That would be a test for antibodies showing you had the virus and are good to go. Assuming you pass the thermometer test to see if you might have one of the variants and are sick.
Are there checkpoints between Ontario and Quebec? I saw a photograph of one in passing, but I don’t know whether it was a one-off thing or whether they are being set up all around the province.
No checkpoints. I’m not sure what you saw: a RIDE program perhaps?
In the photograph, it was definitely some sort of checkpoint for traffic heading toward the camera, and a Welcome to Ontario sign was clearly visible in the background for traffic heading away. So I dunno.
There are travel information booths near some of the Quebec/Ontario crossings, along with signage. I’ll bet that’s what it was.
Found it!
A checkpoint near the Ontario border.
Apparently Quebec has restricted travel to certain regions.
More details from the CBC.
Huh. Thanks. I hadn’t heard that. There are a half dozen or so crossing points near Ottawa and, of course, they’re not considered risk areas.
Yesterday was a bad day for Canada, over a thousand new cases. (This may be a reporting backlog from the weekend. Still, it continues to rise, especially in Quebec.)
This is of course medically presented cases, not infections. We still don’t know how many people are infected, or getting infected.
Because we still don’t test enough - Ontario is way behind the eight ball - it remains hard to really say how much worse it’s getting. A person diagnosed as having it is almost always sick, and a person who’s sick probably got infected 3-6 days ago.
I was surprised at Ontario’s numbers this morning. The whole province is basically shuttered indoors and yet the number of cases continues to grow significantly. It seems almost impossible.
There was something in the news a few days ago where they were asking us not to cross the provincial border unless necessary.
I live in Ottawa but work in Hull, so that would have affected me if I wasn’t already working at home.
My car as been ensconced in my garage for many days now, which I only do if I anticipate a snowstorm or some other reason for not going out for at least several days. But I did have to go out today, and both street traffic and store traffic (in the drugstore and two grocery stores I visited) seemed lighter than normal but still substantial. The only real difference from normality was plastic shields installed between the cashier and the customer, and the social-distancing markers on the floor that most people seemed to be obeying. Also lots of people with masks (which I don’t believe should be used by the general public, and don’t have any anyway) and wearing latex gloves, which I do have and for the first time, I actually wore.
One of my missions today besides keeping up a nominal grocery stockpile was picking up a parcel at a local post office. It is currently sitting untouched and will remain so for at least 72 hours, as I would like any possible COVID-19 attachments to either the box or the contents to be inert by the time I open it.
Canada is at 8579 cases. So yeah, a bad day for Canada no flattening of the curve yet as we hit a new high for new cases.
Alberta had 64 new cases which isn’t bad. I thought it might be higher coming out of the weekend. Alberta has had trouble keeping up with testing, so there may be higher numbers coming in the next days as they get the chemicals they need.
But the numbers we see now reflect what we did two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago, on Tuesday the 16th of March, I was still going to work, four co-workers crammed into a car, and half-expecting overtime on the weekend. We were still gathering in semi-widely-spaced groups on the production floor, when we were away from our stations at the machines. They were still just wiping things down between shifts.
Eight days before, on the 9th, Canada had recorded its first death from the disease. And on the 11th, the World Health Organization declared the disease to be a pandemic.
On Monday the 16th, the federal government banned all non-essential travellers from entering Canada, except for US citizens and residents.
Things at work would change on Wednesday the 18th, with greater cleaning and a requirement for us to wipe down our stations at the beginning and end of each shift. And they staggered lunchtime even more, so that only the crew on one assembly line was in the lunch room at any given time.
And the planned overtime was cancelled. We started to hear about customer plants shutting down.
On Wednesday the 18th, the Canada-US border closed to all non-essential travellers. Citizens and residents of both countries can of course cross to come home. Foreigners with symptoms were banned from visiting.
On Thursday they announced the coming layoffs. It was a regular payday.
Then on Friday the 20th we got laid off. The federal government advised against non-essential travel overseas.
Then the next week – the week before last! – came the rolling waves of change.
The PM called for Canadians to come hone.
I start to hear of rescue flights to retrieve Canadians stranded overseas. I start to hear of checkpoints between provinces.
Wednesday the 25th, the federal government announces the first version of its support program. $82 billion, 3.5% of GDP.
Thursday: The support program is expanded to include a 10% wage subsidy to small and medium businesses. $107 billion.
Friday. A 75% wage subsidy. Support for even more sorts of things.
By Sunday, a million Canadians have applied for EI (unemployment benefits). A million Canadians have come home.
Monday the 23rd: Ontario declares a state of emergency and closes all non-essential businesses.
Ridership on the trains and buses in Toronto has dropped by 70%. Intercity trains and domestic flights are instructed to bar anyone with symptoms.
So we’ve really only been locked down for maybe a week.
Nice post, Sunspace, trying to be patient.
Canada is 6 days behind the US in deaths per million. It doesn’t seem like much but is is if the curves break at the same.
I just noted that one of the reasons Quebec’s numbers shot up in the last week is they changed how they counted. Prior to March 24, they only counted cases where a test verified infection; now they count cases where it’s just very likely, whether a test proves it or not.
This is really neither good nor bad news; while it may mean growth was not exponential, it just means the problem was maybe worse than we realized.
It is however illustrative of how little we know, and how much is guesswork. When you read how many cases and it’s some precise number, like 8,548, that is absolutely not a clear number at all; it may be wildly wrong, and the province-by-province numbers might be of varying levels of dependability or might not even be counting the same thing. When you read that 100 people have died in Canada of COVID-19 that is probably an exaggeration of the actual increased mortality, but no one actually knows. We have no idea whatsoever - absolutely none, not even anything an epidemiologist would use to hazard a guess - how many people in Canada carry the virus but are non- or mildly symptomatic or have already shrugged the virus off. The situation in hospitals in two weeks might be an absolute war zone, or it might be quite manageable.
I hate to say this but one of the reasons governments are telling us to just stay home is that they’ve no idea what else to do; it’s the only tool in their arsenal, because they’re mostly blind. There isn’t enough testing, so there is no way to identify where the risk areas are or to do practical contact tracing. It is the health equivalent of telling the fire department there is a fire, but that they have to drive around spraying water on every house and hope they get the one that’s burning.
And further to this, I just saw this news report:
Police checkpoints on the bridges between Ontario and Quebec in the Ottawa area. The building I work in is just out of frame in that first picture!
Yeah, I saw that this morning. Apparently there were two hour lineups to get across?
March 31 does not appear to have been that bad a day, suggesting the reporting changes were the reason for the surge in the previous week. Offiically the Canadian tally is 9,489 cases, 101 dead.
Quebec remains the epicenter of the Canadian outbreak, and I suspect it will remain so. Quebec is reporting that they’re running out of PPE for health workers.
In an odd bit of cross border friendship, the town of Stewart, BC is apparently getting supplies to the town of Hyder, AK, despite the travel bans. Hyder is geographically totally cut off from the rest of the United States, but is close to Stewart, and so Hyder gets pretty much all its stuff from Stewart - so much so that the residents of Hyder usually use Canadian money. So, by necessity, the border restrictions have to be eased there.
That is interesting. Good for them.