2020-35

Saturday October 23, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday October 23, 2020

Health unit offers tips to reduce COVID risks at Halloween

The Brant County Health Unit has developed guidelines to make Halloween safe and fun for everyone.

Pandemic Thanksgiving

“Many traditional Halloween activities can be high-risk for spreading viruses, like COVID-19,” said Dr. Elizabeth Urbantke, Brant’s acting medical officer of health. “We’d ask that all residents refrain completely from attending costume parties held indoors or outdoors, and going to indoor haunted houses where people may be crowded together and screaming.”

She said that handing out treats from the trunks of cars lined up in large parking lots – often called trunk-or-treat events – is also considered a high-risk activity.

“We recommend staying within your own neighbourhood and avoiding areas where there would be large gatherings,”

The health unit has posted a Halloween and COVID-19 fact sheet on its website, outlining steps to be taken if families decide to opt for modified door-to-door trick-or-treating.

While considered a moderate risk, if going door-to-door, the health unit recommends wearing a non-medical face mask or face covering as part of a costume. A costume mask with two or more layers of breathable fabric covering the nose and mouth can be suitable, but should not be worn in addition to non-medical masks as the combination may cause breathing difficulty, says the health unit.

Here are some other tips from the health unit:

• Trick-or-treating should only be done outdoors in your own neighbourhood, avoiding homes that have their lights turned off.

• Travel only with people from your household, and observe physical distancing on crowded sidewalks and doorsteps.

• Wash your hands before going to trick-or-treat and when you return home, and use hand sanitizer frequently while out.

• While treats collected don’t need to be cleaned, they shouldn’t be eaten until you get home. Hand washing and avoiding touching your face is important after handling treats.

• For people who will be handing out treats at their homes, the health unit suggests standing outside your door so children won’t have to touch the doorbell or door.

• Only pre-packaged treats should be given out, and the use of tongs, a baking sheet or making a candy slide will allow for better physical distancing.

• If you are unable to remain outside to shell out treats, don’t leave a large bowl for children to help themselves. Frequently touched surfaces such as railings, doorbells and knobs should be disinfected regularly.

• The use of smoke machines as part of a decorative display is discouraged as they may cause visitors to cough.

If you decide not to go trick-or-treating door-to-door, the health unit has a number of suggestions for lower risk activities. (Continued: Brantford Expositor) 

 

Friday October 23, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday October 23, 2020

Pope Francis should have a talk with Amy Coney Barrett about same-sex marriage

Pope Francis’s call for civil unions for same-sex couples is a welcome departure from the Roman Catholic Church’s long reluctance to embrace everyone as children of God regardless of their sexual orientation.

September 21, 2013

The pope’s remarks in the documentary “Francesco” reverberated everywhere as a major contradiction to the Vatican’s stance that marriage is between a man and a woman.

“What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,” the pope said in the documentary aired this week, in which he emphasized his views that gay people are children of God.

The puritans within the Catholic Church immediately asked for clarification, though Pope Francis was pretty clear that the marriage of gay people should be recognized under the law.

October 9, 2014

What Francis didn’t say is whether the Vatican will finally recognize and embrace gay people’s marriage just as it does with the union between a man and woman. That would be revolutionary.

It’s thrilling to hear the pope open his arms to everyone as children of God and lending support for same-sex couple civil unions.

It isn’t enough to settle the conflicting views of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics who look to the Vatican for guidance over morality, which they in turn use to sponsor, promote or oppose laws governing us here on earth.   

October 3, 2013

But it is an important statement at a moment when many people in America are genuinely worried about the future of gay marriage and LGBTQ rights when the ultimate arbiter – the U.S. Supreme Court – will soon be packed with conservatives.

Those conservatives on the high court – and especially Amy Coney Barrett, the Catholic judge soon to be confirmed to the Supreme Court – should heed the pope’s advice.

After all, it’s what America wants.

Most Americans – 70% – support allowing gay and lesbian couples to marrylegally, according to the American Values Survey released this week. Twenty-eight percent oppose it.

Democrats and independents overwhelmingly support same-sex marriage, 80% to 76% respectively, while 50% of Republicans support it, the survey showed.

That tells me same-sex marriage has a good chance of remaining the law of the land. But just in case, Pope Francis should invite Amy Coney Barrett to the Vatican for a chat.

Good Catholics listen to the pope, right? (Arizona Republic) 

 

Thursday October 22, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday October 22, 2020

Canadians don’t need election melodrama

If not for Jagmeet Singh and the NDP and the three members of the Green caucus, Canada would be heading into a federal election today. We are not, and we should be thankful for that.

November 12, 2018

An election campaign, with the federal Parliament adjourned for campaigning, is the last thing the country wants, or needs. The second wave of this pandemic is sweeping across the nation. We need all hands on deck to manage the crisis, and no one needs to be distracted by an election campaign and everything that goes along with that.

But how did we get here? How did we end up on the brink of an election no one wants? 

There’s blame to be apportioned across the board, but the majority of it falls on the governing Liberals and Opposition Conservatives. They joined in a high stakes game of chicken that was not driven by anything other than partisan advantage. 

First, the Conservatives. They launched a motion on Opposition Day that called for establishing a new super-committee to investigate corruption, specifically the WE scandal. It would have had unprecedented power to call not only members of the government and civil service, but people such as friends and relatives. It could have compelled the release of private citizens’ financial records over a 12-year period. That is probably not even legal.

October 23, 2019

It was a massive overreach, especially considering Parliament already has multiple committees that can do that work. And given that this is a minority government, those committees are often dominated by opposition MPs, so the government doesn’t always get its way. 

Further, there is a central hypocrisy in what the Conservatives are saying. They want a committee specifically focused on government corruption, and they publicly declare they do not have confidence in the government. But they also say they don’t want an election. You cannot square that circle.

But the Liberals delivered a surprise — they chose a nuclear response to the Conservatives overreach, saying the motion amounted to a loss of confidence in the government, and therefore would trigger an election. They drew a line in the sand, and they dared opposition parties to cross.

October 28, 2016

There’s no doubt, from a political strategy perspective, that the government outplayed its opponents. But beyond that strategic victory, this brinksmanship isn’t a good look for anyone involved. The government is acting like it has a majority when it doesn’t. The Conservatives wanted to weaponize the committee process for partisan gain. Both were willing to force Canadians to endure an election campaign in a very dangerous time. For that, they should be ashamed.

Thankfully, Singh’s NDP sought middle ground. They proposed a committee that would oversee and investigate all spending and management during the pandemic, including in the WE affair. That is a reasonable mandate for a new committee. We don’t know what the Liberals agreed to in exchange for the NDP’s support against the Conservatives, but don’t be surprised if the end result of this drama fest is something like what the NDP proposed. 

So for now, this melodrama is over. Don’t be surprised when the next game of chicken breaks out, as happened frequently when Stephen Harper’s minority government was challenged repeatedly and dared opposition parties to trigger an election. 

That said, there was ample cynical political gamesmanship on display here. It’s wasn’t pretty. The Liberals and Conservatives should take a long look in the mirror and try to remember what Canadians are dealing with. That’s what matters, not an unnecessary election campaign. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

 

Wednesday October 21, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday October 21, 2020

Lesson from the SpinCo outbreak: Province owns testing and tracing failure

When books are written telling the story of this pandemic — as they certainly will be — it may well be that Hamilton’s “superspreader” episode that began at the SpinCo cycling gym will get its own chapter.

May 16, 2020

The outbreak and its aftermath are a textbook example of why it is vital that testing and contact tracing be at optimal capacity during pandemics like this one. Every public health expert in Ontario has said that repeatedly. Even those of us who are not experts but read what experts say know it.

But knowing that and making it happen are different things apparently. At the time that the SpinCo outbreak was happening it was taking Hamiltonians up to eight days to get COVID test results. One gym client who spoke to Spectator journalist Katrina Clarke said she began to feel sick on Sept. 29 and got tested on Sept. 30. But she didn’t get her test results back until Oct. 5.

In that five-day period, 11 more classes were possibly exposed to the virus. The woman was self-isolating, but because she lives with her mother and sister, they got sick, too.

This is the cost of inadequate testing and contact-tracing capacity. Dr. Zain Chagla, infectious disease specialist at St. Joseph’s Healthcare, confirms this case highlights the need for rapid testing and tracing. Without it, public health officials are flying blind, or close to it. Or as Chagla puts it: “You want to fly into a storm with all your instruments on so you know how to react.”

September 18, 2020

If all this sounds familiar, it should. Media commentary here and across Ontario made the same observations during the first wave of COVID-19.

All the forensics on this superspreader event are not final, but at least one thing is clear. The gym may have done everything right. Local health officials may have made the right moves based on the data they had. But they could not move on data they didn’t have, and they didn’t have it because testing capacity issues slowed the results for so long, rendering effective contact tracing impossible.

Colin Furness, infection control epidemiologist at the University of Toronto confirms this, saying: “Contact tracing only really works if it’s incredibly timely.”

June 9, 2020

It wasn’t timely. As of Tuesday afternoon the result of that failure was  80 cases that sprung from the SpinCo outbreak. Radius restaurant on James Street South now has a six-person outbreak linked to SpinCo. Dozens of secondary households may have been exposed along with eight schools and child-care centres, six health-care facilities and 22 other workplaces.

How could this happen? How, when the Ontario government was warned countless times that a second wave was almost certainly coming?

How, when the government’s own health command table acknowledged the critical importance of being prepared after the first wave?

How, when the government committed to adequate testing, lab capacity and contact tracing resources?

Now, with the barn door open and the horse nowhere in sight, the province says it is “taking immediate action to expand case and contact management to help track, trace and isolate new cases of COVID-19.” That reassurance was contained in a email responding to questions from The Spectator.

Better late than never, right? Except the government had mountains of advice and evidence that could have prevented this outbreak from growing as far and fast as it has. For reasons only the government and its health brain trust know for sure, it didn’t heed the warnings and advice. And here we are. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

 

Tuesday October 20, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday October 20, 2020

Declaration calling for end to lockdowns is about politics, not public health

It’s name — Great Barrington Declaration — seems an attempt to make it sound important, even authoritative. It is neither. Rather, “it’s callous, dangerous nonsense” in the words of American microbiologist and immunologist John Moore.

June 5, 2020

Moore was one of thousands of medical and public health experts reacting to last week’s carefully scripted release of the so-called declaration, which essentially calls for and end to lockdowns and allowing people to be infected by COVID-19, so eventually herd immunity would be realized. The idea is that people most at risk of dying and serious illness would be locked down, and the rest of society would return to “normal,” with people less likely to die being exposed to the virus. 

Herd immunity happens when a significant portion of the population is exposed to a virus, so that it stops spreading because a critical mass of people have become immune to it. 

There are two ways to achieve herd immunity. The first is to administer an effective vaccine. The second, proposed by the three academics behind the declaration, is to basically let the virus run free until enough people become infected.

The first option is what the world’s medical and scientific community is working feverishly at accomplishing. The second is discredited by virtually all credible experts, other than those driven by libertarian ideology, as appears to be the case here. 

August 7, 2020

Consider: Since anyone over 65 is automatically at higher risk of serious outcomes, all those people would need to be locked down. In Canada, that would be about 20 per cent of the population. Try to picture what it would look like if 20 per cent of the population was basically locked away while the virus raged unrestrained in the rest of the population.

Experts say that to achieve herd immunity, 70 per cent of the population would need to be infected. That’s 70 per cent of Canada’s approximately 37.6 million people. That means something like 26 million Canadians would need to be infected in order to achieve herd immunity. To Oct. 15, just under 176,000 Canadians had contracted COVID-19. Even given that many cases have gone unreported, that is an unthinkable rate of disease spread. 

Try to imagine the implications on our health-care system of that many people being infected. It’s true that younger, healthy people generally don’t get as sick as higher risk people, but if only a fraction of those millions became seriously ill, hospitals would be overwhelmed. And imagine how many people would suffer long-term health effects? And how many locked-down at risk people would become sick based on the sheer volume of infected people?

September 24, 2020

All of this is magnified many times in the United States, where the pandemic has been so badly managed and continues to spread disastrously. So perhaps it’s not surprising that this horribly inhumane, destructive approach is popular at the Trump White House. (Britain’s Boris Johnson is also a fan of herd immunity by massive death toll.)

In truth, this declaration has little to do with public health. It’s all about a political viewpoint. It’s a crank, dressed up as in credible clothes. While the authors may be credentialed experts, the work itself is funded by far right conservative interests. The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), where the declaration was signed, is a libertarian think tank committed to “pure freedom” and wishes to see the “role of government … sharply confined.” So, if this is a crock, why waste time writing about it? Because, it’s a crock carefully disguised to look and feel credible. The world’s science and medical community quickly exposed this attempt, but it won’t be the last, which is why we need to remain on guard. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)