Thought of the Day - June 27 2021 - By the Numbers

It seems the world is in a strange place at the moment concerning the future of COVID. We are poised to see if therapeutics and vaccines will manage to keep ahead of variants in the coming weeks.

World cases have been pretty much flat over the last few weeks, with South America still clearly the epicentre. South America also hosts five of the top ten countries per capita in new cases and seven of the top ten nations in recent deaths per capita.

But what you will notice is there is now a slight uptick in cases in North America and Europe the two most heavily vaccinated regions in the world.

Looking at more of the most heavily vaccinated countries, cases are not always decreasing

• Chile is bucking this trend and thus is one of the contributors to decreases in South America;

• On the other hand, Mongolia, while rarely reported by the west, has over half of its population fully vaccinated using a mix of AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Sputnik and Sinopharm, but has now become one of the world's hotspots.

Here in Canada, things continue to improve, although the decline in deaths has recently plateaued. BTW, overall Canada is now squarely between Israel and Palestine in the number of deaths per capita since the start of the pandemic, but unlike these other two countries, we are still seeing much higher new death counts.

The COVID-19 outbreak has now spread throughout Yukon, with at least one fatality. It has been traced back to a person who attended a party and was fueled by a more infectious variant (rumours have it it is the Gamma (Brazil, P.1) but only Dr. Tam knows for sure). Illustrating how fragile the situation now is in Canada, the territory now has the highest infection rate per capita in Canada, despite also having the highest vaccination rate.

As mentioned earlier this week BC's active, hospitalizations and death counts have not yet returned to the figures we enjoyed this time last year.

June 25, 2020 June 25 2021

• Total number of active cases: 179 1,096

• New cases: 13 72

• Hospitalized cases: 15 108

• Intensive care: 7 37

• Care facilities currently affected: 7 6

Canada continues to be one of the countries with the highest % of the population with a first vaccination but is still nowhere near the Top 20 for fully vaccinated - that said, we are starting to catch up.

As expected we exceeded the 20% fully vaccinated figure last week, but first vaccinations continued to tail off, as Canada plateaus slightly below 70% - a ceiling that is the envy of the world.

This week's shout-out goes to our other two territories. The Northwest Territories and Nunavut are COVID-free, with no active cases. While we sometimes forget about them, the Yukon has illustrated in recent weeks, how vulnerable they still are.

Cheers

Cliff