Thought of the Day - October 3 2021 - By the Numbers

The world is still in a good place. Cases are down by 30% over the last month, and daily deaths down by 25%.

While there are a number of outliers, Asia, Africa, even South America continue to see daily case declines.

Cases in Europe, while high, have been fairly flat over the past couple of months. However, looking at deaths over the past month, despite all the efforts spent on vaccines, deaths continue to slowly increase across the continent. As fatalities have increased by almost 25% over the last month, this means that case fatality rates have also increased What we have to hope is that they have been pursuing a "don't test, don't tell strategy" and thus new cases are higher than they pretend. If not . . .

Led by the US and Mexico, cases in North America are in rapid decline. Hospitalizations also continue to decline in the US and even deaths have now plateaued.

Thus it is places like Canada and Oceana that are bucking the global trend. Here in Canada, we are still teetering on the edge, not sure if we will see a continued decline or if this is just the calm before the storm. Sorry to say it looks like last week was a false top.

Cases are once again heading up in many parts of the country. Specifically, the Northwest Territories, the Atlantic provinces (apart from PEI) and now once again across the western provinces. BC, Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, are all heading back up. Ontario and Quebec remain vigilant and are the main reason that our fourth wave figures are holding fairly steady at an aggregate country level.

Homing in on the Northwest Territories, they currently have the highest new case rates ever. They are right up there with the top US states. That said, they are still eclipsed by the massive outbreaks in Alaska - now nearly double anywhere else.

This week's shout-out goes to Nunavut. Cases have dropped 75% in the past week, thus they continue to have the lowest per-capita case rates across Canada and the US.

Cheers

Cliff