Just one more week until my holiday trip to the Netherlands.
Didn't think this was possible a month ago.

Also, my wife is probably working full time again starting July (she's currently on 80%). Looks like things are getting normal again (except for working at home. Doubt this will change soon).

A very interested study in Finland has been done. It shows that face mask don't work, they might actually have opposite effect or very marginal positive effect.

"According to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, "research suggests face coverings have minimal benefits" to protect health. But that's not all, its misuse may even increase risks, according to the report."

"To date, unlike other governments, the Finnish authorities have neither recommended nor made the use of masks mandatory."

Source: https://www.foreigner.fi/articulo/coronavirus/finnish-government-says-wearing-masks-has-minimal-benefits/20200529182157006141.html

This is funny, someone has to correct me if I'm wrong, but so far neither Denmark, Norway, Finland, Australia and New zealand is recommending or mandating face masks. But Germany are mandating face masks. We shall see if Germany can beat any of those countries.

Imagine if vaccine is 5 years away and the people in Germany has been walking around in face masks for no reason all this time.

While other countries are starting to open up we just had a record number of new cases and we also added 74 bodies to the ever-growing pile. Now, I might not be as smart as Tegnell and other experts but looking at our numbers and then those of other nations doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

Yeah I would say things aren't going good as they should, we were suppose to hit herd-immunity in stockholm last month. And our death toll is a little to high. I don't know how many people they expecting to die here, but first thing our Prime minister said was that thousands of swedes will die, that sounds like 3-4k to me.

But it's to late to change anything now, we just haft to w8 intill early next year, were they hopefully will remove that 50 limit-people gathering and we just haft to see what happens.

I'm not sure why, but looks to be a big demonstration right now in Sweden/Stockholm about black lives matter.

Last week was better than I thought. Numbers looked like they would stay flat but didn't.

3,150 positive cases (-12.5%) with 392k tests (+13.3%).

On average there were 450 positive cases a day (or 525 if you discard Sunday).

632 in ICU (-17.2%).

There was another public holiday earlier this week (and another partial public holiday next week... May and June are crazy when it comes to public holidays), so testing capacity will probably drop to ~300k again.

This is what out lock down looks like :/

Huge crowds at Toronto's Trinity Bellwoods park in late May. Credit: CBC

It's blunder after blunder here, I'm getting fed up with it all.

Recent highlights:

The Ontario legislature voted on Tuesday to extend the state of emergency until June 30. The vote came after the Ontario health ministry reported 446 additional cases of COVID-19

Ontario's network of about 20 labs, meanwhile, processed 15,244 test samples on Monday, a second straight day below its own target of 16,000. The system has capacity to handle as many as 25,000 tests on any given day, according the Ministry of Health. The backlog of test samples waiting to be processed grew to 10,622. Last week, Premier Doug Ford had expressed optimism that an increase in testing could help facilitate a regional reopening of Ontario. But the province failed to meet its testing benchmark more than half the time throughout May.

Yesterday, CBC News revealed that hundreds of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the Toronto area were not flagged to public health officials because of a mixup between two hospitals. It meant that thousands of contacts of confirmed cases were not traced for weeks.

About 79.5 per cent of all deaths were residents of long-term care homes. The province has tracked outbreaks of the novel coronavirus in 309 of Ontario's 630 long-term care facilities. Ontario's Ministry of Long-Term Care on Tuesday issued a mandatory management order appointing St. Mary's General Hospital in Kitchener to temporarily manage Forest Heights Revera for 90 days. The ministry noted that despite receiving hospital support for weeks, Forest Heights has been unable to contain the spread of COVID-19.

And it's not just in Toronto and long term care facilities. The recent outbreak on farms nearby is another screw up.


It says the rest in the link I posted, that Tegnell wouldn't have changed his approach and that other countries are doing to much in his eyes. Stubborn. As for schools safe to open back up, Quebec proved differently.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-teachers-raising-alarm-about-being-back-in-class-1.5592171
This comes after at least 41 staff and students in Quebec tested positive for COVID-19 in the first two weeks after elementary schools outside the Montreal area reopened.

Kids can still spread, their teachers as well. All the precautions still weren't enough.

It's not too late to change, tighten down restrictions in the hot spots and get the virus under control in a month. It's all those soft measures that only make things worse in the long run.

Here it seems phase 1 will continue as planned despite going back into growth again. At lease phase 2 is on hold and gatherings over 5 people are still banned. Maybe some time cases will actually start to come down in Ontario. We dropped just below 400 cases a day early May, and that's where we still are currently. Started re-opening too soon.

Of course regionally things are different, north of Toronto phase 2 could begin.

I live at the black dot. The big red zone to the South is Norfolk where the recent farm outbreak is. Toronto is that smaller red rectangle on the shore to the North East. The orange zone to the North of me is Region of Waterloo with troublesome long term care homes (including Forest Heights Revera in Kitchener I mentioned in my previous post)

A lot of people that live here work in the Region of Waterloo or Hamilton, Missisauga or even Toronto to the East. Restarting things too soon will mix it all around again. And without access to any anti body tests to found out whether my wife already had (and barely survived) covid-19, we'll have to stay as careful as possible. Her mom is so worried she won't let me do the groceries and she's bringing us supplies instead of letting me help them. That's the burden of being a mother, worrying about your kids for the rest of your life. My wife is the same with our kids. She would not have let them go back to school anyway if they had re-opened this month.

No wonder the rest of the country hates us. People here in Stockholm have been nonchalant about the whole pandemic for a while now, they started it by not really caring, then got spooked for a few weeks when death tolls were hovering around the 100 mark, and now they're back to not caring much at all. "Frihet under ansvar" ("freedom under responsibility") seems to be working really poorly as it stands.

First responders in Australia are required to wear a face mask.

The Public isn't mandated to wear one, but it is recommended to wear one.

The issue is that, the public doing a free-for-all scramble for face masks depleted face mask stores, which meant less available for the emergency services which are seen as an absolutely vital service that comes first.

So the message became that we needed to adhere to social distancing, stay the fuck home, avoid unnecessary travel and socializing, wash your hands for 20 seconds... With no mention of face masks.
Businesses were cleaning their checkouts, trollies and other surfaces and putting up barriers to protect customers as well.

But face masks does increase protection up to a point, it's an additional barrier.

At the moment the fire station has built up a cache of PPE like overalls, facemasks and gloves and the ambulance keeps pinching it as they keep running out, which means the fire station logistics officer needs to liaise with state to acquire some more for us... It's a tough situation because if the issue was to escalate, us firefighters were required to step in and man the ambulance vehicles, we can't do that if we don't have the appropriate PPE. - No one is going to drive an ambulance wearing PBI Gold.

Australia and New Zealand were successful because they reacted early, reacted swiftly and had contingency plans that were adhered to for such an event, the public also obeyed the health officials which means there weren't protests on the street where social distancing was ignored.

It also helped that our Governments were employing positive messaging that we were doing the right thing, what they have done and what the plan and outcome was going forward... Which is in stark contrast to the USA where Trump was laying the blame on everyone else whilst promoting the little actions they had done up to that point.