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Sigh...One month away from a weekend on Sunbeam. Is sceptical optimism a thing???
Last edited by Shayne74 (4/17/2020 2:02 pm)
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Lenny wrote:
I'm thankful we have Minister John Yakabuski who is an Ottawa Valley boy from Barry's Bay as the Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry instead of some Liberal SJW calling the shots. I'm heading Splake fishing on crown land this weekend and patterning my shotgun in preparation of turkey opener on April 25th and will be surprised if I see anyone.
Can you contact him about getting the park, or at the very least Crown land open for some summer camping?
On a separate note been watching the daily reports from the Ontario government.
The number of Covid cases is up by 564, which I'm pretty sure is our highest jump. On the surface, I was pretty disappointed. Then I compared the number of cases from long term care facilities and saw it jumped but almost 400 at 1467 to 1854.
I would hazard to guess that a good number of the remaining cases would tied to hospitals and other institutions, or family members of the ltcf workers.
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I am pretty sure we are not waiting for a vaccine. The shut down was to manage our hospitals. Its going to be hard to keep things so drastically shut down with hospitals at 25% capacity (with more capacity coming online). I understand that is directly related to measures taken, but the paradox is that we are also not waiting for a vaccine. Tuff spot to make a decision. Also a sharp increase in deaths had more to do with how they assign the data. A lot deaths were not counted if they were not actually tested, but die at say home. A super ramped up testing spread. The numbers to watch are hospital admissions and even more important ICU beds. At some point risk based thinking will have to be returned. Germany reopened schools, because the data showed a trend downward, not because they have a vaccine or there is no risk of getting it, but because they feel they can manage it. We are gonna benefit from these types of actions.
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A large contributor to Germany's partial re-opening is a very aggressive testing program that they are putting into place. They were already among the leading countries in the number of tests conducted per 1 million population and they have plans in place to monitor exposures and testing to control outbreaks or to inform them of needed roll-backs in re-opening.
The most impressive response, in my opinion, was from South Korea where they combined a rigorous digital tracking method including cell phone location and video surveillance to identify and backtrack for other exposures. Those mechanisms work well in highly developed, densely populated countries but aren't an appropriate fit for Canada, US, etc. where the geography, infrastructure and political freedoms are not designed for adoption.
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... The numbers to watch are hospital admissions and even more important ICU beds. ...
Exactly this. The number of infected is the most irrelevant metric to follow because of the significant amount of people who are clearly infected but don't get tested. We really have no idea how many people are infected. But hospital admissions, ICU admissions, and deaths are the 3 important metrics. If we can keep the first two within our health systems capacity while continuing to socially distance to 'flatten the curve', then we'll see deaths start to decrease. And once that happens the government will start to slowly open things up again.... like camping! Always need to bring the conversation back full circle to camping 
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My city has a catchment of 500 000 people, 3 hospitals, and 2 arenas turned into triage centres. We have no one on ventilators, no one in ICU, no one in hospital, and 4 cases in the community.
Likewise there are 0 people in hospital and 6 community cases in the Renfrew Health Unit. 2 cases in hospital, and 2 cases in the community in the North Bay and Parry Sound Health Unit.
Flattening the curve so our healthcare system isn't overwhelmed is not a relevant here. I think decisions regarding closures should be more regionalized than they currently are.
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That is good news! Wondering though if a regional approach would encourage too much travel. I have some Killarney PP reservations I would love to keep : ) I live in the Kawarthas and about half of the cottages are occupied on weekends so people are pretty willing to travel.
It will be interesting to see how things go in Ottawa with them closing a street//streets for biking, walking, hiking. I get that they are saying this is only for people who live adjacent but how to enforce and then you also get into the fairness issue.
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Flattening the curve so our healthcare system isn't overwhelmed is not a relevant here. I think decisions regarding closures should be more regionalized than they currently are.
I afraid I can't agree with you Martin. That could work if and only if you were also willing at the same time to institute intra-provincial travel restrictions. I suspect that would be even less popular than the current situation.
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I've seen reports of antibody testing from the Netherlands and Santa Clara County, California. in both cases they showed that the number of people who had been infected and now had antibodies was many many times greater than the number of people known to have been infected. The net effect is to lower the case fatality rate. The Santa Clara study put the CFR somewhere between "a little worse than the flu" to "twice as bad as the flu". If the CFR is really that low it would be hard to justify continuing the level of lockdown we currently have. Of course it will take more antibody testing before medical authorities are in agreement and ideally we would do some testing in Canada too!
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Let's not forget the recent history from Italy, Spain and New York, mass burials etc. That's not conjecture based on mathematical modelling; those are real deaths and show the real -- not hypothetical -- potential for disaster. So far we seem to be doing well but it's still too early to be sure. Indeed if you look at the recent Canadian rate, it seems to be back to increasing exponentially again and is currently increasing faster than the US. (Based on the slope of a semilog plot of number of deaths per day; see graphs at ). Yes there are some encouraging signs in the data (rate of increase of new cases) but it's is still too early to ease up.
And a problem with comparing the death rate to the flu is that the corona virus is much more infectious.
Edit: a sentence above should read Based on the slope of a semilog plot of the number of deaths. (i.e. delete per day)
Last edited by rgcmce (4/17/2020 8:45 pm)
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...And a problem with comparing the death rate to the flu is that the corona virus is much more infectious....)
And also the CFR changes dramatically if/when health systems get overwhelmed. Nothing in our lifetime has had the potential to collapse healthcare systems like COVID, mainly because like you said it's incredibly infectious, so even a low CFR will get amplified very quickly if systems collapse.
But in a weird way it's actually good news that the virus is more infectious than previously believed, because the more people that have had it and recovered without serious complications, the closer we are to achieving herd immunity.
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"Flattening the curve so our healthcare system isn't overwhelmed is not a relevant here. I think decisions regarding closures should be more regionalized than they currently are."
actually that's not true at all, imagine what would happen if restrictions were lifted and all those potentially infected "southerners" were suddenly allowed free access to their cottages, campgrounds etc. on top of the normal mayhem on the roads, you've now got the added burden of Covid, and the requisite quarantining of exposed 1st responders and medical staff. 1 sick person can cause an entire shift at the fire hall, and a full ambulance crew, not to mention any ER staff exposed to be taken out of the loop for 2 weeks. hospital rooms aren't so much the problem as staffing, how many drs. or nurses can you lose before the hospital is overwhelmed, how many EMTS or firemen can you lock down before the station closes?
it's not about space, it's about people
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it's not about space, it's about people
Absolutely.
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Yeah I agree with you Bob, intraprovincial boundaries would be very difficult to manage. That said, I could see situations where regional restrictions are put in place once we get into the tracking phase of our response to this pandemic. That is one factor that has lead to success in South Korea.
If and when other parts of Ontario are seeing similar occurences to what we are seeing in Frontenac, Renfrew, North Bay and Parry Sound I'm pretty sure restrictions will be eased. Actually I believe they will be eased long before they get to these levels.
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I think in a practical sense the removal of restrictions will not be uniform. But they likely will be uniform as long as the province maintains it's state of emergency. Once that's lifted, the various municipal and county states of emergencies will come into play. And those restrictions will be based on the regional situation.
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"Flattening the curve so our healthcare system isn't overwhelmed is not a relevant here. I think decisions regarding closures should be more regionalized than they currently are."
actually that's not true at all, imagine what would happen if restrictions were lifted and all those potentially infected "southerners" were suddenly allowed free access to their cottages, campgrounds etc. on top of the normal mayhem on the roads, you've now got the added burden of Covid, and the requisite quarantining of exposed 1st responders and medical staff. 1 sick person can cause an entire shift at the fire hall, and a full ambulance crew, not to mention any ER staff exposed to be taken out of the loop for 2 weeks. hospital rooms aren't so much the problem as staffing, how many drs. or nurses can you lose before the hospital is overwhelmed, how many EMTS or firemen can you lock down before the station closes?
it's not about space, it's about people
Thats fine but does that mean we wait for a vaccine....I really don't think that is an option.
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Morning all, as we all appreciate our concerns for society as a whole. Maybe its just me but I don't come here for an political debate. Sorry if I offend some but I wish we'd move on to the sites intended topics/policy.
