By Staff
November 14th, 2020
BURLINGTON, ON
The details are always in the data.
The blue line might be a little on the mis-leading side.
On balance the Regional Public Health office has been doing a very good job testing and tracing COVID-19 infections. There are certainly instances of situations where things went off the rails – but the people doing this work have been working flat out. It is a seven days a week operation putting in the hours that it takes to test and trace.
These are the numbers for the Region. How close are we to capacity in terms of what the hospitals can handle?
Testing and tracing tells the Region what we are up against. When the data is rolled up to the province we get to see the bigger picture.
Local data explains the part we play in all this. The numbers are not good.
The percent positivity is the critical number. We are now very close to be unable to control the spread of the virus.
These numbers are not sustainable. That Effective reproduction number is what we want – not what we have. The Region is currently at a reproduction number of 5
With a seven-day moving average of 50+ cases a day it isn’t hard to see where we are headed.
The numbers on where we are with hospital capacity are approaching critical.
If the infections increase the number of people who enter hospitals and those who are in ICU and perhaps needing ventilation – bumps up against the number of ventilators available. As of Friday there were 8 classrooms in the Region closed with 11 people defined as infected.
The front line workers within the medical system are close to exhaustion – they have been at it since March with not much in the way of let up for them.
The Friday announcement that the four municipalities in the Region were now in a code Red status and the Premier suggesting that the province might well go into a second lock-down that will last longer than the first.
New Zealand chose to do a total lock down in August – winter time for them. Their lock down lasted more than 100 days. Canada is approaching its winter and our numbers are rising – because we did not heed what the data was telling us – the very mixed messaging didn’t help.
Is the writing on the wall?
