Thought Of The Day - By The Numbers

Hi All,

Well it has been a week since I tabulated the numbers.

Remember when Shilpi first sent out her note on March 17th ? Then we were just hitting 500 cases across Canada. As of yesterday we had over 14,000 (11,000 active). This means cases are more than tripling each week. And, as long as testing can keep up, we will be near 50,000 by next Sunday.

These larger numbers are more easy to comprehend using graphs. Here is the number of official cases per million population. We can compare provinces, the Canadian average and I also added in our friends to the south.

As you can see overall Canada is about a week behind the US in outbreak levels, and Quebec is leading the way. Indeed soon stories from Montreal will start to sound like what we have been hearing from NYC.

Testing volumes are still increasing. The good news is we are doing far more than the US. The trouble is the number of cases is going up exponentially, tripling each week, yet the volume of tests are not, so we are getting more and more reactive in our testing.

You can also see in the death rate (I believe all provinces are now reporting all deaths including “with” Corona, not just “solely from” Corona), again Quebec is now starting to follow the US trend.

And a final graph: per capita Active Cases (Active Cases are the number of cases minus those that are resolved (recovered or deceased)). This is the curve we want to flatten as it is a proxy for the load on the medical system. This is also the one that will show when we have finally crested the first wave of infection. Once it declines for a week we will know the measures we are taking are actually having a significant effect, rather just slowing the ramp-up.

In short, the calm will soon be over, parts of Canada are already in trouble. Please keep yourself safe.

Cheers

Cliff