I've been working on a series of neighbourhood-level #COVID19#Canada visualizations to track the incidence of the virus in some of Canada’s largest cities. @CoulSim has #Montreal covered, so I started with #Toronto. My progress so far. Thread🧵⬇️
By now, we are all aware of the exponential growth of cases in #Ontario in the last few weeks. This is not restricted to #Toronto, but the city certainly led the pack.
Percent change in 7-day rolling average of cases compared to one week ago:
It has been widely reported that the #COVID19 pandemic has not impacted Toronto's residents equitably. This much is evident from the map of cumulative cases per 100,000.
The city’s northwest corner, home to many of the city’s most disadvantages residents, has been particularly hard hit, as reported earlier in the summer by @jyangstar, @katecallen, and others in @TorontoStar.
The recent resurgence in cases looks a little different. We know it’s being driven by young people. Here’s an animation of weekly new cases per 100,000 from August 17 to September 14.
You’ll notice Toronto’s Waterfront district light up in the most recent week of data. This isn’t surprising. It’s a young area.
"You hear anecdotally, it's because people in that age bracket are less scared and they're not taking the precautions that other age groups are taking," said @AshTuite, an epidemiologist at the @UofT@UofT_dlsph.
Human behaviour is at the root of this resurgence. @deonandan makes this point as forcefully as anyone:
As pithily summarized by @DFisman: "If you’re reacting to hospitalizations, you've missed the boat."
This animation was produced using the awesome Toronto neighbourhood dataset by @TOPublicHealth, extracted once per week on Mondays and uploaded by Wednesday. This is why the dataset only includes cases up to September 14.
Post-script: I spent a good chunk of time this weekend adding more #COVID19#Canada government data to my automatic archival tool. I'm up to almost 100 files per day! Why is this important? ⬇️🧵
I encourage everyone to read this thoughtful 🧵 about the worrying precedent set by the invocation of the Emergencies Act in Canada to freeze people out of the financial system without due process. /1
The order for financial service providers (banks, credit cards, crowdfunding platforms, etc.) to freeze the accounts of anyone associated directly or "indirectly" with the protest gives the government extremely wide latitude to act. /2
As the author points out, the ability to exercise your constitutionally protected rights (freedom of expression, assembly, religion, etc.) is often underpinned by the ability to transact. Exercising your rights costs money! /3
One thing that has bugged me since the beginning of the pandemic: how did the CDC get sidelined so completely? How did Dr. Fauci, the head of an agency almost no one had ever heard of, become the public face of the COVID response, while CDC Dir. Redfield had almost 0 presence?
Is it as simple as NIAID being in the D.C. Metro area whereas the CDC is situated away from Washington, in Atlanta? (Thanks to Coca-Cola president Robert Woodruff, incidentally)
Hey. I’ve been working on #COVID19#OpenData for a while now, but the time has come to think bigger. Today I’m announcing the launch of a new project: What Happened? COVID-19 in Canada
Let’s build a unified platform for COVID-19 data in Canada. Together.
This project has three pillars: a definitive timeline, a comprehensive archive and pandemic storytelling.
1. There’s a ton of #COVID19#OpenData out there and we want to stitch it into one definitive dataset covering cases, vaccination, hospitalizations and every other relevant metric. To succeed, we will need to design a standardized way to assemble and present COVID-19 data.
...among the 76,000 students, staff and faculty that have declared their status. It's not clear how many HAVEN'T declared their status (and thus what the overall vaccination rate is). Waiting for answers from @UofT on this one.
Yes, it's posted on a .gov website. Anyone is allowed to submit comments on articles printed in the Federal Register, which are then posted to regulations.gov alongside the original document.