Thought of the Day - May 23 2021 - By the Numbers

The World

Dang, things are still bad in India. The Uttar Pradesh (read: the biggest state by population in India): Teacher's Union claims they have lost 1,621 to COVID. And the state official count: 3. In short, sad to say, there is no merit in reporting on figures from India.

Meanwhile, it is still South America and Eastern Europe that have the highest number of recent "office deaths" per capita.

Canada

Canada, unfortunately, has hit the 25,000 COVID fatality mark this week. Of course, as you know much of this is due to us failing the care-home system. A March 2021 report released by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) found that Canada had the worst record for COVID-19 deaths in long-term care homes compared to other "first-world" countries. In Canada, care-home deaths represent 69% of the total, versus 41% worldwide average.

Manitoba is now the Canadian hot-spot, leading the country in both cases, deaths and hospitalizations. They came late to the table as other provinces continue to exit their third wave.

British Columbia

BC new cases are now down to the pre-third-wave levels. People are eagerly awaiting restriction reduction news from the province. But let's keep in mind we are still seeing 20 times as many new daily cases and have eight times as many people in the hospital than we had this time last year.

Also, we still have quite a high test-positivity rate, although it has been dropping as of late.

The good news is that wastewater COVID-19 counts have dropped to half from the peak last month.

Looking at BC variants of concern (VOC) unlike the rest of Canada, the UK (B.1.1.7) variant while the highest is not overwhelmingly dominant in BC. Unlike Ottawa, BC is also reporting the Indian variant (B.1.617.2) that was starting to grow in numbers in late April, already overtaking the South African (B.1.315) variant.

Vaccinations

50% of the Canadian population have had a first shot. This means we are still on track for the Trudeau re-election target of 75%/20% before Canada Day.

Using this one-dose figure we are now ahead of the US of A, closing in on the UK and Mongolia. But seriously, looking at a more useful figure we are now ninth in the world for vaccinations per capita - ahead of Germany, but we still have a way to go to catch Mongolia.

At the helm of Canada's vaccination program is now Brig.-Gen. Krista Brodie replacing Maj.-Gen Dany Fortin.

Shout Out

This week's shout-out goes to BC. I thought we would get our butt kicked this time, but we did well when compared to all but the Atlantic provinces; on par with Quebec who got it right this time with the right balance between the medical profession and common sense and thus skipped much of the third wave. Good job Bonnie!

Cheers

Cliff