2021-08-13 General

Hospitalizations

An independent statistician pulled together this graph:

Why does Quebec have such a fall-off in hospitalizations/confirmed case and ICU admissions/confirmed case when the other provinces do not? Because Quebec does a better job testing/finding cases, so the denominator is bigger.

Note that the most recent data is excluded because the episode date is when the symptoms started (or test date if they don’t know the symptom start date), and it generally takes about two weeks to go from recognized case to hospitalization, so he excludes the last two weeks.

Transmission

This article says that the Kootenays might follow Kelowna, that cases are rising worryingly quickly there.


This article reports a study which linked summer 2020 California wildfires to a significant rise in COVID-19 deaths. They show a correlation, which granted is not necessarily causation, but small particulate air pollution has been shown to degrade the immune system.

Mitigation Measures

Canada will require all air passengers to be vaccinated, probably starting at the end of October. While I can see this would really really suck if you were not vaccinated and had to travel suddenly (like if your mother was hospitalized urgently), I can also see that the airlines would really like to have an excuse to get unruly anti-vaxxers out of their hair.


Canada will require all federal employees to get vaccinated.

Recommended Reading

This article is about parents of children and COVID-19.


This article is about the difficulty of finding an analogy for vaccines.


This article is about pandemic/Delta burnout.

Arnold Schwarzenegger lambasts unpatriotic anti-vaxxers.