COVID’s second spring

My winter thread is now behind the times, so this will be a new place to track COVID stories of interest and importance.

One I saw today is not encouraging: More young Canadians getting severe COVID-19, being hospitalized: experts

According to new modelling from the Public Health Agency of Canada, Canada is on track to see a “strong resurgence” of COVID-19 cases across the country if these variants continue to spread and become more commonplace, and if public health measures remain at current levels.

The new long-range projections, released on Friday, show that the highest incidences of COVID-19 are currently being experienced in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and parts of Ontario, while the overall incidence rates are highest among young adults aged 20 to 39 and have declined among older Canadians.

Let’s all do what we can to combat complacency and sustain the public determination to keep acting protectively toward one another.

52 thoughts on “COVID’s second spring”

  3. New data shows COVID-19 pandemic now ‘completely out of control’ in Ontario, key scientific adviser says

    …

    “Right now in Ontario, the pandemic is completely out of control,” Dr. Peter Juni, the table’s scientific director and a professor of medicine and epidemiology with the University of Toronto, said in an interview prior to the briefing note’s publication.

    That stark assessment follows weeks of warnings from medical professionals in Ontario over rising case counts and fast-spreading variants. It comes the same day B.C. announced it will be implementing a three-week “circuit breaker”-style lockdown, with sweeping new restrictions on indoor dining in restaurants, group fitness and worship services.

    Juni said for Ontario, there is now “no way out” of the dire scenario that’s set to unfold over the next few weeks without a widespread lockdown as well — coupled with other measures, including the province providing paid sick leave to essential workers, encouraging Ontarians to avoid movement between regions, and ensuring residents have access to lower-risk outdoor activities.

    “There is no such thing as winning this race with just vaccinations,” Juni stressed. “That’s impossible.”

  12. Before ordering jail time, Duval County Court Judge James Ruth said she was struck by the fact that Hunter’s testimony focused less on how she may have harmed the victim and more on how her actions affected her own family.

    “Her children didn’t create this problem and her husband didn’t, and she talked about how it changed her world and she was getting nastygrams on Facebook and things of that nature and they can’t go to their country club or wherever,” Ruth said. “But I have yet to see any expression, or a significant expression on her regret about the impact it had on the victim in this case!”

    https://apnews.com/article/florida-coronavirus-pandemic-jacksonville-92fecc40640607a3859e75aad1166ec3

  23. Sources with knowledge of the discussions said Ford and his ministers are debating the following proposals on top of the stay-at-home order and shutdown already in place:

    Closing all non-essential retail, no curbside pickup or delivery.
    Further restricting retail hours of operation.
    Restricting curbside pickup (only permit non-essential retail to deliver).
    Shutting down non-essential construction, warehouses and manufacturing not related to health, food or automotive.
    Tightening capacity of indoor events like places of worship, weddings and funerals.
    Increasing fines, increase policing powers.
    Cabinet met late into the night Thursday. Sources said they talked about the option of a curfew but ultimately decided against it.

    https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5990092

  28. Health officials in B.C. are being urged to accelerate the province’s vaccine rollout over fears a constantly mutating virus could outrun currently available vaccines if left to spread without control for months.

    Modelling experts at Simon Fraser University say the threat of a variant mutation that will render vaccines useless is a looming fear and opportunities to stem the spread of current variants in B.C. were lost.

    https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5998704

  29. Colijn said Canadian health officials were warned early in 2021 about the potential of a variant with a higher transmission rate — and that the variant first detected in the U.K. gave a clear and rare picture of how a more transmissible variant can quickly threaten the stability of health-care systems.

    But Colijn said despite warnings from modellers, provinces failed to act — a failure she hopes won’t be repeated.

    “It was disregarded because total case numbers were low, so how could there be something growing?” she said. “Public health and policymakers did not get the message that high-transmission is a serious, serious thing.”

  33. Ontario hospitals on the verge of enacting ‘last resort’ triage protocols

    …

    The province also reported on Wednesday that 2,281 patients are currently hospitalized, with 877 patients in intensive care.

    It’s believed the province could be forced to enact triage protocols if ICU admissions related to COVID-19 exceed 900.

    “I just can’t say strongly enough just what a horrible position we’re in the health-care sector right now and why it’s so important that we really drive these numbers to the ground,” Dr. Chris Simpson, a cardiologist and executive vice-president of Ontario Health, told CTV News.

    “We simply have to get COVID under control if we’re going to have our health-care system back in a functional state again.”

    Ontario’s triage protocols, developed in January, are meant as a last resort to determine who should be given intensive care when the demand for critical care exceeds the supply.

    “It’s going to be extremely emotionally difficult for staff to have to make these decisions to tell family members that we’re not able to offer ICU-level treatments that we would have been able to offer in the past,” said Dr. Erin O’Connor, the deputy medical director of the University Health Networkemergency departments.

    The situation is already dire in the Toronto area, where health officials have been forced to transport patients to other districts as ICU beds in the city fill up. Ontario’s COVID-19 modelling numbers from April 16 suggest the province could see nearly 10,000 new COVID-19 cases per dayby the end of May, even under strong public health restrictions.

    “There is a wall that’s going to be hit at some point,” Simpson said. “We don’t know where that is yet. We do believe we can build about 200 new ICU beds per week for the next three weeks or so. It gets increasingly tougher, but we think that that will take us into mid-May and we can only hope that things will be cresting by that point.”

    Under the triage protocols, all patients are assigned four colours — red, purple, yellow and green — depending on how doctors perceive a patient’s likelihood of surviving for another 12 months. Patients deemed red are predicted to have a 20-per-cent chance of surviving for the year, while patients deemed in the green have more than a 70-per-cent chance of surviving.

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