on Monday, November 23.
Canada crushed the Covid-19 curve but complacency is fueling a deadly second wave
By Paula Newton.
Canada crushed the Covid curve but complacency is fueling a deadly second wave (msn.com)
Canada’s largest province is under a lockdown to slow a second wave of coronavirus cases.
“At least we’re not as bad as the States.”
With the United States population in 2020 of 333,546,000 and
The current population of Canada being 37,858,890. Canada is doing an admiral job of preventing Covid-19 cases than we are. There numbers being 435,330 cases (active 72,336 – recovered 350,011 and Fatal at 12,983 deaths) versus The United States at 15.511,403 cases (active 8,037,936 – recovered 7,180,627 and Fatal at 292,480 deaths).
But at what cost to their economy?
Seven percent of U.S. counties have seen more per-population coronavirus deaths than Manhattan – The Washington Post
Those were the words uttered by so many Canadians during the first wave of coronavirus, perhaps without malice although with a good dose of smugness.
But that complacency may have helped fuel a deadly second wave in Canada that is now straining hospital capacity in nearly every region of the country as health officials impose more restrictions and lockdowns.
“What you’re saying is we’re better than the worst country in the world,” says Amir Attaran, an American-raised Canadian professor of law and public health at the University of Ottawa during an interview with CNN.
For months, Attaran has been an unsparing critic, warning that by measuring itself against an American yardstick, Canada’s Covid-19 response was bound to falter. And falter it has.
“Over the last few days, we’ve seen new records of Covid-19 cases in a number of provinces. Hospitalizations are rising, families are losing people and our most vulnerable are at risk. Just because we’re getting closer to vaccines doesn’t mean we can afford to become complacent,” warned Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a press conference.
So, what went wrong?
“You need to drive community transmission to almost nothing or near nothing and then do the aggressive testing contact tracing and isolation which we never did,” says Attaran.
During the first wave of Covid-19 Canadians were mostly compliant, cautious and serious about staying home, masking up and following orders issued by earnest public health officials. And the pandemic was rarely politicized.
But in early fall, Canadian public health officials warned that private,
household gatherings were fueling a surge in cases and community transmission.
Then, Canadian Thanksgiving in early October seemed to seal the country’s fate as infection rates surged for weeks afterwards.
Canada’s numbers are heading in the wrong direction.
Canada has logged record new cases and deaths from the coronavirus in the past month, according to Covid-19 tracking data from Johns Hopkins University.
The country has reported more than 425,000 cases of Covid-19 and nearly 12,800 deaths to date, according to Johns Hopkins.
New daily cases are now 10 times higher than they were in late summer with deaths averaging about 88 per day now, according to Canada’s Public Health Agency.
For a few days in summer, Canadian government data reported no deaths from Covid-19.
By nearly every measure of Covid-19 tracking, Canada is still faring better than the US but Canadian officials have warned that hospital capacity is reaching its breaking point and community transmission must be reduced.
According to government data, Canada now has about 2,400 people with the virus being treated in hospitals. That’s a few hundred less than Los Angeles County reported Monday even though Canada has nearly 4 times the population.
More than 14.9 million coronavirus cases have been reported in the US so far and more than 284,000 people have died. The US also is dealing with a surge in cases that health experts expect to worsen, anticipating new waves from December holiday gatherings on top of a potential surge from Thanksgiving week. But again, public health experts warn
American comparisons should offer little comfort to Canadians.
Lack of adequate testing.
For weeks now Canada’s public health agency has reported that, on average, about 75,000 Canadians are being tested daily. That means Canada is testing at about half the rate,
per capita, than the US.
Public health experts say Canada must be more aggressive with testing in order to bring down community transmission and detect asymptomatic spread.
According to a report released Monday by one of Canada’s largest long-term care operators, that lack of testing has tragically allowed the virus to stalk and kill residents of nursing and retirement homes in Canada.
Canadian government data show that as of August 2020, nearly 80% of all Canadian coronavirus deaths were among residents of long-term care facilities. During a press conference in late October, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam confirmed that figure did not change much in the fall although the national public health agency is awaiting data.
And yet lack of adequate testing in these facilities continues.
In a report released Monday by a government-owned long-term care operator,
an expert advisory panel noted not just the testing failures of the first wave, but that inadequate testing continues.
“…although it was widely understood that long term care residents faced an extremely high risk of serious complications and death from Covid-19, and so had much to gain from testing, they and the staff who look after them, were not prioritized for testing within the system,” according to the report titled “A Perfect Storm.”
‘Perfect storm’: Growing calls to address domestic violence during coronavirus (msn.com)
The pandemic of viral infection with the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Virus‐2
(SARS‐CoV‐2) that causes COVID‐19 disease has put the nursing home industry in crisis.
The combination of a vulnerable population that manifests nonspecific and atypical presentations of COVID‐19, staffing shortages due to viral infection, inadequate resources for and availability of rapid, accurate testing and personal protective equipment, and lack of effective treatments for COVID‐19 among nursing home residents have created
a “perfect storm” in our country’s nursing homes.
This perfect storm will continue as society begins to reopen, resulting in more infections among nursing home staff and clinicians who acquire the virus outside of work, remain asymptomatic, and unknowingly perpetuate the spread of the virus in their workplaces. Because of the elements of the perfect storm, nursing homes are like a tinderbox, and it only takes one person to start a fire that could cause many deaths in a single facility.
Several public health interventions and health policy strategies, adequate resources, and focused clinical quality improvement initiatives can help calm the storm. The saddest part of this perfect storm is that many years of inaction on the part of policymakers contributed to its impact. We now have an opportunity to improve nursing homes to protect residents and their caregivers ahead of the next storm. It is time to reimagine how we pay for and regulate nursing home care in order to achieve this goal. This article is protected by copyright.
All rights reserved.
The Economics of Our Health Care System Are Horrifying (aafp.org)
The Perfect Storm of COVID‐19 in Nursing Homes: A Podcast with Joe Ouslander (geripal.org)
Vaccines are coming but timeline is an issue
Trudeau has said for weeks that Canada has secured “one of the most diverse” vaccine portfolios in the world and a CNN analysis of government purchase agreements shows Canada could easily have 4 to 5 times the vaccines needed to vaccinate its entire population of about 38 million people.
It’s the timeline that’s the problem.
“Vaccines are coming,” announced Trudeau during a press conference in Ottawa Monday, saying Canada has an agreement with Pfizer to begin early delivery of up to 249,000 doses of its vaccine candidate.
But Canada’s 2020 rollout of vaccines is largely symbolic as it represents just a fraction of
the 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine that Canada says it has pre-purchased.
Trudeau himself said late last month that because Canada had very little capacity to manufacture vaccines, other counties like the US, UK and Germany would be able to vaccinate more their citizens on a faster timeline than Canada.
Addressing those prior comments, Trudeau said “we wanted not to get people’s hopes up.”
Health Canada is expected to approve the Pfizer vaccine candidate within days and is currently reviewing data for three other candidates, including those from Moderna,
Astra-Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
The concern is that despite aggressive procurement, Canadians will still be vaccinated later than citizens in the US and Europe.
“It’s a shock, I really did not expect that when I warned Canada would be late on this that I would be proved right. It’s heartbreaking, it really is. It will be heartbreaking because it will cost lives,” Attaran said.
Multi-week lockdowns don’t seem to be working.
In recent weeks the tone from public health officials around the country has been the same: They are pleading with Canadians to stay home, stay away from each other and wear masks.
That has been backed by various degrees of lockdowns and new restrictions in cities and towns throughout the country, including larger urban centers like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. But there is little evidence the lockdowns and restrictions are having a significant impact on the infection rate.
In Toronto, now in its third week of a second lockdown, cases continue to surge with
daily records broken in the last few days.
“The case counts are so high, that I can only call this a very, very serious situation,” said
Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health during a press conference Monday.
She thought that the virus was spreading so aggressively in the city that she did not want to think about what the case load would be if Toronto had not entered a lockdown.
There is a similar story in the province of Alberta where restrictions that fall well short of a full lockdown have failed to stem the surge of community transmission.
Alberta now has one of the highest per capita rates of infection anywhere in Canada.
“I will be blunt, so far we are not bending the curve back down, we are still witnessing very high transmission of the virus which is putting enormous pressure on our hospitals, intensive care units and health care workers,” said Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, at a press conference Monday.
Attaran says Alberta and other Canadian regions failed to lock down early enough with strict enforcement believing they were sparing the economy.
“What Canada did wrong is what very many places in the world have done wrong and it’s that their politicians have chosen to treat the virus like stakeholder that you can cut deals with,” Attaran said, adding that the current half-measures will take much longer to bring the infection rate under control.
Government steps in to help out financially.
From the very beginning of the pandemic Trudeau has tried to reassure Canadians that
he “had their back.” And he has made good on that promise with piles of cash handed out
to tens of millions of Canadians.
A CNN review of nearly a dozen programs reveals a payout to residents and Canadian business during this pandemic of nearly $200 billion and counting.
The programs range from a direct payment to individuals, through unemployment benefits and the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) with about a third of all Canadian adults receiving $1,500 a month for several months.
Add to that a wage and rent subsidy program for business owners, payments to students and those with disabilities and special programs for fishers and farmers.
Trudeau says the programs and the money will keep coming until the pandemic subsides.
In fact the Canadian stimulus was so effective that Statistics Canada reported an increase of disposable household income of more than 7% in the last nine months, with government payouts bulking up personal savings. It’s unclear, however, what the long-term impact of the spending will have on the Canadian economy. Across the border, political leaders in the United States are struggling to come to an agreement on another stimulus package
as several key pandemic relief programs are set to expire at the end of the year.
Economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada – Wikipedia
OTTAWA — Canada’s deficit is growing at the fastest rate among developed nations as it seeks to prop up its economy during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Canadian officials are betting the aggressive approach will pay off, pointing to the number of jobs already recovered, and argue that the country can afford to pour money into the economy while borrowing costs are historically low. But some economists warn the heavy spending could lead to a fiscal crisis, and one major ratings firm has already stripped
the country of its triple-A rating.
Canada isn’t alone in its spending spree: The International Monetary Fund estimates governments around the world have doled out $12 trillion to minimize the economic damage from restrictions in place to halt transmission of Covid-19. Canada’s virus-related spending, the bulk of which originates with the federal government, has totaled about 382 billion Canadian dollars, the equivalent of $294 billion, and accounts for roughly 19% of Canada’s total economic output.
Yet data from the IMF indicate Canada’s fiscal position during the pandemic — incorporating all levels of government — has deteriorated at the fastest pace among the major economies in the Group of 20 industrialized countries as it seeks to keep the economy pumping.
“Canada could come off as heroic if this spending is done right,” said Jimmy Jean, a strategist at Desjardins Securities in Montreal. “If Canada fails, all the emergency spending might have been done in vain because we won’t have the capacity to power the post-vaccine recovery.”
The Canadian government said Monday that it projected a budget deficit in the current fiscal year, ending March 30, to jump to at least C$381.6 billion or 17.5% of gross domestic product, versus a deficit of C$39.39 billion, or 1.7% of GDP, in the previous 12-month period.
The U.S. budget deficit tripled during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, to reach $3.1 trillion, or the equivalent of 14.9% of economic output.
The deficit could swell to near C$400 billion because of deteriorating economic conditions related to a second wave of Covid-19 infections. Canada anticipates the deficit to narrow next fiscal year to between C$121 billion and C$166 billion, depending on how much new spending is deployed.
So far, Canada has recovered about 80% of the jobs lost in March and April because of the virus, whereas the U.S. has regained just over half of employees shed. Canada’s economy grew by a record 40.5% annual rate in the third quarter, Statistics Canada said Tuesday. However, growth is expected to grind to a halt in the final three months of 2020 as restrictions re-emerged to deal with a rise in Covid-19 infections.
The federal government’s debt is also set to surpass C$1 trillion for the first time this year, or 50% of GDP, and debt from all levels of Canadian government will surge to roughly 115% of GDP this year from 89% in 2019, the IMF said. The debt-to-GDP ratio this year in the U.S. is forecast to reach 131%; 108% in the U.K.; and 73% in Germany, according to the IMF.
When downgrading the country’s rating from triple-A to double-A-plus in late June, Fitch Ratings cited a steep rise in the country’s total government debt, and skepticism about the ability among political leaders to stabilize debt growth after the pandemic passes.
Carolyn Wilkins, the second-highest-ranking official at the Bank of Canada, said fiscal policy is a powerful tool with interest rates already near zero and business activity constrained. Without massive fiscal outlays, “you wouldn’t be seeing the recovery we’re seeing now,”
Ms. Wilkins said in an interview.
Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said Monday that the fiscal taps will remain wide open for the foreseeable future. She said in an annual fall economic update that the government is set to spend up to C$100 billion over a three-year period starting in 2021 to help fortify the recovery from the pandemic. Stimulus spending would cease only when benchmarks related to employment data were met, she said.
“Canadians understand that this crisis demands targeted, time-limited support to keep people and businesses afloat and to build our way out of the Covid-19 recession,” she said.
Ms. Freeland said the government would eventually introduce rules to stabilize
debt growth but only after the recovery is complete.
She said Canada can afford this wave of spending because of historically low borrowing costs, and that the government is adjusting its debt-management strategy to lock in the low rates by issuing more long-term debt. Even with the rapid growth in debt, Canada said debt-financing charges are projected to fall below 1% of GDP this year and rise to 1.2% by 2025-26.
While Fitch downgraded Canada, S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service are maintaining their triple-A rating.
Ryan Goulding, fixed-income analyst at Leith Wheeler Investment Counsel, a Vancouver-based asset manager, said there are relatively few downsides to Canada’s current borrowing — so long as it is focused on rebuilding capacity wiped out by the pandemic.
He said credit-rating downgrades shouldn’t be a concern.
“There’s a lot of more capital in the world than there was 10 years ago. It is trying desperately to find a home, and the safe ports for capital are getting fewer and fewer,” he said.
Mr. Jean, of Desjardins Securities, said the government is betting the massive fiscal outlays will prevent a catastrophe in household and corporate bankruptcies.
Yet David Rosenberg, economist and head of Toronto-based consulting firm Rosenberg Research, pointed out that combining mounting government debt and what households and nonfinancial corporations owe puts Canada’s total debt-to-GDP ratio at more than 400% — ahead of the Americans and Chinese, but on par with Italy and Greece.
The latter two countries dealt with fiscal crises last decade.
Canada And Covid-19 – Bing video
How Canada compares to other countries on COVID-19 cases and deaths (theconversation.com)