Okay, not way down. In fact, we’re actually up from yesterday, but we’re still trending down and that’s good.
A word of caution, we are not going to continue declining the way Germany did. The reason is simple, we have a smaller population and the daily deaths are lower, so outbreaks even in a handful of LTC Homes can throw the numbers off.
However, if you look at April 16th on the chart, the trend is undeniable. We’re going to see a spike or two but we are trending down.
Ontario actually did not have the best day today, but if you recall my comments from yesterday then that’s expected because the weekend numbers are sometimes tallied after the weekend. Overall Ontario is doing okay, Quebec is doing worse but improving (see the chart below) and the rest of the country is doing really well.
British Columbia is actually not getting a lot of credit. Not only are their daily reports absolutely incredible, and not only do they have an amazing dashboard, but they also get a lot of travel from Asia, and yet they jumped on the issue and contained it incredibly fast. When this thing is all over, Ontario and Quebec need to get lessons from BC (and Alberta) and make some improvements.
BC, like Ontario and Quebec, is also dealing with outbreaks in senior homes. However, they only had one death yesterday and 3 today.
We can’t forget about Alberta, which is absolutely kicked ass when it comes to testing and containing the issue. It’s spared the worst (the active cases adjusted for the population are higher in Alberta because of their amazing testing numbers).
However, they’ve done an incredible job with testing.
That’s an incredible testing ratio for Alberta, twice as high as Ontario (when adjusted for the population).
Another way to understand how much worse things are in Quebec is to see the population-adjusted hospitalization rate.
BC and Ontario were similar at the end of March, but BC improved its situation a lot. Alberta prevented its situation from getting worse. Ontario has actually contained it well, but Quebec rose up. That’s not to say their situation got out of hand, Quebec hospitals have a lot of capacity to handle a bigger surge, but they did struggle more than others because their March break was before other provinces.
My predictions were aggressive because they assumed a general trend without any new outbreak. However, despite some outbreaks in Ontario and Quebec, Canada is not far off my prediction for today. We’re still on track to end the month at ~3,000 deaths.
Something else that the data tells us is this: while we had outbreaks in LTC Homes, we (both Ontario and Quebec) have contained those outbreaks and prevented them from spreading to the community or other homes. That’s an important point, because of that we avoided the NY (and Italy and Spain and France) situation where their deaths just kept piling up because the infection kept multiplying and growing exponentially.
So there you have it: 1) we’re trending down, 2) other provinces are pretty much almost out in the clear (except Ontario and Quebec), 3) Ontario and Quebec have mostly contained it and now it’s limited to LTC Homes, 4) Ontario and Quebec are starting to get a handle on that as well.
Not only is there light at the end of the tunnel, but we are also close enough to the end that we can feel the breeze coming in and hear the birds chirping on the other side.
Almost there.
