Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 (nCoV-2019)

[afransen]

I thought that was the plan.

As with other vaccinations. Polio, for example? No?

That means we'll be waiting until late June or July!

 

[SunriseChampion]

That means we'll be waiting until late June or July!

Depends who your closest and dearest are.

 

[DSC]

Ontario is reporting 3,166 cases of #COVID19 and over 51,300 tests completed.

 

[Richard White]

Ontario is reporting 3,166 cases of #COVID19 and over 51,300 tests completed.

I wonder when we will be out of lockdown. I am thinking will be locked down past Canada Day.

Just a theory but I am wondering if they will want the cases to drop into the low hundreds (100-300) before dispensing with the stay at home order.

 

[PinkLucy]

They don't know what they want. They set parameters around numbers, Rfactor, positivity rates and more and then ignore them.

 

[afransen]

I wonder when we will be out of lockdown. I am thinking will be locked down past Canada Day.

Just a theory but I am wondering if they will want the cases to drop into the low hundreds (100-300) before dispensing with the stay at home order.

I think stay at home will be eased by June. Not sure what you mean by 'out of lockdown'?

 

[DSC]

They don't know what they want. They set parameters around numbers, Rfactor, positivity rates and more and then ignore them.

Absolutely! What "they want' is not necessarily what is best for ALL of us and from a scientific/medical viewpoint what SHOULD be done is to maintain restrictions until the daily case counts get low enough that ALL can be contact traced. The more of us who are vaccinated the fewer cases there will be (after 2+ weeks) but it is really important that our useless provincial government does not start opening up too early. They undoubtedly failed to learn from their mistake in doing that after Wave 2 and we all know what happened.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Pandemic errors made Canadian COVID-19 outbreak far worse than it needed to be, committee told​

From link.

Poor intelligence gathering on COVID-19, faulty risk assessments on the spread of the virus, and a Public Health Agency that lacked enough scientific expertise all helped make the pandemic worse in Canada than it should have been, a parliamentary committee heard Friday.

During several hours of testimony that was critical of the federal government’s response to the outbreak, experts in national security, public health and medicine said many of the problems with Canada’s pandemic response were avoidable. And those lessons can’t be ignored as the government tries to distill the lessons from COVID-19 in hopes of preparing the country for a future health threat.

Wesley Wark, an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa who is an expert in intelligence gathering and security, said the government failed to conduct proper risk assessments of the virus, and did not heed early evidence in 2020 that the pandemic was a serious threat.

Countries who fared better in the pandemic – such as Australia, New Zealand and Korea – all showed signs of taking the threat more seriously early on, implementing stricter measures weeks and months ahead of Canada, including travel restrictions, border closures, physical distancing and lockdowns.

“We have a lot of lessons to learn from our global partners… One of the things that troubles me about our response is that we weren’t attempting to learn those lessons in the early stages of COVID at all,” Prof. Wark told the committee, which is examining Canada’s pandemic response.

“I think if we had taken more seriously all the evidence in front of our eyes about the spread of COVID-19 globally and had been willing to act on that, Canada could have been in a much better position to protect itself nationally and provincially by at the very latest the end of February, if not earlier than that. And certainly not having to wait to go into mid-March before we took real action.”

Mr. Wark, who worked on the Auditor-General’s report from March that was critical of the federal government’s COVID-19 response, said the silencing of Canada’s pandemic early warning system before the pandemic hit, is a good example of Canada’s lack of intelligence gathering and processing, which affected its readiness. The system, known as GPHIN, or the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, had been a key tool for Canada in gathering advance signals of outbreaks such as SARS and H1N1, but it had much of its capacity diminished before COVID-19.

“I think it speaks to a larger, frankly, cultural problem in the Public Health Agency of Canada which is that it took its sights off of global health early warning, and didn’t feel this was a priority for it. And for that reason, GPHIN was kind of put on the blocks, the risk assessment process wasn’t properly instituted, and staffed, and resourced and fully understood,” he said.

Michael Garner, a former senior science adviser at PHAC who left in 2019, said the diminishment of the pandemic early warning system is a symptom of a bigger problem within the agency, where scientists were increasingly replaced or usurped by senior bureaucrats who had no training in public health.

“GPHIN provides a nice example of, you have a group of people who are in charge of GPHIN but don’t understand that you have to keep looking for the pandemic, and the fact that you haven’t found one yet doesn’t mean you can stop looking,” he said.

“We need to remember that [PHAC] was set up because of a coronavirus outbreak [SARS in 2003]. It’s the changes that have come with the diminishment of science and the diminishment of public health expertise in the agency at the most senior of levels, that mean we’re unable to act and understand the evidence and signals that are coming.”

A Globe and Mail investigation last year detailed how the agency began to restructure GPHIN in recent years, and in 2018 started to allocate its resources to domestic projects, rather than international surveillance, meaning it was no longer watching as closely for early signs of global outbreaks. The Globe obtained 10 years of internal Public Health Agency data that showed GPHIN’s internationally respected alert system was silenced on May 24, 2019, less than eight months before the COVID-19 began spreading around the world.

Mr. Garner, now an Anglican priest who advises the church community on public health matters such as the need for vaccines, said during his time inside PHAC he witnessed a department that no longer had senior management capable of handling urgent and complex briefings from scientists, nor ensuring such threats could be communicated up the chain of command.

He traced the root of the problem back to 2014, when the Harper government installed a senior bureaucrat as president of Public Health, which relegated the role of the chief public health officer to that of an adviser. That change, which was kept in place by the Trudeau government, created a cascade effect throughout the department. Management ranks were soon stocked with civil servants with no grounding in public health, and scientific arguments could be influenced by politics, he said.

“There is an inability to brief with complexity, because the people you are trying to brief to don’t have any training in public health,” Mr. Garner said. “The advice of a doctor is hopefully going to be driven by health, whereas the advice of a bureaucrat can be balanced with politics.”

These mistakes led to the pandemic being worse than it should have been, including deaths that didn’t need to happen, Mr. Garner said. “Before things get bad, you need people in places of decision-making who can understand actually the potential for really significant outcomes and significant events.”

 

[DSC]

Ontario is reporting 2,864 cases of #COVID19 and over 47,800 tests completed.

Toronto also seems to be doing well in vaccinations:

May 8, 2021

City of Toronto and Team Toronto partners reach milestone this weekend with 50 per cent of all adults in Toronto vaccinated

This weekend, the City of Toronto and vaccination partners anticipate that at least a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine will be administered to 50 per cent of adults age 18 or older in Toronto. Team Toronto will reach this goal thanks to a vaccination network that includes the City, Toronto Public Health, hospitals, pharmacies, Ontario Health Teams, Local Health Integration Networks, community clinics, primary care physicians and community groups — a network of more than 300 vaccination partners.

To date, 1,379,532 COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered in Toronto. The Team Toronto effort is focused on getting as many residents vaccinated as quickly as possible based on available supply. It is also expanding mobile vaccination efforts across Toronto to bring vaccine to the neighbourhoods most in need.

 

[W. K. Lis]

In the Greater Toronto Area, Toronto logged 684 new cases, a notable drop from 876 the previous day. Meanwhile, 803 new infections were reported in Peel Region, 285 in York, 125 in Durham and 98 in Halton.

 

[afransen]

Peel Public Health is going ham closing workplaces.

 

[DSC]

Trudeau government throws travel ban back into Ford’s lap as Ottawa-Ontario pandemic split widens. See: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/sta...-as-ottawa-ontario-pandemic-split-widens.html​

Interesting tit-bit from Trudeau reads: "“Doug Ford asked me to restrict international students. There’s been about 30,000 international students come into Ontario over the past months because they were approved by the Ontario government,”" and “If the Ontario government wants to do more to restrict the volume of people coming into Ontario, we are more than happy to work with them on it, but it’s been a week since we’ve received that request directly from the premier (and) they haven’t followed up, except with personal attacks which doesn’t make sense and quite frankly won’t help Ontarians.”

 

[W. K. Lis]

Can Masks Filter Pollen and Prevent Hay Fever?​

From link.

1. How big are pollen particles?​

Pollen particle sizes typically range from 10 microns up to 200 microns — about the width of a human hair. That makes them pretty ‘large’, as far as particles go. They’re bigger than most smog, PM2.5 and soot particles, but smaller in size than heavy dust and sand-like particles.

Looking at individual pollen types, they vary greatly in size. Most trees have pollen that are in the range of 50 – 200 microns. The smallest pollen known measures 9 microns, the pollen of mimosa pudica.

2. Can Masks Filter Pollen-Sized Particles?​

Because pollen particles are fairly large, most masks will capture a high percentage of it. Data shows that even surgical masks can capture up to 80% of tiny PM2.5 particles. They even do a great job when wearing them. Since the size of pollen is bigger than PM2.5, surgical masks will do even better at capturing them.

Other masks, such as 3M respirators and masks focused at filtering out PM2.5 do an even better job of capturing particulates. The 3M masks tested by Smart Air were able to capture over 99% of particulates when being worn.

 

[tripwire]

It figures. The day after I finally get my first shot through the province's website I finally get the email from Shopper's Drug Mart saying I can now book an appointment. It was only 20 days after I signed up for the waiting list! Oh well, hopefully someone else can use that spot.

Same here, but they wanted me to go pretty far compared to walking to St. Mike's where I got my first shot. Strange, as there's a Shoppers much closer to me. Completely anecdotal, but I've found my downtown friends and I have been finding it more difficult to get our shots vs our friends further out (Markham/Richmond Hill/Mississauga/etc).

 

[Rufus8]

Did the annual pilgrimage to the garden centre. Sparsely stocked and expensive but that is where we are in this new age. I don't think we will be in the clear until the late fall at the earliest. I miss swimming and shopping and restaurants, maybe I should take up golf?