It was an interesting diversion but we are now clearly very far from the topic of the thread, so please rein it in.
RickJay
Moderator
It was an interesting diversion but we are now clearly very far from the topic of the thread, so please rein it in.
RickJay
Moderator
Alright, you won’t need to say it twice : )
My sister in the Soo says that there have now been cases of community transmission there. Guess no-one will be able to see my aunt in the retirement home for a while…
It’s being reported that COVID-19 deaths in Ontario and Quebec are 75-80 percent in old age homes.
I remain pretty convinced that while most of us, and most businesses, will be out of lockdown by the end of May, old age homes won’t be out of lockdown this year. And they shouldn’t be.
New Brunswick has been a week with no new cases and only 11 active cases. Premier Higgs announced a loosening of restrictions yesterday. We can golf and get outside. Most importantly, we can increase our bubble by one household! So many of my friends are having fun with interviewing prospective monogamous household partners on Facebook.
This is the first step. If we can go another 2 or 3 weeks with no outbreaks (3 unlinked cases of community transmission within 6 days) then the restrictions loosen a bit further. Hopefully we can co-ordinate something with PEI before the end of summer as well as they have a great handle on things to all appearances.
Fingers crossed that my fellow NBers can keep things up and be smart.
In Alberta there is still a huge divergence between the Calgary area and…everywhere else. Calgary is still getting on the order of 100 new cases per day. In the rest of the province the virus has nearly stalled out. Here in Edmonton we’ve averaged less than 10 new cases per day over the past 14 days, in a region with over a million people.
We have only had 47 people need the ICU in total in Alberta since the start of the pandemic.
This suggests to me that outside of Calgary perhaps we are too locked down. We’re not building herd immunity, our health care system is nowhere near capacity, and time is ticking on every closed business. We can’t keep doing this.
Trudeau has announced rent relief for small businesses. The government will pay 50% of the rent; the tenant will have to pay 25% and the landlord will have to eat 25%. It looks like a good deal all around. It should allow a small business owner to survive and the landlord too. Presumably taxes will have to rise eventually to pay for all this, but them’s the breaks.
If Ontario doesn’t open golf courses in May, my mother will absolutely drive to New Brunswick from Kingston to golf.
Lockdown won’t last that much longer. Still, even another four weeks will do terrible harm to the economy. I think that die is cast; we’re facing the next Great Depression.
I hope they open then. I’d hate to see her take the drive and be turned away at the border. A big part of our plan is keeping the borders as tight as we can. I can see opening up with PEI as they have next to no cases but anywhere else will be a while I think.
Well, my Mom isn’t dumb enough to drive twelve hours and not first check to see if NB opened the border. 
I got a notice yesterday that the schools have extended their shutdown to May 31; this took me by surprise because I actually thought they’d called it for the whole school year. I suppose they would prefer to at least get the high school kids back for exams.
I’ve been playing around with the Covid-19 data in Alberta, and found some interesting things.
One of the things that has bothered me in most of the published data is that they keep showing it in terms of overall infections compared to deaths. This is misleading especially early on when most of the infected people are still not well and the disease for them has yet to run its full course. So I filtered out only the recovered and dead, to get a sense of what this looks like when the disease is done with you.
Unsurprisingly, what I found is that the virus is mostly a risk to those over 70. Here are the numbers:
Age 80+: 50 dead, 59 recovered
Age 70-79: 14 dead, 80 recovered
Age 60-69: 7 dead, 183 recovered
Age 50-59: 1 dead, 265 recovered
All ages: 75 deaths, 1664 recovered
Again, this is only for the people for whom the disease has fully run its course. This seems to me to be a far more accurate representation of the mortality rate for people who become symptomatic enough to be officially tracked in the data, because it eliminates unknowns like people who have been infected and remain asymptomatic. So far, it looks like if you are under 60, the risk of death is very low, but people over 70 should be doing everything they can to keep from being exposed.
Without knowing the specifics of the younger people who died, I would guess that they must have had significant co-morbidities, since there were only four deaths in the entire <60yr old cohort, despite the fact that they also had the vast majority of total infections.
Caveats: The data is thin, and maybe skewed for older people due to more of them being in institutions where they may be getting larger viral loads. It may not hold for people of that age still living alone, and there could be other confounding factors. We just don’t have that data.
Hope this is interesting to someone.
Also, Southern Alberta is still getting slammed with new cases. Northern Alberta, almost none. It is a,puzzle.
If you go here you can see an interactive dashboard built by my staff using the Ontario data updated daily. Go to the second page and you can see the decomposition chart in the bottom right and click on fatal to see outcomes by age. Nothing under 20 and very few under 40, the bulk are over 60. I think the volume of deaths in Ontario give it more statistical significance, but then again it’s has run rampant though seniors homes so they may have been disproportionate infection rates.
Nice analysis Sam Stone. I continue to be frustrated about the increasing caseload specifically in Calgary. I think everyone is socially distancing, and have been for a month or more, so it is somewhat hard to explain. I would guess that the rest of the province will be able to partially re-open first. I would like to open my small office in June. We have plenty of room and just 4 workers. We will see.
I think I will be able to get wage support for two employees. As usual, the self-employed business person seems to be left out.
Wow, that’s really impressive, Fins.
There was conjecture among researchers that ACE inhibitors, a common BP med, may actually assist or speed this virus, and possibly explain why hypertension is such a commonly seen comorbidity. ( Can’t remember what paper it was in, but should be easy to find if interested!)
Thanks Sunspace. Unfortunately the province is only providing data at the Pulic Health Unit level based on their address, so if you in Durham it all shows up under Oshawa.
yeah, all this is a little scary from the fact that you don’t understand much …
Ontario has released a “plan” for repoening the province.
https://files.ontario.ca/mof-framework-for-reopening-our-province-en-2020-04-27.pdf
As a nitpicker and expert in procedural documentation, this really isn’t any sort of a “plan.” “Framework” is a very generous term. It looks great but says very little because nothing is defined.
It does at least note that old people in care facilities need special protection. Honestly, that should be at the BEGINNING of the document; that is where the vast majority of fatalities have been. COVID-19 is dangerous to middle aged people like me, sure, but to old people it’s fantastically dangerous. It’s the difference between recreational skydiving and being in a plane crash.