These maps show Toronto’s current COVID-19 hot spots are not where you think they are.
The city is in fact at risk of losing a third of its population, which is being displaced by a pandemic that has hit Canada’s largest city with nowhere to go but up.
The city lost almost three quarters of its permanent population in the early 1990s as baby boomers left for the suburbs.
A decade ago, the suburbs were booming: Population growth was in the region of 50,000 people per year, compared with the city’s growth of just under 25,000. Population growth slowed down to about 10,000 during those years.
In the late 1970s, the city opened a new hospital, and it wasn’t long before the suburbs began to grow again.
Now Toronto is rapidly losing population as a consequence of the pandemic itself, a number of new measures implemented to stop the spread of the disease and to minimize the impact for residents.
This is a problem for municipalities, not just Toronto. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of tens of millions around the world, and is expected to cost economies around the world trillions of dollars.
Toronto, which is on track to lose nearly two-thirds of its population in just the next year and a half, is in a race against time as we have no clear solution to the crisis — as we know it will become a very large one in the near future—with so much at stake.
We’ve used this visualization to provide a sense of the current COVID-19 hot spots across the city, as well as how they are related in terms of population loss, COVID-19 outbreak, and death rates.
The map is divided around the world into six different regions to show the range of COVID-19 hot spots and pandemic levels at each city.
We can see that while all of the hot spots are outside of Toronto, the city has had two of the five worst