Coronavirus: what Canadians need to know

NDPP wrote:

Study Shows 8 Times More People in BC Infected With Virus Than  Confirmed

https://twitter.com/SharkawyMD/status/1283726311672995848

"Good news; Risk mitigating strategies actually DO work. Bad news: Lower rates of protective antibodies means more suscepbible hosts in a second wave. Vigilance is critical. Don't count on a vaccine quite yet."

But with the evidence that covid immunity isn't long-lasting, what difference does that make anyways?

Israel Authorities Demolish Coronavirus Testing Center in West Bank

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli authorities have demolished a coronavirus testing center in the city of Hebron. In Iran, the Health Ministry reported 229 new deaths on Tuesday — the highest daily total since the pandemic began. And the Gulf state of Oman is instituting a near-total lockdown including nightly curfews and a travel ban.

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U.S. Military Infection Rates Soar, Raising Concerns for Areas Near Overseas Bases

The number of U.S. military personnel infected with COVID-19 has topped 20,000, raising growing concerns in Japan, South Korea, Germany and other countries housing U.S. military bases, as well as in the war zones of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. In Okinawa, Japan, more than 140 marines have tested positive. The New York Times reports the infection rate in the services has tripled over the past six weeks.

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California Surpasses New York in Total Coronavirus Cases

In California, Los Angeles is on the brink of shutting down again as coronavirus cases continue to soar. This comes as California has overtaken New York as the state with the most coronavirus cases with just over 409,000 confirmed cases. The death toll in New York, however, is four times higher than in California. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed the actual number of coronavirus infections nationwide may be 24 times higher than the public count. This comes as the Trump administration is opposing more federal funding for COVID-19 testing. The White House has refused to spend up to $8 billion already allocated for testing even though many states and cities face severe testing shortages.

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Brazilian COVID-19 Death Toll Surpasses 80,000; Bolivian Police Recover 400 Bodies

In Brazil, the coronavirus death toll has surpassed 80,000. Two more government ministers in Brazil have tested positive. In Bolivia, police have recovered 400 bodies in recent days from streets, cars and homes. Most of the people are believed to have died from COVID-19.

Lockdown fatigue, 'invincibility' causing more COVID-19 infections

More young people are being infected with COVID-19, creating the potential for a severe outbreak, scientists warn.

They say the change in demographics could be attributed to lockdown fatigue, increased testing or feelings of invincibility.

Brett Snider, a water resources PhD student at the University of Guelph, first noticed a higher number of infections in the under 20 and 20-29 age groups in the Toronto and Peel regions in May.

Snider's supervisor, Ed McBean, said he was puzzled by rising infections in the under 20 age group because daycares and schools were closed.

"And we thought 'whoa'. The little ones don't tend to get violently ill, but they will bring it home. And if you have multiple generations or even visitors, you get that uptick as a result," said McBean, an engineering professor at the University of Guelph.

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Data from British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island show an increase in COVID-19 infections in the 20-29 age groups. The figures also show more women are testing positive for COVID-19.

Numbers from the Public Health Agency of Canada show that during the second week of July, the largest proportion of new cases reported — 22 per cent of female cases and 28 per cent of male cases — was among the 20-29 age group.

Since the start of the pandemic, 14 per cent of female cases and 15 per cent of male cases have been up in that age group.

The younger age groups are now making up a higher percentage of positive tests, while older age groups are falling overall, the data show.

Thousands of people spend time on the beach by Lake Ontario in Toronto on June 20, 2020. Photo by The Canadian Press/Frank Gunn

epaulo13 wrote:

Data from British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island show an increase in COVID-19 infections in the 20-29 age groups. The figures also show more women are testing positive for COVID-19.

Numbers from the Public Health Agency of Canada show that during the second week of July, the largest proportion of new cases reported — 22 per cent of female cases and 28 per cent of male cases — was among the 20-29 age group.

Since the start of the pandemic, 14 per cent of female cases and 15 per cent of male cases have been up in that age group.

The younger age groups are now making up a higher percentage of positive tests, while older age groups are falling overall, the data show.

Thousands of people spend time on the beach by Lake Ontario in Toronto on June 20, 2020. Photo by The Canadian Press/Frank Gunn

Most seniors are still in small bubbles and humans as youth and young adults have an over active sense of invulnerability.

B.C. provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has pleaded with people to continue social distancing as community transmission rates have spiked significantly. There were 102 new confirmed cases of the virus on the weekend and on Tuesday, the province confirmed 30 more.

The worst community outbreak is in Kelowna, where a group of six people from Vancouver, Kelowna and Alberta partied in the Okanagan city over the Canada Day long weekend. There are now 60 cases related to that community exposure, as the group went to several venues including a restaurant, fitness facility and beach.

The median age of British Columbians who are testing positive is 50, but Henry said that number was falling, with more people in their 20s and 30s testing positive.

https://vancouversun.com/news/covid-19-party-held-on-vancouver-beach-des...

Pandemic Worsens, Resistance Will Follow 

Two recent developments in the US seem to capture just how the destructive profit-driven irrationality of capitalism renders it incapable of effectively containing the present global pandemic. On July 10, the US recorded a staggering 70,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day, and Florida saw 11,433 cases, with 435 more people hospitalized. The next day, the reopening of “The Most Magical Place on Earth,” Disney World, began in that state. Admission tickets for the four theme parks are already sold out for the month of July. Meanwhile, across the country in Los Angeles, it is reported that the factories used to produce face masks for front-line workers, under the ‘LAProtects’ initiative, have become a major source of coronavirus infection. The low wage sweatshop conditions that the mainly migrant workforce have to endure have proven deadly. Three factories have been closed after three hundred contracted COVID-19 and four died.

Rob Wallace has pointed out that ‘pandemics are mirrors.’ This one has been generated by capitalist conditions of food production, and its impacts are determined by a system in which human and social needs are subordinated to the interests of profit-making. The concept of the ‘superspreader’ of the coronavirus has been developed in such a way as to conjure up images of reckless party-goers or selfish sun worshippers, but those who do the most to spread the coronavirus sit in corporate boardrooms and around cabinet tables.

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The course of the pandemic throughout the world is being charted according to this division between political jurisdictions that adopt reluctant but relatively effective measures of containment and those that show an utter disregard for public health. Though, of course, poor countries have much less inherent ability to control the virus, the WHO director-general is not wrong that many countries with ‘modest means’ have done far better than some of the richest. The effectiveness of the Indian state of Kerala in containing the threat has received international attention. The same can be said of Vietnam, which has controlled the spread of infection despite sharing a border with China. Laos and Cuba have also been extraordinarily successful in protecting populations from rampant infection.

On the other hand, countries trapped within the Washington Consensus face catastrophe. Latin America, as a whole, has now suffered 144,758 coronavirus deaths, but this tragedy is not spread out evenly. Jair Bolsonaro has presided over a horrible and needless loss of life in Brazil. Already by late June, half of the infections in Latin America had occurred in that country. Brazil’s death toll has now reached 72,151, with 1.87 million cases confirmed. Earlier this month, Bolsonaro “vetoed provisions of a law that obligated the federal government to provide drinking water, disinfectants, and a guarantee of hospital beds to Indigenous communities amid the COVID-19 pandemic.” An advocacy group says that this will “deny the minimum necessary for the survival of these communities.”

With its right-wing coup government, Bolivia is also seeing an appalling situation. Work crews in Cochabamba had to dig mass graves for COVID-19 victims after a local cemetery stopped accepting those who had died from the virus. In the words of Mary Ticona, a nurse who was interviewed during a protest, “We collapsed about two months ago. We are attending to our people as we can, in stretchers, wheelchairs, however we can attend to them. We have collapsed.”

Among those countries where global wealth is concentrated, there are also those who have failed to prevent the unchecked spread of infection. I need hardly stress that Boris Johnson’s Tories fit into this category. In Sweden, that other site of ‘herd immunity’ theory, those in power also have blood on their hands. It is, however, the epicentre of global capitalism, the United States, that stands out as the most extreme expression of a disastrous sacrifice of life in the interests of profits.

I took a look at Ontario's numbers today. I was hoping to see a drop since mask mandates apparently went into effect in Toronto and Ottawa a few weeks ago. Then I saw that most of the cases, by far, came from Windsor-Essex. Can anyone state whether or not mask mandates are in effect there?

Windsor is practically twinned with Detroit with only a bridge separating the two cities. Maybe rules were broken in terms of people crossing the border.

There is actually good news coming out of Sweden. Long criticized for their softer approach, their hills and valleys are finally starting to fall off, and their numbers are starting to get much lower.

‘Without early warning you can’t have early response’: How Canada’s world-class pandemic alert system failed

Months before the COVID-19 outbreak, the federal government’s early warning system went silent, just as it was needed most. The change left Canada poorly prepared as the virus began to spread rapidly around the world. Grant Robertson investigates​

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So, when it came to the outbreak in Wuhan, the Canadian government had a team of experts capable of spotting the hidden signs of a problem, even at its most nascent stages.

But last year, a key part of that function was effectively switched off.

In May, 2019, less than seven months before COVID-19 would begin wreaking havoc on the world, Canada’s pandemic alert system effectively went dark.

Amid shifting priorities inside Public Health, GPHIN’s analysts were assigned other tasks within the department, which pulled them away from their international surveillance duties.

With no pandemic scares in recent memory, the government felt GPHIN was too internationally focused, and therefore not a good use of funding. The doctors and epidemiologists were told to focus on domestic matters that were deemed a higher priority.

The analysts’ capacity to issue alerts about international health threats was halted. All such warnings now required approval from senior government officials. Soon, with no green light to sound an alarm, those alerts stopped altogether.

So, on May 24 last year, after issuing an international warning of an unexplained outbreak in Uganda that left two people dead, the system went silent.

And in the months leading up to the emergence of COVID-19, as one of the biggest pandemics in a century lurked, Canada’s early warning system was no longer watching closely.

When the novel coronavirus finally emerged on the international radar, amid evidence the Chinese government had been withholding information about the severity of the outbreak, Canada was conspicuously unaware and ultimately ill-prepared.

But according to current and former staff, it was just one of several problems brewing inside Public Health when the virus struck. Experienced scientists say their voices were no longer being heard within the bureaucracy as department priorities changed, while critical information gathered in the first few weeks of the outbreak never made it up the chain of command in Ottawa.

‘WE NEED EARLY DETECTION’

The Globe and Mail obtained 10 years of internal GPHIN records showing how abruptly Canada’s pandemic alert system went silent last spring.

Between 2009 and 2019, the team of roughly 12 doctors and epidemiologists, fluent in multiple languages, were a prolific operation. During that span, GPHIN issued 1,587 international alerts about potential outbreak threats around the world, from South America to Siberia.

Those alerts were sent to top officials in the Canadian government and throughout the international medical community, including the WHO. Countries across Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa also relied on the system.

Pondering wrote:

Sweden has a population of only 10 million and they didn't do nothing.

The cause of the fandom was the country’s approach to mitigating the coronavirus pandemic’s effects on its population: Unlike most nations, including its Scandinavian counterparts, Sweden did not shut down its economy or schools. Instead, the country’s leaders asked its people to take responsibility for social distancing themselves and banned only gatherings larger than 50 people, allowing schools and businesses, including bars and restaurants, to stay open. (Officials advised people to work from home when possible and avoid nonessential travel, and on March 31, the country issued a ban on visits to elder care homes.)

 Sweden has 564 deaths per million, Canada is at 235 per million in a country of about 35 million.

That's true, and that's a key thing that the "open-everythig-up-like-normal" crowd has overlooked. Plus the fact that the population of Sweden is generally trusting of heatlh authorities, and I don't know if a soft approach would have worked in the US precisely because people there don't trust government authorities. Remember those pictures of people on beaches when health officials were screaming at people to not do that? Those scenes would not have happened in Sweden.

Their death toll compared to Canada indeed looks bad. But if this thing does go on as long as some are predicting, then I think it's a fair question as to whether Sweden mishandled the pandemic or if they simply ripped off the bandaid in its early stages. If a second wave comes, it will be interesting to see what impact it has on the parts of the world that were hit hard in the early stages. New York and Italy in particular were knocked over, but now the case count seems to be more stable.