Montreal City Weblog

Kate 16:41 on 2020-04-10 Permalink Reply  

• mare 16:59 on 2020-04-10 Permalink

  Festivals require a lot of organizing in advance, work that has to be done now, and can’t be all done from home. Also if you book artists there will hefty cancelation fees in standard contracts.

  A late decision to cancel schools for another week or month doesn’t involve as many people and money. Teachers are being paid anyway. Festival staff works on contract so they just get IE or CERB. Or nothing.

• EmilyG 17:13 on 2020-04-10 Permalink

  And for the artists, planning to play in a festival and then it’s cancelled, can mean lost revenue.

• Tim S. 17:21 on 2020-04-10 Permalink

  I assume the government has access to more detailed information than we have, but I find it weird that there were 750 new cases yesterday and the government has decided to start being optimistic. I keep thinking about the first weekend of social distancing and there were what, 17 confirmed cases? That have now grown to 12,000ish. I guess May is still 3 weeks away, but there is a huge difference between “not as catastrophic as we feared” and “everything’s OK.”

• DeWolf 18:34 on 2020-04-10 Permalink

  2021 is going to be a hell of a summer.

• Raymond Lutz 19:10 on 2020-04-10 Permalink

  I guess they’re projecting the peak will occur April 17 (see this linear fit of daily growth values, horizontal axis is the month date). But reading the latest research about observed reinfection cases and reevalutations of R0, 3 weeks from now is too soon.

  PS: yes, the fit is glichy… I think there was a backlog of tests cleared around April 4th.

• dwgs 20:28 on 2020-04-10 Permalink

  Merci Raymond

• Raymond Lutz 10:10 on 2020-04-11 Permalink

  Tout le plaisir est pour moi, dwgs. Maybe you’ll like this post too: https://mamot.fr/@lutzray/103980331537144081

• Tim S. 10:52 on 2020-04-11 Permalink

  nice chart Raymond. Ontario doesn’t look good.
  I guess I’m concerned that too much focus on graphs and “the peak” makes it easy to overlook that even on the downslope, significant numbers of new people are being infected.

• JaneyB 14:27 on 2020-04-11 Permalink

  I think the school opening plan is because the data shows that little kids can develop immunity with fewer symptoms. They’ll pass it on to adult caregivers in manageable numbers. Then the immune but not contagious kids will be able to visit their grandparents in a couple of months. Festivals, on the other hand, are just completely unpredictable, especially now since everyone is stir-crazy with spring fever and moving day on the horizon.

• Tee Owe 14:52 on 2020-04-11 Permalink

  JaneyB has it right – we need to get immunity out into the community and this is a manageable way – kids are relatively resistant and their parents are generally younger so this is a balanced way to do it – we can’t hide from this, we also need to manage how quickly it spreads. Tough choices buit we are not unaware.

• Raymond Lutz 15:37 on 2020-04-11 Permalink

  You need to stay current about covid-19 publications. My main source is Paul Beckwith and I collect its links in my published bookmarks, here’s even an RSS feed for those interested.

  Tee Owe and JaneyB: numerous reinfection cases AND low antibody levels observed in recovered patients doesn’t bode well for herd immunity.

  Couple that with a NEW estimation of Ro of 5.7 rather than the previous 2.2… And more asymptotical cases, and damaged lungs in recovered patients… Oh and the discovery that SARS-COV-2 binds to another receptor (called CD147 en plus de ACE2) via “prion-like” properties of its spike proteins. This is bad shit. For sources, see the aforementioned feed.

• Tim S. 20:13 on 2020-04-11 Permalink

  I suspect that, if schools are opened before September, and maybe even after, within three weeks enough teachers and staff will be sick that nothing of educational value will be accomplished. And many of these workers are over 50. All this without the points raised by Raymond. Let some other jurisdiction go first, I say.

• Raymond Lutz 22:21 on 2020-04-11 Permalink

  OK, here’s what I’ve read we’ll need to do, for covid-19 AND (more worrisomely) for novel pathogens Homo Sapiens has never been exposed to and melting permafrost will inevitably release.

  We’ll have to implement NPIs: non-pharmaceutical interventions, ie social distancing, mandatory masks wearing, soft lockdowns, hard lockdowns. All this but at a finer level: municipalities should decide actions rather than provincial governments. At a finer time scale, too. And periodically (like sirens warnings before WWII bombings) everything most stop or slow down LOCALLY. How to know when and how hard? Constant sewage monitoring for viral detection in each community. Pervasive and rapid individual testing using antibody presence with results in minutes, faster than current genetic PCR lab analysis. Implementation du salaire à vie de Bernard Friot so workers without sick leave can stay home. Finally cell phone tracing of individuals to stop asymptomatic transmission. Yes! This can be done with privacy-friendly contact tracing apps and protocols, using strong cryptography. The open source software community must develop this before GAFAM and Palantir does (without privacy protection).