1) Although the number of Quebec's #COVID hospitalizations dipped below 1,000 Saturday for the first time since Dec. 15, Health Minister Christian Dubé urged anyone with the slightest symptoms to get tested. In this thread, I'll try to explain why the situation is still so dire. 
2) The Health Minister explained that #COVID19 cases were on the increase in the past few days. This is true for both the province and Montreal, with the number of infections rising for three days in a row to 1,204 in Quebec. But there’s a lot more to this story.
3) Although #COVID19 outbreaks have been declining in the workplace and in health-care institutions, they’ve been rising sharply in schools across Quebec. The government reported that the number of clusters in schools jumped by 17 to 272 on Saturday.
4) The health minister and Dr. Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s chief public health officer, are acutely aware that more transmissible variants like B117 are lurking in the province. Yet neither has spoken publicly about the possibility that such variants might be spreading in schools.
5) Since there is no widespread testing in Quebec's educational sector, and no concerted effort to sequence samples from students or teachers for possible variants, there is no way to confirm or rule out schools as a potential source of B117 contagion.
6) It’s worth quoting at length a Jan. 15 article in 𝑺𝒄𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆 by Gretchen Vogel concerning the risks schools pose during the second wave. “An outbreak of the new variant (B117) at a primary school in the Netherlands has undermined that confidence” that the risks are low.
7) “Tests of 818 teachers, students and families revealed 123 people — nearly 15% — were infected, just one month after the first case was identified at the school,” Vogel added. “The new variant was responsible for a large fraction of those cases.”
8) Meanwhile, #COVID19 outbreaks were flaring up in Quebec’s prison sector while authorities were focused on lowering hospitalizations. The chart below shows a total of 105 active cases in two Montreal jails and one in Saint-Jérôme. These numbers are likely under-counts.
9) Montreal, for its part, posted 605 #COVID19 cases, up from 489 the day before. The city’s rolling seven-day average inched up to 24.23 infections per 100,000 residents, slightly below Harvard University’s stay-at-home threshold. Please see the chart below.
10) At the neighborhood level, community transmission of the #coronavirus remained stubbornly high across the city, and especially in Montreal North, as the chart below makes clear. It doesn’t look like cases are trending downward definitively.
11) To conclude, Quebec’s death toll reached 9,999 Saturday, as if to underscore the sombre 10,000 mark. Montreal added four more deaths to a total of 4,365. For context only, the city of Paris declared 2,957 #COVID19 fatalities. End of thread. Please limit your social contacts.
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