Rentals.ca June 2020 Rent Report
The average rent for all Canadian properties listed for rent in May on Rentals.ca was $1,814 per month, down 1.4% monthly and 5.4% annually. The median rental rate was $1,750 per month in May, down $50 from April 2020 and May 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to put downward pressure on the rental market nationally, with rent down 7.2% from the market peak in September of last year ($1,954 per month).
Brazil: populist pandemic
https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/opinion/regional-perspectives/gwynne-dyer-...
Colliers CEO breaks Labour Laws by threatening job losses if employees don't lie on time cards
Coronavirus: Psychologists reveal New Zealand's political shift during lockdown
Please listen to, and follow the advice and instructions from Dr Tam.
A single case could spark a new COVID-19 outbreak, Tam warns
All it could take for Canada’s current COVID-19 progress to be thrown off course is a single new case that prompts an outbreak, Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam warned on Tuesday.
“Even though the epidemic growth has slowed considerably across the country, and we can now see these hopeful signs, this is the part where we gather our strength and resolve to continue our efforts, because it may only take one new case of COVID-19 to spark an outbreak, or renew epidemic growth that could change our trajectory,” Dr. Tam told reporters during the daily update in Ottawa.
In countries and American states where restrictions have been loosened, cases have begun to creep back up, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said last week serves as a lesson and a caution to Canada as reopening plans are underway across the country.“After months of hard work, people are finding themselves right back where they started,” Trudeau said on Friday.
Canada's first presumptive case of COVID-19 involved a man in his 50s who travelled from Wuhan, China to Toronto in late January. Less than five months later, the country is nearing 100,000 confirmed cases nationwide, more than 60 per cent of which have now recovered. So far, 8,213 people have died after contracting the novel coronavirus.
During her update, Tam spoke about how it’s important to still think beyond the numbers that are being updated daily to realize that COVID-19 is “very much still with us” and having serious consequences for so many.“It's been a big part of what has united and driven us to make sacrifices to stop the virus from doing even more damage. So for those moments that we're tired of this new way of life, it helps to look back at what we've sacrificed,” Tam said.
She is encouraging people to not get complacent and to keep up with their observance of public health measures including maintaining physical distancing with those outside of your household or social bubble, frequent hand washing, wearing non-medical masks when in public, and staying home when you think you have any possible COVID-19 symptoms.
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Covid-19 is now recurring in China and New Zealand.
Once Covid-19 is anywhere, it is a risk everywhere.
We all have to do our best to prevent super spreader situations.
Dr Bonnie is against re-opening Stanley Park to cars.
Widespread Mask Use Would Slow Pandemic. And More Science Journal News
https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/06/16/Science-Journals-Mask-Use/
Maintain Your Bubble! And More News Straight from Science Journals
https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/06/09/Science-Journals-Maintain-Bubble/
Follow the science.
COVID-19: Fears emerge for B.C. as virus reappears in Chinese market
Flush with caution: study says coronavirus particles could be spread by toilet 'plumes'
Trudeau and Ford both need to butt out and let the Public Health Care Officials decide and comment on what is the appropriate approach.
Canadian app
Canadian app
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced today that a COVID-19 app will soon be available for Canadians to download on a voluntary basis. It will be released first in Ontario on July 2.
Dr. Henry, who has said in the past that her team has had previous discussions about apps but had been unable to find one that satisfied their criteria, clarified that although the federally approved app has been referred to as a contact-tracing app, she said it’s actually a notification app.
She explained that this app doesn’t help with contact tracing.
What it does, she said, is that can provide notification for individuals to contact public health if they are in proximity to someone who tests positive.
She said it can help in crowd situations—but only if many other people also have the app.
“I think there’s probably a place for it,” she said. “It’s not answer in and of itself. It’s a piece, a tool, that we might be able to assist in some cases.”
She said that it doesn’t replace contact tracing as she emphasized that it is essential for individuals to be able to speak with a public health representative who can ask the “right questions” and provide important information to the individual.
However, she added that they are continuing to look at how to use technology for case management, contact tracing, and daily followup of contacts.
Good for Dr. Henry for laying out the facts.
Who will be first?
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/who-will-be-first-to-get-a-covid-19...
How sick can these hospitals and the politicos that oversee them be!
https://www.11alive.com/mobile/article/news/investigations/the-reveal/ga...
COVID-19: Oklahoma surpasses 10,000 cases after 331 additional confirmed positives and 1 new death
Tulsa World editorial: This is the wrong time and Tulsa is the wrong place for the Trump rally
“The Karens Are Giving Us a Hard Time Now”
A waiter at a reopened restaurant explains how dining works in a pandemic.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/06/restaurant-florida-reopen-coronavirus.html
Doctors and nurses are your neighbors and friends
Health care professionals need you to see our humanity – thereby protecting your own
If Canada opens up its border with the USA with what is going on there we are fucked Our Canadian government needs to get its act together and start acting independently of the USA to protect Canadians from Covid-19
https://www.wired.com/story/if-the-coronavirus-slows-this-summer-it-may-...
Bonnie Henry warns businesses against COVID testing
False positives could overburden hospitals, health officer warns
https://www.burnabynow.com/bonnie-henry-warns-businesses-against-covid-testing-1.24156860
Read this and weep!
Only a Newly ‘Vigilant Society’ Can Stop the Next Pandemic
Dumb and Dumber: Johnson and Trump vied for who could most dither, scapegoat, politicize science, and squander their nation’s medical expertise, a new book charges. Photo: The White House.
The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again
By Richard Horton
Polity (2020)
Feeling a bit under the weather, you go to your doctor. He knows your medical history, he checks your symptoms, he comes up with a diagnosis, and then he chews you out for behaving precisely as you’re not supposed to, thereby making yourself sick. What’s worse, you’re now a menace to the health of everyone around you. If you don’t shape up, you’ll ship out — in a body bag.
That’s the structure of this short, angry, and powerful book, written while the author was in lockdown in the U.K. Richard Horton is a doctor, but for a quarter-century he has been editor-in-chief of The Lancet, flagship of a fleet of important medical journals. As such, he has monitored global health through outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, cholera, H1N1 influenza, Zika, and the steady, deadly background noise of malaria, measles, and other diseases.
While locked down and dealing with a flood of incoming reports on COVID-19, Horton has also managed to write a clear, concise account of our own incompetence and folly — both in preparing for a pandemic everyone knew was coming, and in responding to it once it arrived. While politicians and bureaucrats take much of the blame, so do scientists. And so does everyone else.
His summary of the emergence of COVID-19 covers the key points and the questions they raise. If the first cases were noted at the beginning of last December, why wasn’t World Health Organization notified until New Year’s Eve? And once notified, why didn’t WHO respond more quickly, and why didn’t it engage health scientists from around the world in learning about the new virus from their Chinese colleagues?
Slow and confused
The world’s response to clear signs of impending disaster was woefully slow and confused. Governments, especially those of the U.K. and the U.S., come in for Horton’s condemnation: “The science and politics of COVID-19 became exercises in radical dehumanization.… At press conference after press conference, government ministers and the medical and scientific advisors described the deaths of their neighbours as ‘unfortunate.’ But these were not unfortunate deaths. They were not unlucky, inappropriate, or even regrettable. Every death was evidence of government misconduct — reckless acts of omission that constituted breaches in the duties of public office.… Missed opportunities and appalling misjudgments were leading to the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of citizens.”
Horton marvels at the American response: “The story of COVID-19 in the U.S. is one of the strangest paradoxes of the whole pandemic. No other country in the world has the concentration of scientific skill, technical knowledge and productive capacity possessed by the U.S. It is the world’s scientific superpower bar none. And yet this colossus of science utterly failed to bring its expertise successfully to bear on the policy and politics of the nation’s response.”
Ignoring the warnings
About the U.K. under Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Horton is devastating: “From the last week in January, it took the U.K. government seven weeks to recognize the seriousness of COVID-19. It wasted the whole of February and most of March, when ministers should have been preparing the country for the arrival of a deadly new virus. Why? Inexplicably medical and scientific advisers to the U.K. government ignored the warnings coming from China.”
The same was true of the U.S., which soon started blaming China, triggering a wave of anti-Asian racism in the process. It was easier to blame the Chinese than admit they themselves were making things much worse.
Horton well recalls China’s disastrous response to SARS in 2003-04, when Beijing tried to keep a lid on the outbreak. He argues that the Chinese learned a lesson: they developed a powerful health-care system, full of highly trained experts with excellent resources. After a month’s silence (suppression? apathy?), they moved very fast. By mid-January Chinese scientists gave the world the virus’s genome, and Chinese research was on the internet.
Yet other countries’ scientists and officials didn’t pay much attention. One Italian doctor observed that the lockdown of Hubei province seemed to her and her colleagues like something from a science fiction movie. Then the virus hit Lombardy, and soon all of Italy had to be locked down.
Richard Horton: ‘The leadership of medicine... betrayed the very people who had invested their trust — and their taxes — in modern medicine.’
As tough as Horton is on politicians, he’s even tougher on his scientific colleagues who let the politicians get away with their misbehaviour. The U.K. scientists on the top advisory committee “astonishingly… allowed the participation of the architect of Brexit, Dominic Cummings, who had been appointed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as his chief political advisor.” The committee, as a result, “was impossibly compromised.”
Horton knows that scientists have been bracing for a pandemic for decades. But they tended to assume it would a repeat of the influenza pandemic of 1918-19. Their exercises showed they were gravely unready for such a repeat, and equally unready to adapt their plans to a different kind of virus.
A two-count indictment
Horton draws up a two-count indictment of science policymakers in the U.K. First, he says, they were corrupted: “the system resulted in an abuse of entrusted power,” in which policymakers failed to act on China’s clear warnings. “Second, it was collusive — scientists and politicians agreed to act together in order to protect the government to give the illusion that the U.K. was an ‘international exemplar’ in preparedness and made the right decisions at the right time, based on the science.… Advisers became the public relations wing of a government that had failed its people.”
It wasn’t just a British problem. “Whatever the reasons,” Horton says, “the leadership of medicine in the U.K. and in many other Western nations let down those they were supposed to protect. They let down the old, the sick and the vulnerable. They betrayed the very people who had invested their trust — and their taxes — in modern medicine. It was a grubby betrayal, a stain on the leadership of a profession whose frontline workers had given so much.”
Horton’s polemic gains force because he’s not an outsider ranting about Big Pharma or medical conspiracies; he’s very much an insider, keenly aware of his profession’s weaknesses and of how strong it could be if society were only organized better. He concludes with a look ahead, to a “vigilant society” that pays attention to pandemics and the social conditions that let them thrive.
This pandemic has shaken the old society beyond repair; Horton quotes U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ observation that we are now enduring a “tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scaremongering.” But we have also gained a new appreciation of public health and the value of “essential” workers who keep society running. A new society, Horton argues, will reflect that appreciation:
“Resilient health systems will be constructed to be better prepared to withstand the shocks of sudden new diseases. Health and social care will be unified into a single health-care system. A redistribution of esteem will recognize (and reward) key workers. Inequality will rise on the public’s list of political priorities.… Governments will attack inequality with every fibre of their political being.”
Well, they will if they realize that another pandemic will be their ruin, and if the societies that they govern change as Horton thinks they should: “The political, economic, social, technological and environmental determinants of a stable and sustainable society will become matters of the utmost political importance.”
Disease as a social pathology
Horton foresees political parties actively recruiting more scientists, if only to meet the demands of a changed public. “Publics will no long view disease as a pathology of the body,” he predicts. “We will see disease as a pathology of society.” Medicine and other sciences will change as well, adopting the concept of “One Health” — that the health of humans and that of animals are linked. Universal health care will be not just a nice idea for rich countries, but a matter of self-preservation for rich and poor alike: “My health depends on your health. Your health depends on my health. We cannot escape one another.”
How we are to achieve a pandemic-proof society is up to us. But Richard Horton has pointed the way, and if we fail we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2020/06/22/Only-Newly-Vigilant-Society-Can-Stop-Next-Pandemic/
Someone has to pay the bill!
https://www.burnabynow.com/opinion/opinion-a-tax-on-the-super-rich-is-wi...
Do you know your blood type?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/17/health/coronavirus-genes-blood-type-study...
The faster a country required masks, the fewer coronavirus deaths it had: study
https://globalnews.ca/news/7075024/mask-wearing-fewer-coronavirus-deaths/
Association of country-wide coronavirus mortality with demographics, testing, lockdowns, and public wearing of masks (Update June 15, 2020).
How to Destroy a National Health Service
Over several decades, a toxic combination of underfunding and stealth privatization efforts have brought Britain’s widely beloved NHS to its knees.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/destroy-britain-nhs-privatization/
So, has mimik Tech been in touch with BC's Minister of Health Adrian Dix and/or BC's Public Health Officer Dr Bonnie Henry?
CEO of mimik Technology, Fay Arjomandi, says infection tracing for COVID-19 doesn't need to sacrifice privacy
Half of poll respondents of Chinese ancestry faced insults or name-calling due to COVID-19 outbreak
The Coronavirus Pandemic: Canada's Response
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2020/the-coronavirus-pandemic-canadas-response/
What To Look For In A Face Mask, According To Science
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-to-look-for-in-a-face-mask-according-to-science/
Children unlikely to pass COVID-19 to each other, says BC's Dr Henry
Research suggests children far more likely to become infected by an adult they are close to
