I'm going to build on it a bit. Remember my analogy that covid-19 under bad government is like riding a canoe on a rollercoaster?
We have two canoes now.
• Calgary and Edmonton, leading/front going down
• Rest of Alberta, leading/front going up.
Example: Test Positivity
AB average going down, now 10.33%
• dominated by Calgary Zone down to 6.95% and Edmonton Zone 8.35%
• while rest of Alberta goes up
• Central 16.3%, North 19.37%, 14.24% and rising
Despite the divergence:
• which is both an outcome of divide-and-conquer strategy by our Premier
• and also enables more
• we still all share the same hospitals
• and deaths outside Calgary & Edmonton are rising
We have an entire province glued to social media and news for the point ICU overload triggers triage.
IMHO (see last night's thread) we would have reached it on weekend if not for non-ICU Wards like Internal Medicine saying to ICU:give us as many of your patients as possible.
And @AHS_media media Dr Verna Yiu put it bluntly: we would have triggered triage already if not for people dying in roughly same quantity as new admissions.
Even though today was part of the "Chief Medical Officer Updates" many people have tuned her out.
• sticking to her model and stories about the UK despite the actual evidence from Alberta
• keeping June model secret until too late
• "Endemic"
They are there for Dr Yiu.
We're supposed to be getting province-wide wastewater testing results published on Alberta Health stats page soon, right?
@ucalgaryCHI is still publishing. While R for Calgary is slowing...
Trend since 1 July: Number of infected people in Calgary shedding virus still rising.
So between the two threads, we're just about through the whole scorecard.
You're ready for the pop quiz now, right?
Deaths & Vax left.
I'll do Vax another day. Want to give it a deeper dive.
Deaths. What we are all trying to avoid.*
New graph, just on this. I don't want to extrapolate the trend out further, and I have already increased the vertical axis more than I want.
Many wonderful people are knocking themselves out to stop this.*
* Notable exceptions.
Love and care for each other.
These are tough days now, and ahead.
We're making history - in realtime - that people in all sorts of disciplines will study later.
Just finished watching @PopAlberta special on:
• protecting children too young to vaccinate
• learning that the risk in schools SEEMS to be scientific: #COVIDisAirborne but is ACTUALLY political
• Learn how to address this at home, school & your MLAs.
Last night @CMOH_Alberta gave a presentation to Alberta family docs, and I got a chance to see it and take screenshots before the video was set to Private.
Whenever a politician wants to give you "Context", be wary of Deceptive Framing.
The damage was done in July with that steep rise of R > 1.2 during & after Stampede.
I'm sticking with Leading Indicators of the spread of #COVID19AB, because They. Lead. To. Severe. Outcomes, including Death.
You can't grow ICU Capacity to match exponential growth. You have to stop the spread up front to give your healthcare system a chance, Public + Private.
Sadly, today is the day we exceed Alberta's baseline ICU Capacity.
Again.
• Blue Exponential Growth Curve = Albertans in ICU with COVID-19
• Red line = Baseline Capacity
• Surge Capacity comes from Cancelling Surgeries & Redeploying Doctors, Nurses, other Healthcare Workers
I don't normally do one graph inset into another, but I wanted to show @GosiaGasperoPhD modelled this exactly, on 24 August.
She's a world-class biologist who could be doing this anywhere in the world, saying "Look what is happening over there in AB."
Big news about COVID-19 Vaccinations in US, UK and Canada to share before @PopAlberta explains this live today at 4pm.
The news is about vaccine mandates, passports, and 3rd doses.
Let's start with Dr Fauci speaking to Americans on @NewsHour, on which we Canadians eavesdrop because:
• he's world class
• Covid in Canada is like a lot of American states
• Alberta (and BC & SK) are like the worst of American states