Be cautious about the shared area. Note, though, that the week prior to the shaded area shows the number of new cases had already stopped growing exponentially - again, precisely coinciding with Canada getting serious about social distancing.
It works. We may be able to avoid overloading the health care system. I hope we can take some careful steps towards normalcy - opening up a few more workplaces, for instance, and maybe schools with a great deal of care. It will be much longer before we can safely travel outside the country.
Of course, much of this isn’t just about how many cases there are, but how widespread testing is.
Canada’s population is mainly distributed among a small number of large cities. The more international travel to those cities the higher the risk.
If 100 infected people travel to one city and 10 to another then the city with 10 people are about 2 weeks behind the city with 100. 2 weeks can be significant amount of time in a pandemic.
If you look at the death rate per 1 million people then Canada is in great shape compared to most other countries.
Another comparison is the US rates compared to Canadian rates. Since we’re both developed countries in North America, most factors are similar, so comparing rates may give an insight into how the two countries are doing, respectively.
I’m not a numbers guy, so for back of the envelope calculations, I just rely on the fact that the US population (327.2 million) is roughly ten times the Canadian population (37.59 million), and then multiply the Canadian stats accordingly, and compare to the actual US numbers.
According to the Canadian federal website Leaffan linked to up-thread, Canada today has 3,409 cases, with 61 deaths. Using the Piper-order-of-ten magnitude comparison, that would give 34,090 cases in the US, and 610 deaths.
The actual US numbers today, according to the CDC, are 140,909 cases in the US, and 2,405 deaths.
Either my rough-and-ready order-of-ten is flawed, or there’s some difference between the two countries which is resulting in a significant difference in the disease stats.
The US has currently 10 deaths per million. Canada has 2 per million. Stats are all available on Worldometer. About a week ago, the US was at 2. Hopefully, social distancing limits that type of growth in Canadian cities, but it doesn’t take long for things to trend downwards fast. I live in the NYC metro area and watched it happen right in front of my eyes.
I think the next week will be telling as to how Canada’s situation will evolve compared to the United States’ situation. Will we see new hotspots emerging?
Dr. Hinshaw was on TV today and said we can’t test everybody in Alberta for Coronavirus. Why not? There are just over 4 million people in Alberta. Why can’t everyone have a test? How expensive is a test? I read $50. How many facilities would it take to process it? How portable can these tests be? I think without a vaccine, that only way to safely get back to work is to test everyone. That way you can isolate people carrying the virus with no symptoms.
When the H1N1 virus was a problem, everyone in Alberta was offered a vaccine. I got one. So dealing with that many people must be possible.
Another difference in Canada is that our major cities tend to be more spread out and rely less on mass transit and high rise apartments.
Edmonton, for example, has about 3500 people per square mile. Calgary has 3400. Only a small fraction of the population relies on mass transit - in Edmonton, only about 15% of the population lives within 5km of the city center. Only about 12% of the population uses mass transit to commute.
New York City has 27,000 people per square mile. Los Angeles about 20,000. San Fransisco about 17,000. Boston has 13,000. Chicago 11,000, which is about where Toronto is in population density.
But all the huge hotspots in the U.S. are in highly dense cities. Alberta and Saskatchewan look more like the U.S. western states.
There have been plenty of screwups in Canada. Trudeau took way too long to cut off flights from hotspots, and our ‘enhanced screening’ turns out to have been handing out leaflets to people getting off planes warning them to go home and sef-isolate. It took him until last week to close the illegal border crossing in Ontario, and we allowed in flights from Iran and China LONG after the U.S. shut those flights down.
Here in Alberta, one of our health directors thought it would be a good idea to send health professionals to the airport without any protective gear at all to greet people as they came off airplanes.
A group of 47 doctors and nurses in Alberta and Saskatchewan thought it would be a marvy idea to have.a big 5-day curling bonspiel from March 12 to 17, when the pandemic had already been called and we already had over 1000 cases in the country. Then they went back to work in our hospitals. Twelve of them have tested positive, with three having ‘extensive contact’ with patients and other doctors and nurses before they were tested, causing a number of critical health care workers to have to self-isolate. One of the people who went to the Bonspiel was the head of the Saskatchewan Medical Association, who is now sick with COVID-19. Way to go, professionals.
Thanks for the great information, Sam Stone. I had thought that we are a lot more spread out than American cities and that would help. I agree that mistakes were made and the Drs. who participated in that curling event were not thinking clearly. Especially seeing patients at the end.
Another event that is shown here By March 25, 34 cases were linked to a “super spreader” event, a March 6 prayer meeting held at a private home in Calgary’s Upper northwest zone, with a pastor from Singapore as the featured guest.
I am sure the tests do not exist in that quantity. Shouldn’t it be a priority to make enough tests for all Canadians? I do not see how we come out of this before a vaccine is ready, if we do not have universal testing.
The tests need to be administered by health care professionals. Should we be focussing their efforts on testing everyone, or gearing up for acute care in hospitals? Which is the best use of those health-care professionals’ time and skills?
I don’t know the answer, but “test everyone” has to be balanced against other needs of the health care system.
Sure, universal testing may not be job one. There are other priorities. But I would like to see a discussion of a gameplan to recover once social isolation has done it’s job. And I would like the planning to start now so we are not again caught flat footed. If we need to ramp up testing kit production, I would like to know that it is in the works.
the priority is to keep away from each other. “test everyone” is a matter of developing a fast/cheap diagnostic tool and that’s just coming out now.
If Canada started sequestering people when Europe and the US did then it’s a function of where the infection rate was at the time it was started. Here is the current list in order of deaths per 1 million as of 30-Mar. I’ve left out smaller countries because they are probably skewed too much. I stopped at Canada because that’s the focus of the thread.
191.71 Italy
165.03 Spain
50.42 Netherlands
46.33 France
44.26 Belgium
41.48 Switzerland
35.15 Luxembourg
32.82 Iran
20.74 UK
14.46 Sweden
13.73 Portugal
13.29 Denmark
11.99 Austria
10.94 Ireland
9.56 USA
7.70 Germany
6.26 Panama
5.90 Norway
4.41 Greece
3.87 Dominican Republic
3.51 Ecuador
3.38 Romania
3.16 S. Korea
3.05 Bosnia and Herzegovina
2.44 Canada
Gee, Northern Piper, I thought I was kind of agreeing with you. Testing all Albertans is not our top priority. Not yet.
But, how do we get out of social isolation without it? How do we monitor for new cases without near universal testing? Let’s say in a month new cases are close to zero. Maybe partly because of Summer. But there will probably be a new wave in Winter. What is the gameplan?
So we need a cheap fast test like Magiver said. There is a new five minute test in the States that I don’t know much about.
And again, the effort of testing all Albertans, or Canadians, would be in the same league as was vaccinating all Canadians for H1N1. An excellent use of health care worker’s time.
Going with your math, if the time for a test is changed from 10 minutes to 1 minute, 9 days done.
