on that next week in the newsletter.

A University of Oxford professor of evolution and genomics made his feelings crystal clear this week about a certain word that has increasingly been bandied about as Western countries tire of a pandemic that will disrupt a third calendar year.

"The word 'endemic' has become one of the most misused of the pandemic. And many of the errant assumptions made encourage a misplaced complacency," said Aris Katzourakis, the England-based professor, in an article published in the journal Nature.

What's clear is that the Omicron variant of the coronavirus — with its rapid transmission and reduced severity coming at a time of high vaccination rates — has made public health officials at least more comfortable envisioning the light at the end of the tunnel domestically.

"From our perspective, the overall goal of this pandemic remains the same: to prevent morbidity and mortality — so serious illness and death — and to manage our health-care system," Bonnie Henry, B.C.'s provincial health officer, told CBC's The Current in an interview broadcast Friday.

But, Henry said, it is important at this stage of the pandemic that officials keep a keen eye of the costs in terms of those with other serious illnesses and diseases trying to access a strained health-care system, as well as the effects of prolonged time away from peers and optimal learning experiences for children and young adults in school.

Speaking at a Friday briefing, Toronto Medical Officer of Health Dr. Eileen de Villa said she envisioned an endemic state as being one where "you may see some flareups from time to time."

"What exactly that looks will depend on what we see on the ground," De Villa told a reporter.

In an endemic state, the reproduction number of the virus — a measure of how contagious it is —hovers around one, "so it's not declining and it's not increasing," Dr. Raywat Deonandan, an epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa, told CBC News.

"Politically, the word [endemic] seems to be being conflated with: 'We're done with this and let's move on,'" added Deonandan.

Arguably nowhere is that the case more than in the United States, where there have been plenty of articles and commentary prematurely declaring the worst of the virus had passed. As well, reporters have consistently asked American health officials for when they believe their country will be in an endemic state.

On that topic, infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said recently a turnaround could begin as soon as February, a prospect that seems overly optimistic given the country is at least 12 percentage points behind Canada's fully vaccinated level and has topped more than 2,000 deaths per day recently.

Fauci did provide, however, another useful definition of endemic, describing it as having reached a level of "sufficient control" where the virus "does not disrupt us in society, does not dominate our lives, not prevent us [from doing] the things that we generally do under normal existence."

The World Health Organization has said COVID-19 will continue to be a threat in rich countries like Canada, the U.S. and England until significantly more people in all countries are vaccinated.

"You could spend a huge amount of resources and effort to vaccinate everybody in Canada and the U.K. but then be threatened by a variant that's arisen elsewhere that is able to evade your vaccination efforts," said Katzourakis. "And that is an incredibly wasteful way of trying to solve the problem."

Patience may be in short supply at this stage of the pandemic, but it's still very much required, according to Deonandan and Katzourakis.

Five members of Canada's Olympic delegation were placed in COVID-19 protocols upon arrival in Beijing, exactly a week from the opening ceremony of the Winter Games.

The Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) said it would not be sharing names "because there will likely be persistent shedders," meaning people who continue to test positive for the virus long after their initial diagnosis.

"We are following the Beijing 2022 Playbook rules. Part of our strategy was to arrive early to allow time for confirmation testing and, if necessary, the Medical Expert Panel process to unfold," COC added in a statement.

It's not clear how many of the individuals, if any, were athletes. To put the number in perspective, the full Canadian delegation consists of 246 people, including 215 athletes plus support staff.

The COC added that it would work with athletes to release specific names in the event a positive test makes them unable to compete. It plans to release daily updates on the number of team members in protocols.

Athletes were required to provide two negative COVID-19 tests within 96 hours of boarding the plane to China, plus one more upon arrival. The Canadian contingent began to arrive in Beijing on Thursday.

The challenges of staying in a bubble have been great for athletes around the world. Several teams have reported positive cases of COVID-19 amongst their athletes and coaching staff this week, just days before their scheduled departures for China.

Norway's ski federation said it was delaying the team's departure to Beijing by at least four days, after a coach and two competitors, including 2014 cross-country bronze medallist Heidi Weng, tested positive for the virus. The Russian team has also been hit by several cases, including figure skater Mikhael Kolyada, who will no longer compete in Beijing after testing positive.

Some 106 of the 3,695 people who arrived from abroad for the Games so far tested positive for the coronavirus, according to The Associated Press, which could conceivably also include media members, diplomats and representatives from international athletic bodies.

China's infection numbers have been modest outside of the early origins of the pandemic two years ago, but the Chinese Communist Party has pursued a "zero tolerance" strategy that aims to keep the virus out by isolating every infected person whenever a spate of cases is detected. That has included a recent monthlong lockdown — just ended — of Xi'an, a city of 13 million that is a major production hub in the global supply chain.

But in areas without onerous restrictions, movement can continue. Many Chinese are travelling to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year, the country's biggest family holiday, despite a government plea to stay where they are as Beijing tries to contain coronavirus outbreaks.

The holiday, which starts Wednesday, usually is the biggest annual movement of humanity as hundreds of millions of people who migrated for work visit their parents and sometimes spouses and children they left behind or travel abroad.

Some 260 million people travelled in the 10 says since the holiday rush started Jan. 17, less than before the pandemic but up 46 per cent over last year, official data shows. The government forecasts a total of 1.2 billion trips during the holiday season, up 36 per cent from a year ago.

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