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Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 (nCoV-2019)

As I said usually during this time of year people in Toronto are travelling.

Now everyone is home.

Almost everyone I know is making plans to visit Niagara falls or tobermorry or sable beach or the parks.

Now we need to either figure out to operate these places with social distancing or well have fun trying to ban people from travelling in the province.
 
^ You might want to suggest that they check with their destinations first. A number of municipal beach areas are closed to non-residents. I don't know the particulars at Sauble Beach but I know they were a little miffed a few weeks ago about over-crowding.
 
vic said:
BREAKING NEWS:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1283787703469912069
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Interesting, I first heard rumours of this when Canada imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. made products in the whole Steel/Aluminum kerfuffle.

One of the tariffs was on US sauces.

I could stand to be corrected, but I think it was only 10%.

Whether that was a deciding factor I don't know.

I've seen a couple of brands exit Canada after a change in ownership.

Dr. Oetker's sold off its muffin mixes and the like (they made a decent Apple Cinnamon Mix); and shortly thereafter the new owners exited Canada.

A few years ago Ragu was offloaded to Mizkan, from Unilever, I believe.

They seem to be headed the same direction.

Bertolli is their other big brand here. They have decent sized market share, so I'd be surprised to see an exit. But ya never know.
 
lenaitch said:
^ You might want to suggest that they check with their destinations first. A number of municipal beach areas are closed to non-residents. I don't know the particulars at Sauble Beach but I know they were a little miffed a few weeks ago about over-crowding.
Click to expand...
Yeah but that is my point

There are no regional restrictions and people fear a 2nd lockdown in the fall and want to enjoy the summer.
 
On a personal note my family will be away more in August but I’m in the prepare for fall second wave crowd.

I’m getting as many appointments as possible done now for everything like medical, car repair etc. The kind of stuff with annual frequency.

I’ve also moved from a 14-day supply to 30-day supply mindset for all home essential supplies.
 
Pennsylvania Department of Health won't allow Toronto Blue Jays to play at PNC Park in Pittsburgh amid pandemic.

The Blue Jays had originally sought approval for a plan to play its 30 regular-season games at home, but was denied by the federal government last week due to the risks of travelling back and forth from the U.S. during the coronavirus pandemic.

Toronto had considered playing at its spring training facility in Dunedin, Fla., or at Sahlen Field, the home of the Jays' triple-A affiliate in Buffalo, N.Y. However, surging coronavirus cases in Florida and a lack of space and lighting concerns in Buffalo raised doubts about the potential sites.

https://www.cbc.ca/sports/baseball/mlb/blue-jays-regular-season-home-pittsburgh-1.5639983
 
Jasmine18 said:
Yeah but that is my point

There are no regional restrictions and people fear a 2nd lockdown in the fall and want to enjoy the summer.
Click to expand...

I would argue that many of the restrictions are, in fact, local ("regional") such as mandatory masks because there is no provincial order in that regard. In addition, some have imposed some very local-specific access and parking restrictions.

When viewing some of the coverage of the major beaches, I would suggest if you don't want a 2nd wave, don't be part of the reason for it.
 
Jasmine18 said:
Based on my readings there has been very limited spread of the virus from beaches.
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And on that you may be correct, I think open air transmission is likely very low, but I'm wondering with some of the densities I'm seeing at some venues, when does open air approximate a closed space. Also, I don't know the status of beach-side businesses and amenities.
 
tiffer24 said:
Pennsylvania Department of Health won't allow Toronto Blue Jays to play at PNC Park in Pittsburgh amid pandemic.

The Blue Jays had originally sought approval for a plan to play its 30 regular-season games at home, but was denied by the federal government last week due to the risks of travelling back and forth from the U.S. during the coronavirus pandemic.

Toronto had considered playing at its spring training facility in Dunedin, Fla., or at Sahlen Field, the home of the Jays' triple-A affiliate in Buffalo, N.Y. However, surging coronavirus cases in Florida and a lack of space and lighting concerns in Buffalo raised doubts about the potential sites.

https://www.cbc.ca/sports/baseball/mlb/blue-jays-regular-season-home-pittsburgh-1.5639983
Click to expand...

This is an odd decision unless they are also denying the Pirates the right to play.

I would have no problem with that, as I see the traveling aspect in MLB restart as more pressing risk to players/team personnel and the public vs the Hub models of the NBA/NHL.

All are equally unnecessary right now, but I digress.
 
A public health employee predicted Florida's coronavirus catastrophe — then she was fired: 'This is everything I was trying to warn people about'

From link.

"More people are gonna die,” Rebekah Jones wrote to her mother and sisters on Facebook. It was April 26, a warm spring Sunday in Tallahassee, Fla., and she was just finishing work at the Florida Department of Health, where she was managing the state’s much-praised coronavirus dashboard, which she had also created.
“I feel sick,” the 30-year-old doctoral student continued.

The exchange marked the beginning of an exceptionally turbulent period for Jones, who was demonized by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a rogue employee while also being celebrated by his detractors as a brave truth teller willing to stand up to political power.

In a whistleblower complaint Jones filed last Thursday with the Florida Commission on Human Relations, her attorneys alleged that she was fired by the state’s Department of Health for “refusing to publish misleading health data.”

DeSantis’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

“We wanted to be wrong,” Jones told Yahoo News. “What we’re seeing right now is actually far worse than what we anticipated.” Back in May, DeSantis’s combative press secretary dismissed as “alarmist” new projections showing the state suffering 4,000 mortalities from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Florida now has more than 5,000 coronavirus fatalities.

Of the many supposed errors DeSantis has allegedly committed in the course of the pandemic, his administration’s firing of Jones may prove the most symbolic to those who see it as a Trumpian rejection of numbers that don’t look good.
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Six months since the coronavirus is believed to have entered the U.S., Florida is recording some 10,000 daily coronavirus cases, more than most countries, and Jones’s dire predictions appear to have been borne out. Her rapid rise and sudden fall from grace in the Florida Department of Health illustrate the larger tension between science and politics when it comes to pandemic response. Initially hailed as a hero for building an easy-to-comprehend dashboard, Jones claims she was pushed aside when the numbers clashed with DeSantis’s desire to reopen the state.

Last weekend, the state recorded more coronavirus infections than the entire continent of Europe. “This,” Jones says, “is everything I was trying to warn people about.”
Click to expand...

On Jan. 23, long before most Americans were even aware that a new virus was spreading from China, Johns Hopkins University announced the launch of a coronavirus dashboard that had been created by Lauren Gardner, a young civil engineer.

“This is something I think we should watch,” Jones told superiors at the state health department on Jan. 24. At the time, she was head of the department’s geographic information system division, which mapped how hurricanes like Michael battered the state.

Jones, who had been a journalism student at Syracuse University in New York and then studied climate science at Louisiana State and, later, Florida State, had joined the state health department in 2018 while still pursuing her doctorate in geography. As the coronavirus spread from China to Europe and the Middle East, Jones pestered her superiors to be allowed to create a Johns Hopkins-like portal for the state. She says they told her it wasn’t necessary, as it would only frighten people.

Finally, on March 12, she got a call from Carina Blackmore, the head of the health department’s infectious disease division.

“They wanted a dashboard, and they wanted it up today,” Jones says Blackmore told her. The task would have been impossible, except Jones had prepared mock-ups of the dashboard. “I had it up in two hours.” (Blackmore declined to speak to Yahoo News for this article, as did all other health department officials contacted.)

Software engineer Olivier Lacan, who lives in Orlando and volunteers for the COVID Tracking Project, remembers when he first encountered Jones’s creation, only to be astonished by the ease with which it allowed him to access information about the coronavirus. “It really felt like plugging into ‘The Matrix’ in some ways,” Lacan says. He remembers thinking, “I can’t believe I have access to this.”

Lacan says Florida stood out, for once not as the butt of jokes but as an example of getting it right. “Everyone had data. It was just a question of how much of a mess it was,” he told Yahoo News. “California was a tragedy for months.”

Others noticed too, including Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force. “That’s the kind of knowledge and power we need to put into the hands of American people,” she said of the Florida dashboard on “Face the Nation” on April 19, “so that they can see where the virus is, where the cases are, and make decisions.”
Click to expand...

A site Jones initially figured might garner a couple of thousand views overall had registered 100,000 unique visits within a week of launching, as worried Floridians checked whether the virus was making its way down from New York and New Jersey, which some said it would inevitably do. Others said the heat and humidity of Florida would keep that from happening.

The heat-and-humidity hypothesis was especially popular in a White House eager to declare victory over the pandemic and have the country begin a return to normal. At a White House coronavirus task force briefing on April 23, President Trump trotted out William Bryan, head of the science and technology division at the Department of Homeland Security, who described the results of a recent government study.

“Our most striking observation to date is the powerful effect that solar light appears to have on killing the virus,” Bryan said. “We’ve seen a similar effect with both temperature and humidity as well.”
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