The Alberta government has committed to infecting all children with the delta variant come fall. Why is this problematic? 1/n
1. There are over 500 000 children younger than 12 in the province. If even 0.05% get a severe complication like pneumonia or MIS-C, that’s 250 pediatric hospitalizations.
2. We don’t know the long term effects of delta infection on children.
3. Delta is as transmissible as chicken pox which means it will spread through schools and daycares (and back home to unvaccinated or immunocompromised family members) like wildfire.
4. We are likely only a few months away from being able to vaccinate our children against COVID-19.
5. Halting testing, tracing, and quarantine ensures that families have NO DATA to make risk based decisions for themselves and their children.
6. Teachers. Educators. School support staff. Emerging evidence shows delta may spread more easily than we thought through the vaccinated. We are making schools and child care centres unsafe for children AND adults.
7. Marginalized, essential and frontline workers may not have the ability to keep their children home come fall. They will again will be disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. /end
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Here are my initial thoughts on the announcement today.
YES I’m relieved measures are finally being implemented.
BUT they’re a hodgepodge of rules that still pander to the unvaccinated and are difficult to understand (see @UbakaOgbogu tweet), let alone implement: 🧵 1/n
1.The only ABSOLUTE restriction is for indoor social gatherings (10 max for vaxxed, no for unvaxxed) which is essentially unenforceable.
2.Other measures have a RESTRICTION EXEMPTION which means unvaccinated citizens can participate with a private negative test - MAJOR equity issues AND won’t drive our vaccination numbers up sufficiently.
Let’s deconstruct these unreasonable, unscientific arguments one by one. 1. The monitoring measures that are being eliminated are not “extraordinary measures.” They are the basic tenets of public health for disease control and are continuing around the world.
2. We are not yet at the stage of “living with covid.” That implies that it’s endemic (Rt=1, steady state). It’s not. We’re still in a period of exponential growth with an novel variant and insufficient vaccination to reach herd immunity.
3. The reason the rate of hospitalizations with COVID was similar to the flu in children last year was because PROTECTIVE measures like masking in schools were in place as were testing, tracing and isolating.
I never thought I would leave Alberta. I’ve lived in the US,Australia & BC but Alberta has always felt like home.Yes, even a minority immigrant female can be a prairie girl at heart. Under the UCP, my husband and I are seriously considering leaving. We are both physicians. Thread
My sister is a physician. My brother in law is a physician. My sister in law is a physician. We all live in Alberta and we are alarmed by the rapid dismantling of our health, education, and social systems. The UCP values profit over people,
Corporations over community, and autocracy over discourse and collaboration. And it’s not just our leadership - how can we live amongst UCP supporters that espouse these values? We want to raise our children in a community that values diversity, inclusivity,