Canadian Politics: Is that a Light at the End of the Tunnel?

[SpaceChampion]

Not her first time either:

Quote

Payette was given severance of roughly $200,000 when she resigned from the Montreal Science Centre in 2016 following complaints about her treatment of employees, say multiple sources at Canada Lands Company, the Crown corporation that employed her. In 2017, Payette left the Canadian Olympic Committee after two internal investigations into her treatment of staff that included claims of verbal harassment, sources with that organization said.

 

[Fragile Bird]

That’s pretty sad, from well-respected astronaut to nasty tempered so-and-so.

[Fragile Bird]

Update

Jan         16Sa   17Su   18Mo  19Tu   20We   21Th   22Fr                          

BC           584     445     301     465     500      564     508                               

AB           717     750     474     456     669      678     643    

SK            270     287     290     309     234      227    312          

MB           180     189     118     111     154     198     173      

ON         3056  3422    2578   1913   2655   2632   2662

PQ          2225  1744    1634   1386   1502   1624   1631    

Atl-4           27      36       26       37      24        35       35              

North           4         4        0         2        0           0        1                                          

Total       7063   6881   5425   4679   5738   5959   5965

Nice to see five days in a row below 6,000 cases, but since a lot of people show up for testing on Thursday and Friday, I wouldn't be surprised if numbers ticked up on Saturday. Nunavut had it's first case in a while. The Edmonston area is entering lockdown, it's the hot spot in NB.

I remember in December saying we were supposed to get 250,000 vaccine doses a week in January, fewer the first week, ending up with 1.25M at the end of the month. Since Monday we seem to have received 360,950, a few thousand the first couple of days and then a large amount recorded today, presumably received yesterday. Ontario's portion showed up in the numbers today, we've received 134,600. Next week is the week we are supposed to receive only 25% of the previously expected Pfizer amount, although I have also seen statements we will receive no Pfizer vaccine at all.

(eta: total received to date is 1,122,450)

In the last 7 days we administered 269,653 first and second doses, or 38,521 a day. That means a thousand days to vaccinate everyone. Of course, we expect to get huge numbers of doses in the second quarter and the vaccinations will ramp up. I watched the BC press conference lay out their 9 month plan on tv today, and they are very confident everyone in BC will be vaccinated by September, sooner if more vaccines are approved. I expect their plan will be duplicated, more or less, in every province.

In BC there are 900,000 people under the age of 18 who will not get vaccinated until some time in the future, since companies are still running trials on the youth groups to determine dosage.

Eta 2: there are 7.25 M people below the age of 18, and there are 6.8 M over 65.

[Paxter]

I really hope this is as bad as it gets now and that none of the provinces succumb to ending lockdowns prematurely.

Western Canada has been tracking pretty well for the past month and it looks like Ontario has turned the corner after Ford’s mishandling of the holiday season.

The wild card is the new strains. Hopefully Canada can keep them at bay while vaccination progresses.

[Fragile Bird]

1 minute ago, Paxter said:

I really hope this is as bad as it gets now and that none of the provinces succumb to ending lockdowns prematurely.

Western Canada has been tracking pretty well for the past month and it looks like Ontario has turned the corner after Ford’s mishandling of the holiday season.

The wild card is the new strains. Hopefully Canada can keep them at bay while vaccination progresses.

Well, today's Ontario number is 2359, so it went down, not up. That was heartening. Less heartening is that after months of being thousands of cases behind Quebec, even with a bigger population, we just passed Quebec in total cases.

[Paxter]

Yeah I think Ontario gets a C- for the winter phase of the pandemic. The policy response should’ve been a lot better, though we still easily outperformed the vast majority of US states. 

Quebec gets a B so far from me. 

[Fragile Bird]

That Barrie nursing home with the Covid variant has seen more deaths now, bringing the total to 25. 122 residents and 74 staff have been infected, although I thought I heard a CBC report today that said it was 83 staff.

[Aemon Stark]

4 hours ago, Paxter said:

Yeah I think Ontario gets a C- for the winter phase of the pandemic. The policy response should’ve been a lot better, though we still easily outperformed the vast majority of US states. 

Quebec gets a B so far from me. 

The Atlantic provinces have been mostly lucky, but mandatory quarantines for visitors have almost certainly helped. Though the NL government by no means gets full props due to a series of knee-jerk essentially xenophobic decisions like the "travel ban" that was based on wholly unsubstantiated reports of foreign license plates looking at icebergs in Bonavista. 

The federal government responded well in terms of fiscal stabilizers, but has really been caught unprepared otherwise. PHAC was created in the aftermath of SARS (Ahem, SARS-CoV-1) by the Martin government. But its structures and capabilities were allowed to erode under successive governments, and particularly neglected under the Trudeau government. Vaccine manufacturing capacity was wrecked ultimately by the Mulroney government's privatization program. What we've needed all along was a full national mobilization of resources - total war, in other words - to address this crisis, and the response has been left to the likes of Ford and Legault who have presided over thousands of elderly people in retirement homes and LTC. Sure, it's not as bad as the US, but that's a pretty low bar. 

[Fragile Bird]

Update

Jan         18Mo  19Tu   20We   21Th   22Fr   23Sa   24Su   25Mo                          

BC           301     465     500      564     508    527     472     346                                   

AB           474     456     669      678     643    573     463     362    

SK            290     309     234      227    312     274    260     240          

MB           118     111     154     198     173    216     222     113        

ON         2578   1913   2655   2632   2662  2539   2417   1958

PQ          1634   1386   1502   1624   1631  1685   1457   1203     

Atl-4           26       37      24        35       35      17       21      27              

North           0         2        0           0        1        1        13       2                                          

Total        5425   4679   5738   5959   5965   5832  5325   4251

New cases have taken as dramatic a drop here as they have in the US. Our high number was 9216 on Jan. 8. Well, technically it was 11,323 on Jan. 3, but that number included three day totals over year end for a couple of provinces. Ontario is below 2,000 for the first time since Dec. 28, if you consider the 1913 number on last Tuesday was short several hundred Toronto cases because of a data collection issue. The previous time it was below 2,000 cases goes all the way back to Dec. 14, Dec. 15 being the first day our over 2,000 stretch started. BC, Alberta and Quebec have all dropped nicely as well. NB is still having issues around Edmunston. Nunavut found another pocket of cases, those northern numbers come from them. At least they have 11% of their population vaccinated with first doses, even if it's only a bit under 4,500 people.

The president of casino operator the Great Canadian Gaming Company had to resign because he flew up to a remote indigenous village and tried to say he and his wife worked at a motel in town in order to get vaccinated. They were turned down and the police called. How stupid can you be, as if in a community of a couple of a hundred people they wouldn't know these white people were strangers.

The CTV vaccine tracker has screwed up their numbers in some way, or someone at CTV can't decide how many people live in Canada. Two days ago they showed 2.12% of Canada had been vaccinated, today they show 1.96% with 21k more people vaccinated. Ontario screwed up it's numbers, two days ago we had 218k first doses administered, yesterday we had 217k done, and today we have 214,854 done. I am going to be charitable and assume someone added second doses to the first dose total and then caught their error. We do have over 71k second doses done, which is great. Only 18k people in the rest of Canada have received second doses, because the other provinces decided to do only first doses for longer stretches of time. We also showed 1.9% of Ontario vaccinated yesterday, today it's down to 1.46%. I guess somebody doesn't know the population of the province.

[Paxter]

I wouldn't be too harsh on the provinces that opted for a single jab approach. While there is no doubt that two shots provide the most protection, Israel's Maccabi Health Services has reported a 60% fall in infections, 13 to 21 days after the first shot, in the first 430,000 people who got the dose. That's not bad protection and I can see the benefit in giving it to as many people as possible to arrest the rise in the reproduction rate. 

But yeah, two doses is definitely the best. Maccabi's data on two-dose patients shows very, very few cases after the second dose (20 out of 128,600). 

[Fragile Bird]

The news is looking very good today with Ontario down to 1,740 new cases, the lowest since Dec. 2 when we had 1,723 new cases. The number of people being tested has dropped a lot though. I assume it's because fewer people have symptoms so don't go for tests. Quebec has 1,166, their lowest number since Nov. 25, when they reported 1,100 new cases. I saw a bit of BC's press conference yesterday and they are worried that they have plateaued around 500 cases a day. I remember being so worried in the summer because we could not go below 100 a day in Ontario. I'm not sure we'll get that low because the virus has spread across the province so much.

A made-in-Canada vaccine is going into Phase 2 testing! The Providence Therapeutics vaccine human trial started with 60 people, 45 getting the vaccine and 15 getting a placebo. They have purchased a facility in Calgary for vaccine production. It's an MRNA vaccine, like Moderna's. The goal is to have it ready for January, 2022, which should be just in time for another winter wave that we are already being warned will come. And Quebec's Medicago vaccine is in Phase 3 trials. Unfortunately it will be produced in a North Carolina plant.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-providence-1.5887613

[Paxter]

I agree that the news on ON is great and a big relief. But I really think Ford deserves a lot of blame for his inaction in Nov and Dec. Only his most recent policy changes have really shifted the dial on behavior and led to a falling caseload. 

On the vaccine front, I think all Canadian eyes should be on J&J. JT ordered around 40m of those, so if it provides decent protection then the rollout could be a lot easier. Plus it's a single jab, so that's enough to cover the entire population and give some back to other countries. 

[Fragile Bird]

I have not been able to find an article to confirm or deny that Trump also locked up the first 100 M J&J doses. Since he did it with Pfizer and Moderna it wouldn't surprise me. Apparently J&J has not confirmed any delivery schedule with us. J&J has very big capacity for vaccine production, though, they are promising a billion doses this year. Nobody has lived up to their promises yet, so keep your fingers crossed.

[Fragile Bird]

Update

Jan         20We   21Th   22Fr   23Sa   24Su   25Mo  26Tu  27We                          

BC           500      564     508    527     472     346     407    485                                   

AB           669      678     643    573     463     362     366    459    

SK            234      227    312     274    260     240      232    149          

MB           154     198     173    216     222     113       94      95        

ON         2655   2632   2662  2539   2417   1958    1740  1670

PQ          1502   1624   1631  1685   1457   1203    1166  1328        

Atl-4          24        35       35      17       21      27        11      20              

North          0           0        1        1        13       2          0        1                                         

Total        5738   5959   5965   5832  5325   4251   4016   4207

Not a lot to report today, a slight tick up. Manitoba is starting to look pretty good. They are about to start a 14-day quarantine period on not only people returning from foreign travel but on people returning from travel elsewhere in Canada, and visitors from elsewhere in Canada. People in BC are clammering for the same restrictions, but the premier doesn't sound very enthused about the idea. He believes it would be too hard to enforce.

Meanwhile, 127 out of 130 residents of that Barrie LTC home have Covid-19, plus 85 workers. 45 have now died, including 1 care giver. I heard an interview with a senior doctor at Toronto General, and she suggested we may need to go stricter measures to stop the spread of whatever variant this is, up to and including roadblocks to prevent people from travelling from region to region. She definitely advises against making a run up to the cottage, travelling between regions will spread the variant for sure.

Usually there'd be a bump up in vaccine received today, but of course we're not getting any Pfizer vaccine this week. I assume we'll get some Moderna, but I don't know. 760,899 people have received a first dose, 130,425 a second, 96,459 in Ontario. Only Quebec and and the North haven't administered any second doses yet. 

Pfizer has gotten the government's agreement to count the vials as 6 doses instead of 5, since it's obvious there are 6 doses in each vial and they sold doses to us, not vials. We are now scrambling to get smaller needles, as is everybody else in the world. We've ordered 76 M but we don't know yet when they will be delivered. We've used larger needles so far, I guess the smaller needles will be more accurate in measuring out the doses.   

[Fragile Bird]

FFS. FFS. FFS. How stupid can you be? 

I kept saying that the numbers on the CTV Vaccine Tracker have been wonky, especially Ontario numbers. I haven't recorded all the daily numbers so I can't comment on other provinces, but Ontario is where I live. In my post last night I said at least we have 96,459 people fully vaccinated, since we were showing that many second doses. We don't. Ontario was recording the number of doses, not the number of people, so under the category of second doses they showed both doses. Huh? A lot of people must have been asking about the weird statistics they were posting. The province has now changed their website, showing "people fully vaccinated" instead of doses. It turns out 55,286 people are now fully vaccinated. 

The total number of doses shown is still the same, they moved 55,286 back to the "first dose" column. CTV states that "2.15%" of the population being vaccinated now means "have received a first dose" and are correcting the historical record, although I haven't figured out how to access their past daily numbers. I guess that way if J&J is a one dose vaccine it can be added in without creating a third column. Who knows, maybe they'll add a third column when we know for sure.

eta: watching the Ontario press conference, the lower numbers earlier in the week also reflected lower testing numbers, as happens on weekends. Yesterday's numbers were from 55k tests, todays, which have ticked up, are from 63k tests, but our positivity rate has dropped to 3.3%, the lowest it's been since November.

[Fragile Bird]

Update

Jan        22Fr   23Sa   24Su   25Mo  26Tu  27We   28Th   29Fr                            

BC         508    527     472     346     407      485     546     514                                   

AB         643    573     463     362     366      459     461     543    

SK          312     274    260     240      232     149     244    328          

MB         173    216     222     113       94       95     133     157        

ON       2662  2539   2417   1958    1740   1670   2093   1837

PQ        1631  1685   1457   1203    1166   1328   1368   1295        

Atl-4        35      17       21       27        11      20        32       21              

North        1        1        13        2          0        1          1         0                                         

Total     5965   5832  5325   4251   4016   4207    4878   4695

I guess the two big news items are the new travel restrictions and the bad news from Moderna.

People interviewed at airports either said why do we have to pay for the hotel, or, about damn time, why didn't they do it earlier. International travel hasn't been a big contributor to our new covid cases, but let's face it, they have brought us the new variants. It's been confirmed that the Barrie LTC home was hit with the B117 variant, and now a second LTC home in Bradford has an outbreak. It's been linked to someone who had contact with a traveller. Here we are, a year into the pandemic, and people still don't know better than to meet up with travellers and then go to an LTC home.

The EU has gotten into a fight with Astra Zeneca over late delivery of vaccine doses and have passed a rule allowing them to potentially restrict the export of vaccine. The government says EU officials have assured us that it won't affect our deliveries, but in the meantime Moderna has cut our next delivery by 25%. Apparently everyone has got their next delivery cut because their plant is having a manufacturing issue. We have also been told that we will have the number of doses we have been promised by the end of March. Every province has now started administering at least some second doses, except for Quebec. Well, and the territories, but they aren't provinces.

[Fragile Bird]

Update

Jan        25Mo  26Tu  27We   28Th   29Fr   30Sa   31Su   01Mo                            

BC         346     407      485     546     514    408     473     277                                   

AB         362     366      459     461     543    383     461     355        

SK          240     232     149     244     328     258    238     147          

MB         113      94       95     133      157     166    119      89        

ON       1958   1740   1670   2093   1837    2063  1848  1969

PQ        1203   1166   1328   1368   1295   1367   1223   890       

Atl-4        27        11      20        32       21       15      26      11             

North       2          0        1          1         0          1      10        0                                        

Total     4251   4016   4207    4878   4695   4661  4398  3738

While it's nice to see the numbers coming down, be prepared to see a stupid low number for today, if you check them. Toronto has been migrating it's numbers to the Ontario platform, because there have apparently been duplications, particularly with regard to LTC facilities. Ontario's number today is a mere 745, recently Toronto alone has had 600 or 700 new cases. Mind you, Quebec is over 1,000, so it might not be crazy low. NB has been hit with B117, everybody is still calling it the UK variant, and a LTC facility in Edmunston has a big outbreak.

Trudeau announced a deal with Novavax to produce their vaccine in the National Research Council's plant that is being expanded in Montreal. The expansion started last summer, to produce the vaccine we were supposed to develop with China, until China stabbed us in the back. However, apparently the plant was not being built to GMP standards ("Good Manufacturing Plant") a very high international standard, which required changes to the building plan. It should be finished some time in July, but then has to be certified that it meets GMP, which will take a couple of months. He also announced $25M for a plant being planned for Vancouver which will have the capacity to make 240M vaccine doses a year, but it won't be ready until 2023. The Novavax vaccine was chosen because of the kind of vaccine it is, the plant won't make mRNA vaccines.

I see from the CTV vaccine tracker that we have received 18,000 doses of something today, Pfizer I assume. I've noticed before that vaccine gets recorded over a couple of days, and I wonder if that's because they post it on the federal website as it is unpacked and confirmed, or if the shipments comes in lots over a couple of days.

[Fragile Bird]

I see we've added the Proud Boys to our list of terrorist organizations. I gather Jagmeet Singh was calling for this, but the government had been looking at a list of violent, right-wing organizations for some time. The Capitol attack added a lot of information from intelligence groups.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/canada-adds-proud-boys-to-terror-list-1.5293967

[TrueMetis]

Everyone heard about this COVAX "scandal"? Honest to god I am starting to HATE all of the oppo parties. I don't even particularly like the Liberals, they're far to milquetoast for me, but fuck if the alternatives aren't so much goddamn worse.

Is this how sane American's feel only having the Democratic party as an option?

[Fragile Bird]

5 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Everyone heard about this COVAX "scandal"? Honest to god I am starting to HATE all of the oppo parties. I don't even particularly like the Liberals, they're far to milquetoast for me, but fuck if the alternatives aren't so much goddamn worse.

Is this how sane American's feel only having the Democratic party as an option?

Go read the Covid-19 thread for my comments about the “scandal”. I am livid at the bs hit piece the Guardian did on Canada. It’s all about the fact that the UK and the US are keeping all vaccine they produce for their own citizens until they vaccinate 70% or more of the population. They are using Canada as a whipping boy to re-direct the conversation about their selfish nationalism and labeling Canada as “vaccine nationalists”.

It also pisses me off that Canadian media have jumped on this bullshit to attack the government. The US and UK have 10% and 15% of the country vaccinated but Canada, the country that makes no vaccine, is supposed to give up vaccine we bought.