Canada and the Coronavirus

The Quarantine Zone
103

I agree. I’ve said it a dozen times; the international system we take for granted, where the world is divvied up into sovereign nations and international organizations are largely powerless, is part of the problem.

But pandemic preparedness does not mean stuff you do after you know one is on the way. It’s what you do BEFORE that. The world is always at risk of something like this happening, and it’s almost always going to be something like a new influenza or a SARS. Canada should be perpetually ready to release stuff like PPE, basic respirators, and other rudimentary equipment, and should have a contingency plan for how to react in these situations and roll out the stuff and the information.

After all, stuff like masks are cheap. There really is not particularly good reason NOT to have a billion masks in a warehouse, and I use the word “billion” quite literally.

104

The problem with that is, these things don’t last forever. You can’t just buy a billion today and expect they’ll be perfectly usable a decade from now.

What you need is a robust system that actually maintains stockpiles. That is, buys them on a regular basis, rotating out the old stock for use before it atrophies, but maintaining a sufficient stock to cover a surge in demand at the beginning of a pandemic.

But we also need earlier warnings, so we can ramp up production, because in a prolonged pandemic, usage will stay high for a long time. The more you can produce, and the earlier you start producing it, the better the results will be.

Of course, all of this will cost money. And every year that passes between the last pandemic and the next will increase the likelihood of someone cutting that funding to make things looks better in the fiscal short term.

105

I am confident the government can find competent people with experience in logistics. This isn’t a mysterious sort of sorcery.

106

Sure, they can find them, but will they keep them? That’s my concern. Obama found lots of them, Trump fired most of them. I still recall some of the shenanigans Harper pulled as PM to make his budgets look better. It only takes one term for people like that to ruin everything. Having to re-build a stockpile system every 10 years or so isn’t very efficient, and leaves you vulnerable for at least some part of the time.

107

Same old arguments for offshoring jobs. I am not talking about trade barriers. I am for economic security and control within our borders. We lose more quality jobs every year. They are not replaced with equal or better jobs. Our wages stagnate as we go into more personal and governmental debt. Fair trade. Logical trade. Is fine. Cut your own throat trade with countries that have lower wages and standards is BS. Eventually you are at those lower standards or worse. Because you are not producing product or jobs. The math is simple.

108

Yes, the government is capable of fucking up. They already have, as evidenced by our lack of a strategic reserve. That is my point; we should have had one.

109

What about all the hospital presidents getting multi million dollar salaries PLUS a multimillion dollar bonus. Why? For successfully cutting things to the bone. Staffing, supplies, advances, development, preparation inventories, cuts, cuts, cuts. I’m pretty sure health care workers would rather have the right equipment, full staffing and actual freaking support for their needs, from the top, instead of the reverse. And instead of clapping, singing, and honking horns. Maybe stand with the nurses when they demand better working conditions instead of sending what amounts to thoughts and prayers.

I’d also like to point out that plenty of those now deemed essential, like migrant farm workers, grocery clerks, truck depot workers, fast food workers, delivery drivers, who put themselves at risk for all of us, those people we weren’t willing to see get a minimum wage of $15. If you’re scared for your loved ones imagine how they feel. But we haven’t raised the minimum wage in a truly shameful amount of time. And all the people bitching that $1200 a month isn’t enough to live on? Yeah, that’s what a minimum wage earner makes in a month of 40 hr weeks.

Nursing homes are another example. No one denies that it must be horrific to know your ‘at risk’ loved one is locked into a facility where Covid’s running amok. You can’t even visit. Instead of heartwarming news stories of the family singing and waving to gran from the lawn, they should be reminding people that workers in these homes have been screaming about deteriorating staffing etc, families were screaming for inspecting and monitoring, but there were no votes to get it done.

And now teachers are gonna try and save your kid’s year through their computer, working from their homes, changing everything about their lesson plans, overcome the tech issues and try to get their 30 kids to the finish line without losing a year or their teachings. That’s a lot of stepping up to expect when they don’t always get support politically for pushing back against government cuts and trying to protect the quality of their student’s education.

I guess I’m hoping we learn some lessons from this and make improvements, to support those we really rely on.
And not just with gestures, but actual change.

110

Do you have any evidence this is true? The pandemic has kicked the economy in the ass, but until it happened - and it’s kicked EVERY economy in the ass, even the ones we trade with - the number of jobs was fine, and they were good jobs.

At the end of 2019 the unemployment rate was 5.5 percent, which is quite low. The median salary was likely as high as it had ever been, even accounting for inflation (I say likely because it definitely was in 2018; 2019 numbers aren’t reliably out yet.) Those are facts.

It is not at all simple, actually. The concept of comparative advantage isn’t the easiest concept to grasp, but if you don’t get it you cannot understand the impact of trade (ANY kind of trade - international, interprovincial, anything) at all.

111

Premier Jason Kenney just gave projections for Alberta in a 15 minute speech. They expect up to 800,000 Albertans infected by the end of summer. That is the relatively optimistic assessment. One in six Albertans infected.

That number does seem high to me as the curve does not seem to be moving in that direction that quickly. We will see. Expect social isolation until at least end of May. That is really going to be hard on a lot of people.

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/one-in-six-albertans-could-contract-covid-19-new-projections-show-1.4886693

112

Yeah, two more months will be really tough. The economy will be totally devastated if we can’t start rolling workplaces back up soon - not all of them, but ones reasonably safe to bring back on.

One can hope he’s wrong.

113

I and at least one co-worker got our first CERB payment of $2000 today (April 8th), direct deposit, in my case 2 and a half weeks after applying for EI after being laid off on the 20th of March. Given that the CERB program was only announced on the 25th of March, and legislation still had to be passed in Parliament, the federal government has been moving very quickly.

114

Nevermind

115

Our premiere did about a 1/2 hour presentation on the virus yesterday, discussing the models in detail, their assumptions, where the data comes from, other countries they are watching, what our supplies are, and what the route out of this would be after May. I was impressed.

It is refreshing to see a leader who knows in detail what he is talking about, has a frank public discussion, and is getting his information from experts. Kind of different than another leader who was seriously warned in November about this problem and can’t talk without lying.

116

He made it very clear that the number of detected cases is a function of the tests being done. If they did 10 times more testing, there would be 10X more confirmed cases.

117

That is probably not true. It makes an error in assuming the populations are the same.

Allow me to expand; I just looked up the Ontario numbers, and 88,698 people have been tested, of whom 5,759 appear to have the virus.

Assuming that 886,980 tests would yield 57,590 infected people is not a logical assumption. The people who have been tested are disproportionately people who have presented an indication that a test is merited (e.g. they are sick) or they are suspected of having it based on being higher risk (they are in a household with a sick person, they just got back from Italy, etc.) Were you to randomly test an additional 798,282 people, you will be testing a sample of people who may not have as many sick and high probability infections, and so the percentage of infected people among those tested would likely fall.

Incidentally, if you’re thinking the low percentage of infected people is good news, it’s not. It would be MUCH better news if every single person tested was infected - what that low figure tells us, when you then compare it to the 200 dead and 200+ currently on ventilators, is that the disease is

  1. Really, really dangerous if you get it, and
  2. Has lots of room for growth.

The potential still exists for it to overwhelm the health care system.

118

When I looked at the graph showing 800,000 infected in Alberta by the end of Summer, it only works if you assume there are multitudes of more infections that have not been tested or confirmed. The current numbers or graph does not get to 800,000 in that time period, with its current curve, or an increasing curve.

I agree testing was done on people the most likely to be infected. 10X more random tests would likely not yield exactly 10X more infections, I would also expect the percentage to be less. But it would bring identified infections up a lot, as the rate of infections as a percent of tests has held quite steady. 10X more tests (about 400,000) would probably make Alberta look like the most infected province in Canada. I don’t mean to just speak about Alberta, just using it as an example and trying to work through the numbers.

As an example, every day we have a lower new case count, and you go look at how many tests were completed that day, it was also lower.

They are now expanding testing in the next hot spot - Calgary. As a strategy to get back to work, Alberta is working on making testing nearly universal.

119

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a detailed document on Alberta’s models and results, as of yesterday:

https://www.alberta.ca/assets/documents/covid-19-case-modelling-projection.pdf

120

I’m watching the presentation by Dr Theresa Tam and others of the models used in the federal projections. Very interesting.

121

thanks.

Saskatchewan looks good. Quebec - yeesh.

122

A phrase I hadn’t seen before: ‘respiratory etiquette’.