There's no good time for a wave of COVID, but this would be a particularly bad one
When the second wave began, fewer than 20 Ontarians were in ICU bed. It's almost 300 today. This could end badly.
Hey folks, just a quick end-of-week note to mark our new publishing date, Friday, here at Code 47. As I noted in last week's (delayed) update, my original plan of publishing on Sundays was running into the reality that I'm fried on the weekends and need to recharge. Fridays are a low-ebb day for me, so here we are.
I already had my say here at Code 47 earlier this week, so this will be a short one. I did want to note just one thing: there has been an ominous development in my home province of Ontario. After weeks of real, obvious progress on reducing COVID-19 case counts, that progress has stalled and reversed. We knew that was going to happen, but we didn't know when it was going to happen. And it probably happened too soon.
Ontario's second-wave decline seemed to hit resistance around the thousand-new-cases-a-day mark. There's probably three explanations for this: people were probably naughty and travelled over the holidays, and then made up for it by being extra vigilant after. That beneficial effect is now behind us. Also, of course, the province has begun to reopen, and that includes getting schools open again, even in hotspots like Toronto. So that'll help spread cases. And then, of course, there are the new, apparently more contagious variants — which seem to be getting more prevalent in Ontario.
Like I said, we knew the fall would stop. I'm just not sure it stopped having fallen far enough. It briefly dropped below a thousand a day, but now it's coming back up — and this is the rolling average, not just individual highs and lows that can be explained away as blips or data anomalies. Dr. Jennifer Kwan in Ontario has done incredible work taking the available information and consolidating it into easy to read Twitter threads, and, like, look at the frickin' curve. It's curving the wrong way.
Worse, take a look at the hospitalization numbers, especially for the intensive care units, which as I wrote at TVO.org, are really the only metric that matters. They were also dropping. Now they're flattening out.
This is bad. I looked back through Dr. Kwan's tweets to try and pin when the second wave in Ontario began. There's no obvious way to pick a specific day, but you can clearly see that a steady decline in cases had flattened out by the end of August, began to rise in early September and was sharply rising by mid-September. When that happened, Ontario had fewer than 20 COVID-19 patients in its ICUs. Today, it's about 300. We are potentially starting a third wave with the hospitals already near their maximum COVID-19 capacity.
We had good news on Friday — a new vaccine, AstraZeneca, has been approved for us in Canada. Millions of doses are expected soon — the first shipments imminently. Help is on the way. But we have just enough time for a third wave ... and in Ontario, at least, we might find a way to sneak it in before the vaccines let us crush COVID-19, hopefully for good.
Well, on that cheerful note, let's recap the week and get our weekends started — my weekend, at any rate!
I did my usual videos at the National Post, of course.
And also this one.
In a column for the Post, I basically gave up on having anything new to say about Canada's horrific military procurement, and honestly just unburdened myself for a thousand words. "Canada. Cannot. Procure," I wrote. "That's it. That's the column." (That actually isn't the entire column).
I was busy at TVO.org, of course, too.
I wrote about how we are finally starting to get to the point where at-home testing for COVID-19 is possible. My kids' school is part of a trial project that makes a lot of sense. Could have used it a few months ago, when I had to get them both swabbed after they came down with colds. Read that here.
And talk about good timing! On Thursday, I wrote about how some new vaccines were imminent, and Ontario better be ready to roll out more than just the Moderna and Pfizer doses we were officially expecting. And then on Friday, as noted above, one of them got approved. Read that here.
Also from me this week, at The Line, I wrote about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau skipping out on the Conservatives' motion to find that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs. "This prime minister, better than others," I wrote there, "must understand that he doesn't have the luxury of governing only for today. The political pressures and diplomatic complications of this moment will fade into the mists of history, and what will be remembered, not least by the Uyghurs, is the core moral issue — when a major Western country's Parliament was prepared to declare what was being done to them a genocide, the leader of that country, a self-styled progressive, feminist and champion of the vulnerable made a political call ... and skipped the vote."
Read the rest at The Line — and subscribe to it today. It's worth it, believe me. And supporting independent journalism is more important than ever.
OK, well, there we go. Our first Friday edition of Code 47 is in the bank. Have a great weekend, dear readers. Until next time.
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