Canadian COVID-19 News

[NaClyDog]

Originally Posted by redhead

But I have to say it's an acquired taste, after a couple of weeks we were both watching to see who would win the women's championship.

HURRY!!! HURRY HARD!!!!

[robert sailor]

Originally Posted by redhead

Hah! That Netflix one is funny.

A couple of years ago we were house sitting for our friends up on the Sunshine Coast in BC. I settled in to watch TV and found three curling channels!! No joke.

But I have to say it's an acquired taste, after a couple of weeks we were both watching to see who would win the women's championship.

Yes curling is an acquired taste but don't ever underestimate the skills involved in playing that game...it takes years and years for the most talented to get as good as they are.

[Montanan]

Well I will Hurry up on the thread drifting with a short humorous video of the American Olympic Ladies team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWamd0zuBt0

[redhead]

Originally Posted by robert sailor

Yes curling is an acquired taste but don't ever underestimate the skills involved in playing that game...it takes years and years for the most talented to get as good as they are.

Oh, I know, we wound up scheduling other things to do around curling. I'm in awe of them. I should have phrased it differently - we definitely acquired the taste!

[jackdale]

Originally Posted by NaClyDog

HURRY!!! HURRY HARD!!!!

Close your eyes during women's curling and it becomes the the most erotic sport on the planet.

[Pelagic]

Originally Posted by jackdale

Close your eyes during women's curling and it becomes the the most erotic sport on the planet.

Lol....Yes but the sound of a hard take-out or even a delicate wick and roll , makes my stones drop!

[Cpt Pat]

Originally Posted by Montanan

Well not great news today on two fronts as to Covid-19

https://www.yahoo.com/news/coronavir...121847378.html

A major new study in one of Europe's worst affected countries for the coronavirus finds no evidence of widespread immunity to the virus developing.

Just 5% of Spaniards were detected to have antibodies to the virus.

Fourteen percent of people who previously tested positive for antibodies tested negative just weeks later.

The study suggests people who experience mild symptoms do not have long-lasting protection.

"Immunity can be incomplete, it can be transitory, it can last for just a short time and then disappear," Raquel Yotti, the director of Spain's Carlos III Health Institute, said.

Another scientist involved said: "In light of these findings, any proposed approach to achieve herd immunity through natural infection is not only highly unethical, but also unachievable."



The World Health Organization states that there is emerging evidence that the virus could be airborne transmitted which makes exposure much more likely as to distance and as to lingering in the air.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/airborne-...121733735.html

"From the start of the pandemic, the WHO and other public health organizations have focused on the virus’s ability to spread through large droplets that are expelled when a symptomatic person coughs or sneezes.

These droplets are heavy, relatively speaking, and fall quickly to the floor or onto a surface that others might touch. This is why public health agencies have recommended maintaining a distance of at least 6 feet from others, and frequent hand washing.

But some experts have said for months that infected people also are releasing much smaller aerosols when they cough and sneeze. More important, they expel tiny aerosols even when they breathe, talk or sing, especially with some exertion.

Scientists know now that people can spread the virus even in the absence of symptoms — without coughing or sneezing — and aerosols might explain that phenomenon.

Because aerosols are smaller, they contain much less virus than droplets do. But because they are lighter, they can linger in the air for hours, especially in the absence of fresh air. In a crowded indoor space, a single infected person can release enough aerosolized virus over time to infect many people, perhaps seeding a superspreader event.

For droplets to be responsible for that kind of spread, a single person would have to be within a few feet of all the other people, or to have contaminated an object that everyone else touched. All that seems unlikely to many experts: “I have to do too many mental gymnastics to explain those other routes of transmission compared to aerosol transmission, which is much simpler,” Marr said."

If I may be permitted the indulgence of posting from the U.S. --

Doing nothing has caused havoc in Sweden. We should learn from that. Their approach to just "build herd immunity" has been a disaster. And their economy was hit just as hard as everywhere else.

Personally, I think it's time to impose penalties for not wearing masks in public enclosed areas -- just like we do with not using seatbelts. Remember: "Click it - or ticket?"

Just telling people that wearing seatbelts was for their own good didn't work. Seatbelt wearing was only widely adopted when people faced getting fined. And telling people now to wear masks for the good of society absolutely won't work with the more selfish among us.

A $500 fine first-offense infraction, with a criminal penalty for repeated offenses, sounds about right to me.

It's too bad we have to force people to care about their fellow citizens but, we burned through a $ trillion with the "shutdown" and it got us right back where we started. It was wasted money and economic suffering caused by non-compliance. It's time for a different approach. Penalties.

[Cpt Pat]

Advocates of the "herd immunity" hypothesis should read this report:

Chinese study: Antibodies in COVID-19 patients fade quickly

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by redhead

Hah! That Netflix one is funny.

A couple of years ago we were house sitting for our friends up on the Sunshine Coast in BC. I settled in to watch TV and found three curling channels!! No joke.

I thought that was standard everywhere .

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by hpeer

OTOH please recall that the “granularity” when viewing the USA is very different from almost any other country. Canadian data is 10x more granular because you have 1/10 the population we do. In fact we are roughly equal in population to the entire EU, but no one suggests we look at the EU as a single unit.

I don't disagree, but the fact is that nations interact with nations, not with subsets of nations. The very same granularity can be seen in Canada, and it can get down to the county, city and even neighborhood level in Ontario, but no foreign nation sets policy based on this level of measurement.

[Cpt Pat]

Originally Posted by desodave

I don't see how "PC" affects this discussion at all. Canadians have largely accepted a science-based approach (and an evolving one) espoused by our medical health officers. In our province (BC) Dr Bonnie Henry is overwhelmingly popular and people have followed her advice overwhelmingly. We have a total of less than 200 deaths, new cases range between 10-30 per day, and large parts of our economy have continued to operate. Our population is approx 5 million people.
We look south of our border in horror- seeing huge rising death tolls, rapidly rising infection totals and an ongoing culture war. It pains me to see such suffering and discord among our close neighbors. And while it lasts, I want to see our border with the USA remain closed to recreational travellers because of it.
I'm on my boat now in Desolation Sound, my 4th trip of the year to the Sound. There were some early park/anchorage closures but they lasted for less than a month. It is my local cruising ground and I've made a decision to stay local this year and to isolate on our boat at anchor. I'm happy that BC has done well enough that travel within the province is now officially encouraged - as long as we minimize contacts with other people. However, we're still cautioned to avoid many small coastal and aboriginal communities because of their lack of resources.
It's a matter of respect imo, respect for other people while I'm enjoying myself. There's nothing "PC" about that at all, nor about preferring science to conspiracy theories and partisan political bickering.

Outsourcing jobs has been very popular in the United States. Do you suppose we could out-source our government to Canada?

Seriously. The U.S. has the world's oldest continuously-operating, democratically-enacted, constitutional form of government. Everyone else has had an opportunity to improve on it. I see our biggest problem is our winner-take-all electoral system that guarantees extremism. One where many, if not a majority of voters (like the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections), get no representation at all.

The parliamentary system grants proportional representation that discourages severe extremism. Of course, it would take some cultural adjustment here in the States. Our media would hate it since it's about as exciting as going to the Roman coliseum to watch gladiators sit down to work out a compromise. But I, for one, would much prefer the boredom of competence to the horror show we here in the States are living through right now.

I do take some comfort in knowing our Neighbors to the North are doing well and maintaining their sanity. It must be, as the saying goes, like sleeping next to a bear. A bear that's infectious.

[OloteleMtn]

Always with the attacks on the president.....isn't that contrary to the terms of service for CF? If he was a "mad king" the states would not be setting their own policies for dealing with COVID-19, not all of which have been successful. Please leave the politics out of it, we all have enough to deal with as it is.

[CruisingCouple]

Originally Posted by Cpt Pat

Advocates of the "herd immunity" hypothesis should read this report:

Of course anti-bodies disappear after awhile. It's completely normal. We got a pamphlet that explains it when we got our test results from the clinic and lab. In a normal person with a healthy immune system the "memory" for the infection is stored in lymphocytes. If the infection tries to come back later, those kick in and produce anti-bodies again much faster than they were produced by the first infection.

It's called secondary immune response.

It would be best to consult your medical care professional for medical advice and information instead of relying on the internet or the so-called "news".

[CruisingCouple]

Originally Posted by Cpt Pat

Outsourcing jobs has been very popular in the United States. Do you suppose we could out-source our government to Canada?

The government here is doing just fine. Canada, in the whole country, doesn't have even the population of California. And they have conducted only about 3 million tests there.

The US has run the second highest number of tests of any nation in the world, well over 40 million. And the US has a much better dataset to work with. Back in May all that were tested were sick because of lack of testing. By June it was found that 17% tested were not getting sick at all because testing was expanded. Within two weeks it was expanded further and found that roughly 50% getting tested positive were not getting sick. Approaching the middle of July they have raised it to almost 85% that test positive but never get sick from it.

It was the government that ramped that up. The US has run more corona tests than there exists for population in all of Canada.

And I hate to burst the bubble, but masks and lockdowns are not the cure. The cure is in the people testing positive on either viral or antibody tests that never get sick from it. We're supposed to go back on Aug 5 and get another serum test. And it's free, paid for by the government.

At the current time, science does NOT have the answers, despite all the hoopla over following "science". They are still collecting data. It is the MSM that is the real problem. They are the true enemy of the people because the MSM applies the political slant to everything they publish, print or broadcast. The MSM does not propagate information that is even remotely accurate. And the really sad part is that both the political and scientific communities have both jumped on the MSM bandwagon.

[fivecapes]

Originally Posted by CruisingCouple

The US has run the second highest number of tests of any nation in the world, well over 40 million.

Total number of tests is not as meaningful as you think. With the 3rd highest population in the world, you're supposed to have a 'high' total number of tests.

So as an armchair epidemiologist (that looks right), I'd like to point out what's far more meaningful is tests/capita where US testing rate is nowhere near 2nd, is worse than UK and Russia, and around Spain.

Furthermore, while Canada has tested only 84,000/mio vs 126,000/mio in the US, her case/test is only 3.4%, well below the rate in the US of 8.0%, indicating a less than half the prevalence of infected in the populace as compared with the US.