Meanwhile in Canada, those under 60 with disabilities & chronic diseases aren’t recommended to be vaccinated until after all healthy 60+ people are done.
I hope someone with the right skills & expertise is planning an international comparison study of ♿️ experiences & outcomes.
Here are the Canadian recommendations if you haven’t already seen them. (There’s a graphic, too, that I refuse to tweet. They obviously spent so much effort making an image with stylized needles that they were too tired to assess & apply risk evidence.) canada.ca/en/public-heal…
Provinces don’t have to follow those recommendations to the letter, but most will likely just follow the national guidance, more or less.
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The appalling ableism in health care, government, academia, and society is even more evident than usual in this pandemic. Canada is one of the worst offenders. It’s hard to take. 🧵
This is not surprising, as we already knew that Canada does poorly compared to other countries when it comes to supporting disabled people. E.g., we do very poorly on, “spending due to sickness, disability and occupational injury.” data.oecd.org/socialexp/publ…data.oecd.org/chart/6hja
So it shouldn’t be a surprise. But the pandemic-time hits just keep coming.
In my experience, most Canadians are unaware that Canada has extremely few available acute care hospital beds (meaning “beds that are maintained, staffed and immediately available for use”) compared to other countries. Here’s the international comparison: data.oecd.org/chart/6a67
What this means: we have less leeway than other countries to max out hospital capacity as intensive care units (ICUs) fill up with COVID-19 patients needing beds, equipment, and health care staff’s attention for days or weeks.
When my research group made an app in April to help people understand how social/physical distancing works to reduce transmission, this is why we noted that hospitals getting overwhelmed is a problem for people with COVID or needing care for other reasons.
Thank you @WrightCensored! 5 minutes is a very tough length for me (1-2 minutes is easy, 20 minutes is easy, anything in between is hard to stick to time), so, as usual, I prepared my statement ahead of time! Makes it easy to copy and paste here. 😀
1/Hello, thank you so much for this incredible honour.
2/I’m very grateful to the society @socmdm, to everyone on the awards committee, everyone on the board, my colleagues and friends who nominated the paper, my co-authors, the people at the funding agency who collaborated on the work, my team and my family.
Night owl thread. Not long ago, I finished my 3-year term on a national committee with the worst acronym, the Advisory Committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Program (ACEDIP). It's pronounced AY-suh-dip. (I died a little inside every time I said it.) chairs-chaires.gc.ca/program-progra…
At one of our meetings (2018, I believe?) people came to present their work in progress on the design of a new Canadian program based on Athena Swan. One of their questions was, basically, “Should we start with gender, like the UK did, and expand from there?”
The committee’s unanimous, unequivocal response was: no. We weren’t involved beyond that meeting, but I was glad that the final program, Dimensions, aimed to address multiple dimensions of identity (not as many as I’d like, but it’s a start.) nserc-crsng.gc.ca/NSERC-CRSNG/ED…
I’m starting to see discussion about serological testing for COVID19 antibodies as one of the ways that we will be able to safely allow people to start to interact more. To have informed public discussions about this, people will need to understand how test “accuracy” works. 🧵
Note 1: There’s a whole separate issue here about how immunity may or may not work and whether the presence of antibodies indicates long(ish)-term immunity. That is not the topic here. I recommend this article.
Note 2: I am not a virologist, an infectious disease doc, nor an epidemiologist. Although I have a background in math & took a lot of epi courses, my PhD was in human factors engineering, focusing on interface design for health information.
I gave a talk this week on things I have learned re: scientific writing. The talk was in French (my language at work) but I thought I’d share here (slides in French, tweets in English) in case it is useful to others.
Thread:
As I presented to those at my talk, what worked for me may or may not work for you, but for whatever they are worth, here are my best tips.
1. Be honest with yourself about your issues.
At one time, I found it easy to say that I wasn’t writing because I was busy. I was definitely busy.