Canadian Politics: Revenge of the small minds

[kairparavel]

.

[kairparavel]

Wrong thread!

[Fragile Bird]

Here is a link to the CBC Canadian tracker.

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/coronavirustracker/

The Johns Hopkins tracker

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

The Worldometers tracker, my go-to.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?fbclid=IwAR2WhtIvODVjwxZEszArsVM0ypi0ZJvQ3SVjdnjuyl9ViV2IZPnIdKS5rto

Canadian government, with links to provinces. Always seems to be late to update.

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/2019-novel-coronavirus-infection.html

[Fragile Bird]

Holy smokes, Quebec, way to go! More than 400 new cases, because they were using narrow testing rules. 
 

I was wondering why their numbers were so low.

[Paxter]

Canada now reporting around 1,000 new cases daily. I wonder whether the timing really hurt us - had the US border closed a week or so before Spring Break (rather than during) then we could be at a much lower rate of new cases. Plus far fewer people would be caught on cruises, which must be pretty chaotic and stressful.

[Fragile Bird]

Trudeau just addressed children directly in his daily press conference, trying to reassure them about their stress and loneliness, and telling them they are not alone. He took the opportunity to tell them about the Kids Help Line, which has counsellors working 24 hours a day. He then went on to talk to seniors as well.

eta Also, $200 M for the various types of shelters.

[Fragile Bird]

The government of Canada just started their press conference by thanking all Canadians for their patience and understanding and for following social distancing guidelines, and then thanked reporters for their important work getting information out to the public. An American watching this must think he stumbled on a science fiction show of some kind.

[Paxter]

I can see the Provinces and the Feds going even more draconian after this weekend. The latest Canadian data isn't overly promising - it looks eerily like a Euro trajectory. 

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, Paxter said:

I can see the Provinces and the Feds going even more draconian after this weekend. The latest Canadian data isn't overly promising - it looks eerily like a Euro trajectory. 

I'd like to see information without Quebec in it. It's all Quebec - 5500 cases are there. I think people in Quebec had the same attitude people in France had. My best friend has a son and daughter-in-law who live in Montreal. They were still going to parties in early March. Both have Covid-19, the mild version thank goodness. They're in their early 30s.

But yes, tighter measures are coming.

Ontario had their pop-up because they cleared the 10,000+ backlog over the weekend. The backlog came from returning travellers.

Tomorrow Ontario will try to scare people. Reporters have been demanding to see the projections the province has, demanding 'all the facts'. The chief medical officer of the province had to point out that reporters get all the facts every single day. Tomorrow, however, the projections, fromthe modelling, will be discussed at the daily press conference. I watch that every morning on the CBC News Network, channel 26 if you have Rogers. It's now free on all cable networks because of the pandemic. The best case, the medium case and the worst case projections wil be shown. Keep in mind, 100,000 to 200,000 deaths is the 'best case' scenario in the US.

I expect projections on the national level will come soon.

Toronto has brought back 100, sorry, 200, by-law enforcement officers to hand out tickets to people not obeying social distancing rules. I hope they raid a few parks tonight. There are all kinds of stories of carloads of young folk cutting chains on barriers to parks to party at night.

 

[Fragile Bird]

I thought I'd do my own update, just to see how off the Canada site is.

Province                         Cases           Recovered

B.C.                                 1,121            641   

Alberta                              968            174

Sask                                   206

Manitoba                           167

Ontario                            2,793            831

Quebec                            5,518            224

New Brunswick                     91              22

Nova Scotia                         193             16

Nfld & Lab                           183                   note: 143 connected to 2 funerals

PEI                                          22              3

NWT                                         2

Yukon                                       6

Total                                  11,266         1,744

I'm unhappy to see the numbers, but I'm not exactly panicking. I could not find 'recovered' numbers for some provinces. There are 166 deaths.

I see we have 40 more flights coming in, bringing back Canadians from around the world. That should mean more cases.

[Paxter]

31 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I thought I'd do my own update, just to see how off the Canada site is.

Province                         Cases           Recovered

B.C.                                 1,121            641   

Alberta                              968            174

Sask                                   206

Manitoba                           167

Ontario                            2,793            831

Quebec                            5,518            224

New Brunswick                     91              22

Nova Scotia                         193             16

Nfld & Lab                           183                   note: 143 connected to 2 funerals

PEI                                          22              3

NWT                                         2

Yukon                                       6

Total                                  11,266         1,744

I'm unhappy to see the numbers, but I'm not exactly panicking. I could not find 'recovered' numbers for some provinces. There are 166 deaths.

I see we have 40 more flights coming in, bringing back Canadians from around the world. That should mean more cases.

The data I didn’t like was the Ontario daily new cases data. It looked like the same pattern we’ve seen in Europe. I certainly am hoping to be completely wrong!

[Fragile Bird]

Just saw this from the CBC, an interactive curve comparison.

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/coronaviruscurve/

[Paxter]

I guess there’s still a chance we are Korea and not France in that graph! Good link.

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, Paxter said:

The data I didn’t like was the Ontario daily new cases data. It looked like the same pattern we’ve seen in Europe. I certainly am hoping to be completely wrong!

Wikipedia has a coronavirus page for every country, it seems. Here's a link to Spain. Take a look at March and it's acceleration. We are nothing like that. You can look at other countries as well. I think we are still doing pretty good at flattening the curve. Except for the fact that Quebec seems to have lost control.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Spain

[Paxter]

4 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Wikipedia has a coronavirus page for every country, it seems. Here's a link to Spain. Take a look at March and it's acceleration. We are nothing like that. You can look at other countries as well. I think we are still doing pretty good at flattening the curve. Except for the fact that Quebec seems to have lost control.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Spain

I think looking at Australia’s numbers is skewing my perception. They seem to be having a lot of success in reducing the daily rate. Not fair to compare for a whole host of reasons.

[Fragile Bird]

14 minutes ago, Paxter said:

I think looking at Australia’s numbers is skewing my perception. They seem to be having a lot of success in reducing the daily rate. Not fair to compare for a whole host of reasons.

That's why I was talking about looking at Canada without Quebec, the outlier. Subtract Quebec's population, making a number slightly below 30 M, but just use 30M and we have 5,748 cases. Australia has 5,314 with 5M fewer people. I am much happier with that. 

But holy crap, Quebec.

eta: I want to add, you can't do the same comparison in the US, subtracting New York, because every province has tested heavily, unlike US states.

[Paxter]

51 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

That's why I was talking about looking at Canada without Quebec, the outlier. Subtract Quebec's population, making a number slightly below 30 M, but just use 30M and we have 5,748 cases. Australia has 5,314 with 5M fewer people. I am much happier with that. 

But holy crap, Quebec.

eta: I want to add, you can't do the same comparison in the US, subtracting New York, because every province has tested heavily, unlike US states.

Even if you take out QC, I don't love the curve. ON, for example, was averaging 150 new cases a day last week. This week it's gone to around 350 per day (today was 401 new cases). So are we moving to 1,000 a day in ON by next week?

Take a comparable state in Australia and you are not seeing that kind of growth. 

ETA: Worth noting that Aus is also testing more.

[Fragile Bird]

Here is a link to a National Post article linking the full text of Ontario's modelling report.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/public-health-ontario-covid19-modelling-technical-briefing-full-text

The modelling shows a potential of 100,000 deaths in Ontario if no actions were taken. If no measures were taken, we might have 300,000 cases by the end of April and 6,000 deaths.

Even so, they are suggesting 1,600 deaths by the end of April and 80,000 cases.

Stricter measures would mean 250 deaths and 12,500 cases.

Sounds like we are going into stricter measures.

[Paxter]

Yeah I think the Provincial Government is warming us up for a crackdown too. As I mentioned yesterday, the data doesn't look great and the modelling is further cause for concern.

[Fragile Bird]

I found a page that tried tracking the location of all the coronavirus cases in Toronto, but they gave up after #39 because the province, which was trying to give details on where the virus was acquired, started taking longer and longer and was not always providing a location. You can actually see a listing of each case and the tracking they've done every day on the Ontario page. 

The tracking of those 39 cases is as follows. Remember, these are not the first 39 cases in Ontario, but in Toronto.

Visited China: #1, #2, #3 Wuhan

Visited Iran: #4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11,17, 18

Visited Egypt: #6, 9, 32, 33

Visited the US: #12,14, 15, 21, 22, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38

Visited Italy: #13 [how appropriate]

Visited France: #16

Visited Switzerland: #19

Visited Toronto: #20 attended the big mining convention in Toronto, the first week of March, PDAC. People come in from all over the world. The fellow lives in Sudbury.

Close Contact: #23, 27 (a baby), 34 (CC with someone back from the US)

Visited Europe: #26

Egypt says they have tested 25,000 people and only have 1,070 cases. That has to be nonsense. You see how early we see cases and I have often looked at the tracking on the Ontario page. Egypt shows up regularly.

My suspicion is the US is the source of the majority of our travel cases. It started early and continues.