My niece and great nephews in Victoria, BC just turned up with symptoms for COVID. They were told to self-quarantine and were not tested.
You cannot believe the numbers from any country which does not have a robust testing regime. That emphatically includes Canada along with the USA.
That's not to suggest that 18% of the population is infected. Merely suggests that positive tests is a useless metric because people are not tested.
Number of people admitted to hospital might be a better indicator -- though this has a lot of delay.
It's a symptom of massive under-testing and would be greatly alleviated by an inexpensive test.
Yet the messaging until recently was "no evidence of community spread, risk remains low" with very lukewarm response. Of course there is no evidence if you don't look for it.
I understand they don't want to incite panic but anyone who's been paying attention to other countries can see that community spread is inevitable unless you have strict measures and robust testing, very early on. I'm pissed our politicians have ignored lessons from other countries.
I think this site may be paywalled unfortunately (but there is just a $1 for the first month charge):
https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...
The second graph in there shows Canada is tracking exactly the same path as most European countries and the US.
At which point, once we have fast and reliable testing, we can actually start having people go out more and reduce the isolation, since we can count on better testing to stop the spread.