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Mnementh said:
SvennoJ said:

I'm wondering what's going on here atm. We didn't do anything new apart from a couple counties making masks mandatory indoors while opening up nearly everything else. The reported cases suddenly started dropping, today only 33 in Ontario (although still 15K pending tests). Great but how did we go from a 160 average to 33 in 3 weeks while opening up things and mobility trends further increasing. A week ago we were still over 100 average.

With a low number of cases contact tracing is a very effective tool. But you need people doing the footwork. East asian countries like Vietnam, South Korea or on the other side of the world cuba have poured a lot of people into contact tracing. This works well enough. But if the case count increases, the people doing the tracing are overwhelmed. So you need additional measures. That Canada reduced it's cases further after opening can probably be accounted to contact tracing. Also keep in mind, that found new infections were usually infected a few days before. Usually between one and two weeks before they find their way into the statistics. So even after opening up numbers may still drop from fewer infection from before the opening.

Yep that's what I like to believe. However the 2 confirmed cases from a local outbreak at the hospital were only counted as one and they said they had no clue where it came from and that the 2 were unrelated.

“Two members of the BCHS team have tested positive for COVID-19. Contact tracing shows there has been no clear link established between the two cases and no patients are affected,”

So it seems more like a failure in counting and tracing. The counter is still only up one after that was reported 3 days ago. Testing is also still mostly based on people coming in for a test after noticing symptoms. The variation between weekend numbers and week numbers also seems to keep growing, although they are 'compensating' here by letting the pending tests build up to over 25K by the end of the week, then it drops during the weekend to under 10K by Monday. Suggesting that less and less people come in for tests during the weekend. Now back up to 17K pending.

3 weeks left for schools to re-open. Hopefully my doubts are misplaced and we'll have it down to the tens of cases per day to safely re-open the schools.


The 33 cases yesterday were an outlier unfortunately, back to 95 today and another 5K pending tests added to the pile (22K pending now) It's not just us who have severe doubts about sending out kids back to school in 3 weeks

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/it-s-a-no-win-situation-these-parents-won-t-be-sending-their-kids-back-to-school-1.5059659

"By sending our children to school with very limited precautions and next to no [physical] distancing required at any age, we are taking a risk with our children’s lives and long-term health as there is far too much unknown on the long-term effects of COVID,"

"What am I going to regret more -- if my one son has some long-term challenges health wise, or if they had a year where it was challenging socially? It's a no-win situation for parents but for us personally the bigger threat to us is health,"

And in our case, what's more damaging, mental health issues due to no interaction with other kids or potentially losing their mother to covid19... Our youngest has already been experiencing panic attacks and isolation issues, but losing their mother is potentially much worse. Unfortunately he also does pretty bad with home schooling, he needs that social interaction and his peers to keep motivated. Very much a no win situation and extremely frustrating that the government will do pretty much nothing to make schools safer and still haven't announced any concrete plans yet for home schooling. All that's been said has been pretty negative (likely to be lumped in with kids from other schools, different teachers for online, all through bright space etc)


Last edited by SvennoJ - on 12 August 2020