I don't know what the funding is like but we often have long waits and most of the hospitals around here look like Cold War bunkers. I don't think the problems are a money issue per se although maybe more funding would help. One strange feature of our system is the federal government pays for a lot of it but the provinces are responsible for providing the service.

Another strange aspect is we supposedly have worker shortages but we accept around 1% of our population each year in immigration.

Many Canadians with money go abroad when they can. Maybe this is a feature of the system rather than a bug.

Our care home system also seems bad. A large proportion of the deaths, up in the 40% range (I wonder if it's climbing again as the median infection is milder and a larger proportion who die are extremely old/sick), was just in old folks' homes. Our approach to solving this revolved around making sure 22 year olds don't go out to bars, which maybe has some impact in reducing prevalence (though by now it seems to me that most young partiers would have substantial immunity) but seems a bit indirect.

The truckers et al should be parked in Toronto and Quebec City given that the authoritarians are at the provincial level. The only cause they have against Ottawa is travel restrictions and a cross-border vaccine mandate which is also in place on the American side so I'm not sure what countries they planned to drive to unvaccinated...

The problem with COVID in the US is that American healthcare workers have been "burned out and overworked" FOREVER. I have listened to (hell, and even contributed to) bitching to deaf ears for as long as I can remember.

Long before COVID.

So using the "burned out and overworked nurses" excuse to continue to prolong pandemic measures.....well......isn't going to get us to any resolution.

In Canada some of this seems to come from the medical associations, credentialing, and universities themselves. The process to get a medical degree in Canada is ultra-competitive, to the point where extremely good students are turned away, yet we are told there's a huge shortage. I suspect it goes deeper and the system is inflexible in terms of training and what work needs to get done, such that the skills can never quite fit the demand.

And like I said in Canada we can attract 400,000 immigrants a year and our federal government can spend $300B extra but we can't do things like find people who are willing to do quarantined shifts at care homes and help old people take their pills and go to the bathroom. We paid tons of healthy young people lots of money to sit at home during the pandemic after forcing their employers to fire them.

The problem in the UK is that experienced nurses only make £35k ($47k) a year, and then they wonder why there’s a shortage of nurses and we all get locked up for months so “save our NHS”. :rolleyes:

The care home staff shortage is inexorable because it’s a shitty job that doesn’t require much skill (maybe empathy) and so it’s not a promising career. You need a lot of them but can’t just pay a lot more because people wouldn’t be able to afford care for their relatives. The answer there is to reduce the need for labor through automation, AI and robotics.

The nurse jobs I see around here start at about $30 Canadian an hour ($23.50 US). Our average "home" price including condos is $1.2M and average rent is in the $2,000+ per month range for a 1 BR. Our economy is pretty busted with older people retiring with huge housing windfalls and paying almost no taxes (the federal government mailed out a supplemental "thanks for being old" cheque during the pandemic) while many under age 40 are wage slaves or completely checked out and their big things in life are video games and weed.

I agree with you about the economics of these jobs but in Canada in the first year of the pandemic the federal government added 17% of our GDP to their budget. They could have carved out a tiny bit of that and dramatically raised wages.

Sweden lifting all restrictions.

^ All good to see.

Switzerland might be next, which would be great because I’m going in a few weeks.

^ More countries wake up from this nonsense, the better.

Then all that will be left is those silly Canadians.

The California indoor mask mandate is ending on 2/15. The Super Bowl in LA is on 2/13.

In some places it never started :shrug:

What I have been saying for a long time:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dai...-pandemic.html


It's time to get back to normal life! Harvard medical professor joins chorus demanding US finally drops COVID restrictions as cases fall 40% in a week and deaths flatten
By Mansur Shaheen U.S. Deputy Health Editor For Dailymail.Com
15:03 04 Feb 2022, updated 18:16 04 Feb 2022


Dr Stefanos Kales, of Harvard Medical School, has joined the growing calls for U.S. health officials to put the pandemic behind them
Kales said that it was a mistake for the pandemic response to be left in the hands of infectious disease experts rather than public health officials
Covid cases in the U.S. are down 40% over the past week and the 361,000 daily cases are far below the peak of 800,000 per day in mid-January
Iowa is set to become the latest state to drop pandemic restrictions, as Gov Kim Reynolds announced the state of emergency will expire on February 15

Dr Stefanos Kales (pictured), a professor of medicine at Harvard University, said that it was a mistake to allow infectious disease experts rather than public health experts to control the response to Covid. He also believes it is time for the nation to 'move on' from the pandemic.

Calls for the United States to declare the COVID-19 pandemic over and return to 'normal life' are growing, as cases have dropped 40 percent nationwide and it seems that all 50 states are past the worst stages of the Omicron surge that started late last year. But despite the growing sentiment, federal health officials have been slow to lift mandates.

The U.S. is averaging 361,072 cases per day, a far fall from the 800,000 cases per day at the peak of the Omicron surge in mid-January.

Dr Stefanos Kales, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical school, told CNBC this week that the government made mistakes early on by choosing to value the opinions of infectious disease experts over all others during the early stages of the pandemic.


“I think what we saw is the danger of turning over public policy and public health recommendations to people who have had their careers exclusively focused on infectious diseases as opposed to public health in general,' he said.

Last month, he published an article on LinkedIn calling for pandemic-related measures to be focused on the vulnerable instead the population as a whole. While some people with comorbidities that put them at risk of serious complications from the virus still do need some safeguards, the average healthy, vaccinated, person is totally OK, he said.

'We badly need to allow the general public, particularly the young, to get back to normal life,' he wrote.

'... It is like trying to stop a snowstorm by catching each and every snowflake, rather than keeping the roads open by plowing.'

what a beautiful and accurate analogy.

the time to live with covid and get the fuck on with our lives has long since come.

Want to be Prime Minister of Canada?

Je$us f3ck yes!! Make that Harvard guy president. The residual damage of this entire fiasco is asinine. Downtown Portland went from a lively, walkable neighborhood to a 3/4 vacant, dirty and violent ghost town in THREE months. There's still blocks of boarded up windows. As of the end of January, the city counted 800 tents in downtown neighborhoods. Eight hundred!! The longer we try and keep up this zero covid strategy, the longer the us workforce is going to be a spooked horse. I said similar shit from the get go back in 2020. Make everyone wear a mask, shelter vulnerable people, if you are sick stay home. The metrics being used are 100% batshit insane too. Alaska with 284 cases per 100k is considered the worst in the nation. Everyone else keep calm and soldier on. Man that was wishful thinking. The next time shit hits the fan, I pray its not in this city. Godspeed SSP members.

Canada's chief health officer (and most of her provincial counterparts) are now saying the same thing: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/can...onse-1.6339609

I think it's looking pretty clear that Covid restrictions' days are numbered. Who knows, maybe we'll even beat you guys to it at this rate. :)

There's a bunch of places in the US that don't have restrictions and some places even have mandates against restrictions. California opened June 15th 2021 and LA is hosting the Super Bowl.
Life has returned to normal for millions of Americans. Come out to CA and party!

^^^^there is still some top down tweaking that needs to come from Washington. The white house is trying to tow the narrative line while us governors are starting to break rank. Unless the messaging is consistent tho, corporate America is going to just keep all their employees home. That's another ball of wax all together. The administration is claiming great job gains but I wonder how many of those are just people returning to the work force. Unless your city already had a huge downtown population, its gonna be a bumpy decade for those neighborhoods. I predict Oregon or Hawaii will be dead last to completely throw in the towel.

Essentially, anyone who still gives a single fuck about Covid is an idiot.

Lift all restrictions and eventually the people who have become phobic will come to their senses. But it’s time to stop waiting until everyone feels completely comfortable and won’t have their feelings hurt. See Australia.

And you seem to give the biggest fuck of all about people who still give a single fuck about COVID

What does that make you? A meta-idiot?

I hurt your feelings rather easily :tup:
There's a bunch of places that actually don't have restrictions.

Now that omicron has washed over the US, do you think there is literally anyone left in the US who isn't either vaccinated or had the virus (most of the US is both now). I can imagine that may be all she wrote for large scale death from Covid. We are seeing 3000 dead a day right now but I assume that is the last batch of the unvaccinated, unexposed population (and the very frail who die despite having been vaccinated/exposed previously). Unless some crazy new variant comes along that can be fatal in large numbers to vaccinated people and those who have already had the virus, in which case we would be back to square one. Barring that, it seems that omicron was basically a vaccine. A weakened form of the virus that was given to basically everyone.
How come you don't see conspiracy theorists out there saying that some scientist removed the protein that lets it attach to lung tissue and altered some proteins to make it insanely contagious so it "vaccinated" basically most of planet Earth in a couple of months. We need some more imagination from our conspiracists.

I care about these entirely unjustified restrictions and mandates, not about the virus. I’ve never given a shit about the virus.

It depends on the place but in some places, a covid death is just a death with a positive test, and a covid hospitalization is just a hospitalization with a positive covid test. If a 7 year old goes in for foot surgery and happens to test positive for covid, in covid hospital count is incremented by 1. If a cancer patient happens to test positive for covid 2 weeks before dying of cancer, they are a covid death. Anyone who goes into a hospital is screened and they go there for one problem or another.

This does not mean that there aren't people still getting seriously ill but I'm not sure there is a clear end point that will be indicated by the "headline" statistics given the way they work. Perhaps a more reasonable assessment would add some context or "control" in the form of all-cause mortality and mortality from other factors.

^ Right, and the effect of this is magnified by the fact that hospitals are a great place to acquire a contagious disease. Probably the best place, actually.

So not only would you expect some % of the population to have Covid over any 4-week period, but anyone undergoing inpatient treatment in a hospital will be more likely to have it than the population at large.

Excess mortality is probably the best indicator (which indicates that the US has likely been systematically undercounting COVID deaths but Canda may have been systematically overcounting, though maybe they're statistically consistent given the methodology). https://www.economist.com/graphic-de...deaths-tracker

Here in Louisiana, if someone tests positive within 6 weeks of the date of death, that person is counted as a COVID death. There are no other factors considered. Unfortunately, this elevates the numbers and causes confusion among the vaccinated, as the latest state data shows that 43% or 114 of the 265 COVID deaths registered were in vaccinated individuals during the week of 1/20-1/26. The state is currently 52% fully vaccinated.

The CDC excess death from COVID tracker has not registered a week with excess deaths since the week ending 11/20/21 despite consistently high COVID death numbers reported by the state. This indicates that COVID death totals have been over-inflated during this latest Omicron wave given the highly contagious nature of this variant amongst both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. https://public.tableau.com/shared/66..._link&:embed=y

^ Based on excess deaths from the entire country and the fact that they are significantly below 100%, my guess is just that Louisiana is just very slow at tabulating. In fact, this is obvious if you look at https://github.com/TheEconomist/covi...027806ce29b636

The latest mortality figures from Lousiana. from several days ago, added deaths throughout 2021.

https://i.imgur.com/qg96Zdph.png

So basically the excess mortality data isn't that useful until months after the fact when everything is tabulated, unfortunately. (The CDC claims this in a big disclaimer on their website, saying that the data is perhaps 75% complete after 8 weeks but obviously some states are faster than others).

Is anyone else finding it very strange that in the U.S., Omicron is almost over, but in Europe the decline seems to have stalled out?

I mean, the U.S. isn't alone in this. The rest of the Americas is also showing consistent declines, and Australia isn't doing badly either. But in Europe cases are either still rising or more-or-less stalled out. There are a few countries showing fairly big declines (Italy, Spain, France) but even here it's declining slower than the U.S.

What I think is happening is more heavily-enforced social distancing is prolonging Omicron. Which honestly is to be expected - that was the initial point of these policies, not to stop anyone from getting infected, but to stretch out the infections over time in order to stop hospital systems from being overwhelmed.

But the U.S. experience shows that a developed country can take the hospital load from Omicron. Hell, given the higher vaccination rates in most of Europe, one would think that most European countries would be able to deal with the hospital strain much more robustly.

I just spot checked a few EU countries. Germany just hit its peak last week, so I would attribute that to a delayed outbreak. Countries with earlier peaks, like France, appear to have similar curves to the U.S.

I wouldn't make one sweeping generalization about 26 countries, each with its own Covid strategy.

Many European countries are experiencing Omicron peaks higher and sharper than the US experienced. This shouldn't happen if they were successfully flattening the curve and, therefore, prolonging the wave, as you suggest.

The US and UK have strikingly similar Omicron curves. The US just lagged behind the UK. This doesn't say anything about their comparative policies, just that Omicron caught sooner in the UK.

The curves seem different to me.

In the U.S., cases seem to have peaked around January 14. Cases have steadily declined since then.

In the UK, cases peaked earlier - around January 2. However, the period of steep decline only lasted through to around January 17th or so. Cases have continued to fall, but very gradually. Thus even though the UK peaked almost two weeks earlier, it has a higher number of cases per 100,000 (122 vs 90).

If you compare the places first hit by COVID in the U.S. to the UK, it's even starker.

NYC - 33 per 100,000
DC - 35 per 100,000
Baltimore - 17 per 100,000
Cleveland - 16 per 100,000

London - varies by area, but seems in the range of 130 per 100,000. Cases actually seem to be rising slightly in a lot of subsections of London as well.

Differences in testing regimes could explain part of this of course - maybe the UK just tests more than the U.S., and thus catches more asymptomatic cases. However, one wouldn't have expected a big change in testing over the course of the last several weeks.

In Europe the new B-2 variant is making its way thru which apparently is 5 times more contagious than Omicron B-1 and will probably start impacting numbers in the US in the coming weeks, I presume.

The US and UK have fewer restrictions than Europe, so they’re getting it over with, and with few adverse consequences. Countries that are stubbornly trying to hold back the ocean are dragging it out for longer.

Well then, this shit is just gonna keep come through in waves.

But hopefully each new wave is less dangerous than the last.

What is this monolithic Europe with a policy of restrictions?

In Bulgaria they've basically acted like Covid never existed. Denmark recently ended all restrictions (while experiencing the biggest spike in registered cases on the continent).

Again, the high and fast spikes in cases in European countries don't correspond to the effects of "flattening the curve" you claim exist, nor do they correspond to the differing, country-by-country realities of restrictions.

At this point, I'd suggest looking at the spread of this virus like the weather: it's a chaotic system; we can point to proximate causes of local events, but broader predictability eludes us.

Blaming late European omicron waves on pan-European policy--even if that's actually what the data tell us--is like blaming a late European spring on European climate change initiatives.

Because a judge struck down Illinois’ school mask mandate 2 days ago, schools everywhere are scrambling what to do.

I just got word from our superintendent that our school district will now make masks optional.

I know that my 12 year old will be happy, as he hates masks. My 10 year old never really minded them.

I doubt this makes a big difference TBH unless prior infection with B-1 doesn't protect you from getting B-2. Since the U.S. case numbers are going down, over half of the country must have already been infected with Omicron (or are otherwise resistant).

Yes. 100% agree. Oregon claims it will drop the mask mandate in March. Hawaii, the state that relies on tourism will be dead last. I suspect mainland immigration with pick up steam.

Did somebody say B1 and B2? Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

• Video Link

Most European countries, especially the ones that anyone gives a shit about, have generally had Covid policies that, while varied, have been and are stricter than the US or current UK measures.

Let’s not try to educate me about Covid rules in Europe. I have, since March 2020, spent at least 4 months in EU countries (mostly Italy, Spain and France) at different points in time with different rules in place, so I’ve had a firsthand view of the ridiculousness and uselessness of it all.

Didn't they drop the restrictions around the peak?

If the restrictions were suppressing transmission a lot, and they were dropped around the peak, there would be a big resurgence in transmission.

It’s always good news when this thread gets less action, can we all agree on that?

Gov Newsom calling Covid “endemic” :tup:

Illinois’ Gov Pritzker lost his court bid to reinstate his school mask mandate. So now it’s optional, and my kids’ schools opted for “mask optional” :tup:

I'm intrigued to see what level Omicron peters along at now that the wave is over.

It seems clear it's going to be lower than 20 per 100,000. Will it be 10? 5?

good news for long covid and kids:


https://www.statnews.com/2022/02/14/...ng-covid-kids/

The last two paragraphs of that article sum it up well.

I’ve never heard of STAT News, but ain’t that the truth!

We attended parent teacher conferences for my younger kid last night. He is a 5th grader.

It was a weird hybrid. Some parents wore masks, some didn’t. I didn’t but my wife did.

We are in a transitional phase right now.

Cool story. I actually live here. For the duration of the pandemic I've had a firsthand view of a mix of ridiculous uselessness and extremely useful policy.

Your reductive arguments are wrong. Their premises don't account for the nuance of reality and your conclusions, therefore, don't match the data.

And maybe you should try giving a shit about countries that don't fit your narrative. You might still look like a dick but it can only help.