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Covid-19

I'm not pro-lockdown. I would just like to know what the hell the plan is in this province. We know more about the disease at this point, we should be in a position to make some decisions about priorities. "Just ignore it and it will go away" isn't an option. We either keep all businesses open, overwhelm our hospitals, and then impose a total lockdown, or we identify the riskiest sources of spread (gyms, indoor dining, and weddings) and close those down for the sake of the rest of society. Gyms and wedding venues are just not that big a part of our economy or the functioning of our society for us to sacrifice more important things like schools and hospitals.

The idea is to get to some holding pattern that gets us through the winter without a breakdown of our healthcare system and/or a total lockdown like the one we had back in March.
Problem is, the window for "we identify the riskiest sources of spread (gyms, indoor dining, and weddings) and close those down for the sake of the rest of society" is past. We cannot sustain a daily count of 1500 (if we reduced R to 1 ). Contact tracing hasn't been working well for a long time now and also totally collapsed so we don't know either. So we need to reduce further to get us to a sustainable load. Right now our cases in hospital and ICU reflect our case counts from the 28 days previous to November 10 roughly (13,317), not where we are in 44 days if cases went flat today, at 42,000 approximately (28*1500).

Things are going to get very rough.
 
If they shut down schools while allowing bars and gyms to stay open... 🤬

My three young kids, who were out of school and daycare from March until August, have been cycling in and out of daycare/school all Fall because they have to isolate for 2 weeks any time someone tests positive in their class, or isolate anytime they develop cold symptoms (typically 4-5 days to get a test and results). This has been getting more and more frequent as cases have gone up in the province. I'm entering my third week in a row of having to try to "work" at home while also caring for small children who are out of daycare. It is pure hell to try to keep little kids inside for two weeks. They're bouncing off the walls.

In the midst of all this, I happened to walk by a local gym this evening. Because it was dark outside and the lights were on in side, I saw the whole thing: the gym was packed full of people. Not a single person with a mask. No one socially distancing. People spotting each other on the machines. This is why our cases are going through the roof. There is a significant proportion of people out there who just don't give a fuck. They don't care if the schools have to shut down, or if the hospitals are overrun, or a quarter of the residents at a LTC die off within the span of a couple weeks. It's really disgusting.

(Sorry for the rant!!)
Never apologize for this, you should (and everyone should be) be furious right now. Alberta had a soft first wave and all summer to prepare and plan when they did nothing of the sort. This is unforgivable failure to govern from the Province.

Here's another example: my partner is teacher, who is back at school after 2 weeks in quarantine because a student tested positive in one of her classes. This was right as the contact tracing was breaking down so the delay to tell the school and the people in closest contact was at 9 days. As a result, the school was forced to quarantine a huge swath of possible contacts, forcing dozens of students home and multiple teachers. Shortly after this, AHS simply began passing the buck to the school boards to contact everyone. School boards forced to quarantine whole classes because they can't trace who was patient zero in the class. Now, 5 more teachers and a hundred kids are out as a result of similar situations, at just one school. Multiply across the board and you see the crisis in the school system and it's impacts to parents, let alone the health impacts as every new case multiples the risk that someone gets sick with serious consequences and possibly dies.

How could this have been prevented?
  • Letting the contact tracing system collapse blinds schools to be able to pinpoint possible transmissions. The result is everyone get's kicked on to quarantine so the impact of one case is 10x more disruptive.
  • Class sizes are 30 - 35 so social distancing is impossible. Why so large? The province cut the budget for teachers, caused chaos in the days leading up to the school start by providing no funding and no guidance on how to achieve health measures. This was only was partially mitigated thanks to a Federal bail out of the education system. Instead, The Province used the summer getting distracted with curriculum changes and fights with unions.
  • Set a clear priority on what should be open and why:
    • Schools are important and there is real evidence they should remain so because the impacts to children (especially underprivileged ones) are huge, and as you mention, the impact to parents is enormous too if they are forced to stay at home. It's not risk-free but it is worth the risk and can be managed.
    • Province instead of offering that clear message that the schools must stay open as a priority, tinkered around with tattoo parlour changes, hours for bars, casinos, gyms. Picked on fitness classes and children's sports for some reason (when it's dubious that that is a leading source of transmissions, especially given they can't really know because contact tracing has collapsed).
    • Such inconsistency and unclear message undermines support for any measure because it's all appearing reactive, political (e.g. the national app being blocked because Kenney hates Trudeau) and arbitrary. This inconsistency and politicization of the process is exactly the painful lesson that the world learned in the spring between places that got crushed like Italy or places that approached it with consistent messaging supported by reasonable, evidence-based lock-downs.
    • Instead of beefing up temporary support systems (like the Feds have done with CERB and others), they rallied against those systems and cut other programs. The Province happily promoted the false-dichotomy of economy v. health which is a lie. They happily stirred up resentment to Ottawa at every opportunity, giving the separatist kooks, anti-vaxers, anti-Trudeau team breathing space to tell each other lies even going as far as MLAs retweeting conspiracies.
All of this was preventable and known. There are no excuses here for the negligence of our provincial politicians. Their actions and non-actions are the critical elements that caused this crisis and have made it worse in deaths, economic impacts and disruption.
 
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I'm not pro-lockdown. I would just like to know what the hell the plan is in this province. We know more about the disease at this point, we should be in a position to make some decisions about priorities. "Just ignore it and it will go away" isn't an option. We either keep all businesses open, overwhelm our hospitals, and then impose a total lockdown, or we identify the riskiest sources of spread (gyms, indoor dining, and weddings) and close those down for the sake of the rest of society. Gyms and wedding venues are just not that big a part of our economy or the functioning of our society for us to sacrifice more important things like schools and hospitals.

The idea is to get to some holding pattern that gets us through the winter without a breakdown of our healthcare system and/or a total lockdown like the one we had back in March.

I couldn't agree more; I've been saying that there need to be both plans and actions for weeks as the case count has risen. But your last statement is far too optimistic.

Contact tracing is not some weird special 2020 thing like playoff bubbles; it's part of the healthcare system. It's more visible and more important during a pandemic, but if two years ago someone had shown up at a hospital with Ebola or there had been a measles outbreak at a granola daycare or a bunch of people in Wetaskiwin all got salmonella, there would be contact tracing staff and epidemiologists in the healthcare system figuring out the source and preventing spread. The contact tracing system broke down three weeks ago, when community cases stopped being traced. It has now broken down completely; thousands of cases will never be traced, and they're still not tracing the vast majority of new cases, asking people to do their own tracing. The healthcare system is already breaking down; the worst part about contact tracing being the first part to go is that it's the cheapest preventative part of the system; it lets us learn where new cases are coming from, it stops the spread, and it permits more targeted quarantines.

The ICUs are full. Currently, they're at 90% in Calgary and Edmonton. But the rise in ICU usage has mirrored the rise in new patients almost exactly since late October. And it takes a week or two for someone to go from covid infection to covid case; it's more like three weeks to the ICU. If the province announced that they were distributing 4 million space suits and every person in the province was going to be welded inside them tomorrow, the number of new cases would still rise for between one and two weeks. Every single covid patient who will be in an ICU bed on December 10th already has it today. We're on track to break 2000 new daily cases around the start of December, and by that point the ICUs will be over full. And that's with no further spread; even a Paris-style lockdown isn't going to stop spread immediately and completely. Yes, there is the ability to expand the ICU beds, but there is also a need to staff them and health care workers get covid too.

Thanks to the Kenney government's weeks of complete inaction and months of refusal to face reality about the pandemic, we are perilously close to a place where even a total lockdown will not prevent a breakdown of our healthcare system.
 
Is the entire ICU full, or is it just the capacity they "set aside" for Covid?
324 currently in hospital. 62 in ICU
"In November, Hinshaw said the province had about 70 ICU beds set aside for COVID-19 patients and, as the number of patients approached that level, she said additional ICU beds could and would be devoted to people suffering from severe effects of the disease."

I think I read somewhere that at the time of the pandemic, Alberta had 500 respirators in total and were making plans to ramp that up to 1000 or more as well as creating up to 2000 temporary hospital beds. I don't think it is beds or respirators they are concerned about ... it is health care workers. The pandemic is taking it's toll on that resource. So many have been exposed to COVID and many more forced to quarantine on a rotating basis. It seems to be a revolving door and at times that are severe shortages of of people.
 
So, not a lot of changes from what we already have. Except they now you can’t visit your sister but you can still go to the bar.
 
Disappointing action by Kenny today. It's obvious he's more worried about pandering to business and the freedumb protesters. I understanding wanting to try and keep businesses open, but bars and casinos? Is it because they generate more tax revenue for the government so we better keep them open? I also noticed he couldn't help but talk about people's freedom, and the hardship of businesses, but no mention of the hardship of dying from the virus.


Also, what's happening in Edmonton? Last time I looked at the Alberta health numbers there were way less deaths in Edmonton than Calgary, like 50 less deaths.

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If and it is a big if the household limits at bars can be enforced, it will work as well as closing them. The danger is in exactly what you demonstrate: an impression of hypocrisy in the measures leading to little compliance of the at home measures.
 
I was horrifically not surprised.

I almost threw my computer across the room when Kenney comment how Alberta was leading with "world-class contact tracing system" and we should be "proud to be the first province to have an tracing app".

I'm truly frustrated and sad in a way I have never been for our city and province. So many more will die that don't need to and that's all but confirmed after hearing that crap today - a basket of half-measures, combined with cheap-shots, ideology, lies and blame for anyone and everyone that isn't named Kenney. This was always going to be a long and tough winter, but today's performance seals that fate and confirms it'll be worse than it needed to on a historic level against a historic crisis.

In an effort to end on a light-hearted note in this dark time. A teacher friend who teaches Grade 7 suggested a good joke to keep kids in school:

Take their 30 student Grade 7 class to the Ship and Anchor and have them enter 1 at a time and sit at different tables and teach their. Not only would they have more socially distant space, minors are allowed during the day and all this would be more acceptable than having them go to junior high school. The other option was a casino and have them sit every second slot machine apart.
 
"If it looks like you're overreacting, you're probably doing the right thing." - Dr. Anthony Fauci, back when cases were first exploding.
"We believe these are the minimum restrictions needed right now" - Jason Kenney.

That says it all. These restrictions might well have been enough a month ago. That's the terrible thing -- the same action a month earlier when people were calling for them would have the same costs, but would have saved dozens or hundreds of lives, and might have prevented this wave entirely. Or possibly a slightly more sensible set of restrictions -- next week, half of the schools in the province will close (grade 7-12) but none of the casinos, none of the movie theatres, none of the dining rooms, none of the bars and none of the gyms. Indoor gatherings with six people and no masks remain fine, as long as you tip your server. (I haven't eaten inside a restaurant since March, but are servers really checking the home addresses of everyone at a table to ensure that the rules are being followed?)

This was pretty much the last chance to take strong enough action to save Christmas. People have opposed lockdowns on economic and mental health grounds; if we have to shut down the second half of December, that's going to kill retail and hospitality much more than if we did it today, or better yet, last month. If a few week lockdown is tough on mental health (and it is), then imagine a few week lockdown that includes Christmas alone. Or Christmas in a hospital bed without visitors.

And we can't pretend this wasn't predictable -- this tweet is a month old and has been borne out almost exactly; the first 800+ case day was Nov 6 instead of Nov 7, and we came close to 1600 back on the 22nd. Two days earlier, Kenney said that the province had no need for covid modelling, that their experience was all they needed, and then he cut corporate taxes even earlier than he had previously planned. He has control of more money than anyone else in the province and has given plenty to billionaires and buddies; if minimum wage retail workers were actually his highest priority, he could send some money to them, rather than using them as an excuse for his inaction.

Fundamentally, Kenney isn't supporting Albertans economically and using that as an excuse to not support them with appropriate public health measures.
 
This was pretty much the last chance to take strong enough action to save Christmas. People have opposed lockdowns on economic and mental health grounds; if we have to shut down the second half of December, that's going to kill retail and hospitality much more than if we did it today, or better yet, last month. If a few week lockdown is tough on mental health (and it is), then imagine a few week lockdown that includes Christmas alone. Or Christmas in a hospital bed without visitors.
I agree. It might be enough (I really hope so), but enforcement for social gatherings at homes is going to have to be numerous, visible, and expensive (for the violators). The time for education and warnings has long since past.
 
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One positive thing is I have noticed traffic getting lighter every day for the last week while cycling into downtown, so a lot of people / companies seem to be taking their own actions to flatten the curve again. Where I'm going to be curious about spread is all the people standing in line outside stores and malls waiting to go shopping. Those will be the biggest potential spreaders that I can think of.
 
Whatever criticism (some deserved but not all) is directed at Kenney, I will say that he may have saved thousands of small businesses from going under. To tell independent retailers, restaurants etc to close during their busiest season of the year; and watch big box stores who sell groceries, soak up all the non-essential purchases; would be devastating. There is a reason Black Friday is called as such. In a normal year (which this is far from) that is the day that most small businesses breakeven or start to make a profit. The last 5 weeks of the year are 'make or break' for most.
 

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