Notes on Santé Québec numbers
It’s Monday so the Santé Québec Covid numbers are updated. We’re now at 14,182 deaths in Quebec, although I’ve noticed in recent weeks that those numbers have been jumping around a bit – sometimes they don’t add up properly, and one day they even went down. Even odder is that the cumulative deaths in Montreal have been stuck at 5330 for most of a week. I don’t like being made to feel paranoid that the government is not levelling with us, but if the Quebec number continues to inch upward daily, what are the odds that none of these deaths were in Montreal?
Aaron Derfel’s latest Twitter thread is worth a look.
Joey 13:28 on 2022-03-14 Permalink
Data collection, reporting and reconciling is trickier than it seems in ideal circumstances – I can only imagine how sloppy it is given our healthcare system (imagine the record-keeping in every medical establishment you’ve been in times a thousand, and then imagine the people who have to clean it all up). I wouldn’t fret too much and would take all numbers as, at best, approximative.
JoeNotCharles 13:35 on 2022-03-14 Permalink
Since outbreaks come in clusters, it would make perfect sense for deaths on certain days to all be in the same location. If there was an outbreak in, say, Quebec City, in a week where there were,kt any significant outbreaks in Montreal, then you’d expect to see deaths in Quebec City some time later and none in Montreal for a while. What WOULDN’T make sense is if deaths seem evenly distributed around the province EXCEPT Montreal.
Even then, though, in a province of 8.5 million, under 10 deaths a day is statistically TINY so the variance is expected to be huge. Common sense results about number distributions only work for large numbers. So it could just be random chance – it’s be a bit odd, but not unheard of.
Also, don’t forget about reporting delay. If there was some glitch and they didn’t receive any records at all from Montreal hospitals all week, and then it’s fixed and they all show up next Monday, there’ll be a spike. Nothing nefarious about it, just an accident. Possibly incompetence, not necessarily malicousness.
And, at the risk of giving unwanted and unsolicited advice, I’d highly suggest that anyone who is feeling “paranoid” or “obsessed” with these numbers talk to a therapist. Even if you decide there’s good reason to be skeptical it will help you sort out what a healthy level of skepticism is.
Kate 13:59 on 2022-03-14 Permalink
anyone who is feeling “paranoid” or “obsessed” with these numbers talk to a therapist
Thank you, JoeNotCharles. When I said “paranoid” I meant it in the more general sense of “not believing you’re being told the full truth” rather than an obsession with the numbers. I do not feel it necessary to consult a therapist for my mild degree of distrust of the CAQ government.
DeWolf 14:06 on 2022-03-14 Permalink
Covid Twitter is not a helpful or healthy place. It’s full of self-promoting charlatans, armchair experts, trolls, bots and people whose entire identity seems to begin and end with Covid. (Maybe they’re actually bots, because I don’t know any real people who only ever tweet about one thing.) When a community of people is fantasizing about a return to the global lockdown of March 2020, something is seriously wrong. It’s delusional.
I also dislike how Aaron Derfel packs a thread with random bits of Covid news from around the world as if the mere fact that bad things are happening in other countries means bad things will inevitably happen here. In the post-vaccine world, the epidemiological situation in every country is very different. Asia is going through the same Omicron surge we went through in December, but the vaccine coverage is very uneven in many places. In China, most people have the Sinopharm and Sinovax vaccines, which are reportedly not that effective. And in Hong Kong, only about 20% of elderly people are vaccinated at all, hence the incredible surge in deaths over the past few weeks. Hong Kong build a dam against Covid, but forgot to give people life rafts. Now that the dam has broken it’s a disaster.
(It’s also disingenuous for Derfel to blame Quebec dropping restrictions on the CAQ’s electoralism. We’re not an outlier – in fact we’re one of the last places in either North America or Europe to drop restrictions. BC dropped restrictions sooner than us, and they won’t be having an election for another three years. It’s a lazy, cynical analysis.)
The situation in Europe seems more relevant to Quebec, but even then, the picture is complicated. Cases and hospitalizations are rising in the UK again, but not in Denmark, which dropped all of its restrictions around the same time.
I support a cautious approach and I really hope Quebec doesn’t go forward with dropping its mask mandate in April. But the bottom line is that the virus isn’t going away and many of our previous measures are totally ineffective against an ultra-contagious variant like Omicron. The new reality is that lockdowns slow the spread but can’t suppress it completely, as China has shown. Vaccine passports are only as effective as the vaccines, and again, two doses doesn’t stop transmission, and three doses only seems to stop transmission for a couple of months. Masks work, although there are some contradictions in mask policies, like the idea that you need one to walk to the bathroom in a restaurant but not when you’re sitting at a table.
That’s the situation these days. It’s messy. So where do we go from here?
Kate 15:19 on 2022-03-14 Permalink
Whether we like it or not, we learn to live in a world where a common disease can kill us, or leave us with lingering issues – and be easily transmitted to anyone nearby with reduced immunity.
We (by which I mean anyone who grew up in Western culture post‑1918) have been spoiled by living in societies where the worst thing most of us would catch by contagion is the flu (or an STD if we were living dangerously).
CE 16:13 on 2022-03-14 Permalink
Is there anywhere on Twitter that could be considered a helpful or healthy place?
Kevin 16:26 on 2022-03-14 Permalink
The frustrating part is that policies that would work are being ignored in many places.
Ventilation and filters should be a necessary part of the fight against this disease, but that’s an industrial solution — instead the government puts the focus on the individual to do the heavy lifting.
Ian 16:34 on 2022-03-14 Permalink
@CE tech & design twitter are pretty useful, but it mostly depends who you follow. I make a point of following mostly women, which keeps most of the bros out of my feed.
Blork 10:11 on 2022-03-15 Permalink
If those numbers are because the government are not levelling with us it is far more likely to be due to good old fashioned incompetence. Such as:
~ The person whose job it is to compile the data for Montreal went on vacation and didn’t bother to get someone to fill in for them (or their boss forgot to do so).
~ Somebody forgot the password to the computer that’s used for the updates.
~ Somebody used the wrong filename on the data update and now the file is adrift in IT limbo.
~ Someone tripped over an Ethernet cable somewhere and didn’t fix it or bother to tell anyone, thus disrupting the data flow.
~ On and on. Most government “conspiracies” can probably be traced back to dumb shit like this.
Kate 11:04 on 2022-03-15 Permalink
Blork, knowing what I do of the health care system, it’s more likely to be
~ The fax machine ran out of toner.
Ian 18:14 on 2022-03-15 Permalink
Hanlon’s razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
I WISH there was a conspiracy because at least then someone with a glimmer of intelligence would have to be involved.