Haha, that was exactly the debate we had today. Problem was, my kid was working it out the wrong way in his head, reversing numbers in some instances yet refusing to write down the steps. Of course to debug the method, he had to explain first what he was doing, which he couldn't.

I went to grade school in the early eighties, it's all different nowadays. Even in high school we only had a more group like seating arrangement in arts and crafts class, although physics and chemistry at least had shared desks (with gas connections etc) But most of the lessons involved copying what the teacher wrote down then do some work in class and the rest at home through homework.

The great thing about the Jenaplan school was, I never had any homework until high school (which was the classic model again). I'm surprised how much homework my kids are already getting, from grade 1 already. Back in the day you could also fail a year and have to do it over. Nowadays, at least here, you advance automatically... No clue how it's going to turn out now the schools are closed. Home schooling is not ideal. Some parents don't have the devices or the no how of how to get access to and use all the different programs. All the teacher can do is write an email asking how everyone is doing, hope everyone is fine although I haven't heard from a lot of you...

The Australian Government releases the unemployment data for April which jumped from 5.3 (March) to 6.3 (April) but the really interesting thing is that from the 13-14 millions of the Australian Workforce around 6 Millions are under Job Keeper and 600k unemployed.

Some experts manifested that “the worst is yet to come”

People are getting so bored....


https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/burgers-ice-cream-doughnuts-and-plants-queues-forming-for-non-essential-items-1.4940671

Burgers, ice cream, doughnuts and plants: Queues forming for non-essential items

Rob Ladouceur and his wife waited in their car on three consecutive days at a new Peters' Drive-In in Edmonton for burgers, shakes and fries. They drove away empty-handed each time. The couple gave up the first time when cars were backed up for almost a kilometre. They were turned away the next two days because the restaurant closed before their car made it to the window.

The Winnipeg ice-cream shop Bridge Drive-In closed its drive-thru just two days after opening because of traffic congestion that created friction with neighbours. People also waited over two hours in their cars to pick up a box of doughnuts in Mississauga, Ont.

Mike Priest was assigned a curbside pickup time to collect a gift card and hanging basket at Bradford Greenhouse in Barrie. That took an hour and 20 minutes. "We had been assigned a time to show up, arrived right on time and saw about 10, 15 cars. Figured that wasn't too bad until we got near the front of the line and realized it was just a line to get into the main line, which was over 100 cars long."

So much for the environment benefiting with all those cars idling in line ups...



Most elementary schools are open again in Quebec (Montreal follows on the 25th)

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/return-to-school-bring-your-own-sanitizer-quebec-student-advises-fellow-kids-1.4940812

Sebastian Weiss is advising other kids who may be returning to school to bring their own hand sanitizer because the stuff at his Quebec City school “smells pretty bad.” He also warns to cut back on any expectation of excitement: there are no gym classes and no library time. The Grade 5 student told CTV’s Your Morning Friday that arrows and logos painted by teachers on the floor in the hallway show students how to move and where to stand. And he’s allowed only four books from the class library.

Class sizes are limited to 15 children and officials expected about 60 per cent of eligible students would return this week. They came back to a transformed school experience. Playground equipment is still off-limits and schools are limiting the number of kids out a recess at one time. Desks are spaced out. Physical education and library time is no more. There are no school lunches, either. On school buses, students can only sit one per bench and the driver sits behind a plastic shield. Students are reminded often to wash their hands.

Sebastian says he and his classmates spent the first half of the first day back going over all the new rules and, after a trip home for lunch, he came back to an afternoon-long refresher on what his class had been studying before schools closed down.

Quebec is still reporting over 700 new cases daily and about a hundred deaths daily. Ontario is down to over 300 new cases daily and 30 to 50 deaths daily and keeps the schools closed until at least the end of the month. All lesser hit provinces have already cancelled the rest of the school year or only have limited schools open for kids of essential workers. Doing everything backwards in Canada lol.

Yeah I wonder what is going in Canada and California, despite a ongoing lockdown the 2 places have an R1 number if you look at confirmed cases and daily reported dead. I don't see what guys are planning to do, must be a tough situation.

We're planning to re-open everything in 3 phases. Phase 1 on Monday (or Tuesday, Monday is a bank holiday) in Ontario.
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/full-list-of-businesses-that-can-reopen-in-ontario-1.4921154
However every province has their own strategy and ideas. Phase two to follow in 2 weeks if cases keep declining.

Canada and USA are currently under R1, I have them tracking at 84% and 88% week over week. Which is 0.975x and 0.982x daily growth. It's not much of a decline, hence I don't think it wise to start opening things up yet. (Except for the parks, that can't hurt, give people more room to spread out) The weather just turned from freezing to +20c. May 24 weekend this weekend, traditional time to head out to cottage country, however plenty local majors have asked people to stay away. https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/cottage-country-mayors-urging-seasonal-residents-to-stay-away-during-covid-19-crisis-1.4874661

Long term plan is working on a vaccine I guess. Anti body tests got approved last week and clinical trials have been approved for a Chinese vaccine to get tested. A lot of other research is going on as well.

What are the plans in Sweden, stay the course? I see the growth rate slowly declining again in Sweden, currently 106% week over week or 1.01x daily, avg 570 cases and 70 deaths a day. Is that the new normal?


Muppets. Yesterday they were celebrating the lowest case count in 6 weeks in Ontario, today:
*On May 15th, the province reports a data error, as noted by Health Minister Christine Elliott.  Yesterday, 87 new cases were missed, and the Ontario tally should have read 345, not 258

I meant ongoing lockdown in California and Canada in my previous post. What is going on with these annoying phases? There should just be 1 phase, either Trace/quarantine/self-isolate work and can keep it going or it doesn't work and countries haft to go for herd immunity as a second lockdown won't have the same effect as the first one.

Weather is actually very positive, it will lower the R number, by how much we shall see. But it can be a problem when fall return and the cold is back.

As for Sweden, we already hit peak infection on ~april 6, the international media can't see our charts.

This is a picture of our R daily cases with both extra testing and without, the dark purple is our R number and light purple is extra testing on hospital personal.

And our dead for when it happened, includes todays number.

They both on a downtrend.

Edit: as for our plan, We staying the course, there was a very misleading bloomberg article recently that we are questioning our course, but that is not the case. 60%+ of swedes are super happy what we doing and about 22% are okey what we doing.

How come Worldometer shows an absolute record number of deaths in Sweden for today?

I'm comparing week over week numbers to rule out variations

Sweden can't keep a steady decline, popping back over the 100% line. But sure the week with the highest numbers had 617 cases per day vs 570 this week, and 99 deaths per day vs 70 days this week. So yep generally heading down, just very slowly. Ontario's peak week was 570 cases per day vs 330 this week and 58 deaths per day vs 41 this week.

Better weather is not a positive here since people go out to places to enjoy the weather, some not adhering to social distancing rules. The last warm weekend caused a slight uptick in cases. The past week was cold and we're now getting a bit fewer cases than expected. The week over week change was 104% for May 7th, the result of the nice weather the weekend before. This Thursday it was 79% week over week after a miserable week(end) of cold weather and rain. Maybe hot humid weather will help, not quite there yet.

The idea of opening things up in phases is to find the balance point where the spread still goes down while life can mostly resume. Get and keep the numbers low enough to efficiently test and trace. However we have very little margin for error with an average daily growth rate of 0.975x, and there are still 14,373 tests pending, doesn't look promising to get on top of tracing if you can't even keep up with testing. I should check how many tests a day are done now, it only shows the total 510.8K total tests done in Ontario.

No talks of herd immunity here, 14.57 million people, even if 100x as many have already been infected (and all somehow build up lasting immunity which is highly doubtful) that still leaves another 12.38 million people to get infected.

The immediate concern is to get the healthcare system back to normal. Elective surgeries are scheduled to restart as well as other procedures. Hence the different phases. Open up everything at the same time is guaranteed to trigger a second wave. The spread needs to be contained more first.

It can still happen ;)

Austria waited long enough to open things back up, however Austria is trending up again.
May 5th was the lowest 3 day average in reported cases at only 29 new cases a day.
Currently it's back up to a 3 day average of 59 new cases per day.
Small numbers, yet representing a 140% change week over week.

Soon is relative, this shit can go on for years :/

Covid is not a good bet to get rid of your girlfriend, unless she's actually a 80+ obese old guy with diabetes.

Mother's day effect isn't in that 3 day average yet, was the average of cases reported on Tuesday to Thursday, effects from mother's day would show up from Thursday through the weekend. But yep, rebound was inevitable if not eliminating community spread first (and keeping the borders closed). South Korea still has slight rebounds as well although they cycle between 3 and 32 cases per day, 0 to 2 deaths per day.

It should be fine for contact tracing as long as you keep it in the teens instead of the hundreds.

I also have someone that needs some Covid loving in the Netherlands. I haven't heard of his demise yet, maybe a second wave can get him.