Just this week, a Canadian statistic finally surpassed the United States! Only it’s not the economy or technology, it’s the epidemic! This week, for the first time, Canada’s per capita rate of new diagnoses surpassed that of the United States, where the epidemic was previously very severe. Why is this happening in sparsely populated Canada?
Data analyzed by Our World in Data, a website run by a British non-profit organization, shows that for the first time in the last seven consecutive days, Canada has surpassed the United States by averaging 205.73 new diagnoses per million people per day! Currently, the U.S. has averaged 205.12 new cases per million people per day for the last seven days. In the last week, Canada has averaged 7,967.7 new diagnoses per day, an 82% increase over the last 14 days. On the 9th day alone, 9,255 new cases were diagnosed in Canada, the highest number of new cases in a single day since the outbreak began.
Kerry Bowman, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto, said he was not surprised that there were more new confirmations in Canada than in the U.S. “I think it shows that our measures are not working well or that they’re not effective enough at this time.” Bowman said that while the U.S. was previously thought to be doing very poorly in response to the outbreak, the situation is now completely different, “because the Americans are now making tremendous progress and we’re not, and our infection rate will probably become comparable to the U.S.”
To sum up, the main reason for the current situation is that Canada is lagging behind in vaccination. Because of its dependence on imports, it has been very reactive in obtaining vaccines. Subsequently, ongoing production delays, coupled with fierce competition in the vaccine market, have severely hampered Canada’s plans to get widespread vaccination as soon as possible. As of April 7, 10,542,312 doses of New Crown vaccine had been introduced across Canada, of which 7,569,321 had been administered in all provinces. The vaccination completion rate is 10.14%.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on the 9th that by the end of June, Canada will have received at least 44 million doses of Pfizer, Modena or AstraZeneca vaccines. Meanwhile, the federal government also said that all Canadian adults who wish to be vaccinated will be able to receive at least one shot by the end of this summer. By comparison, more than 178.8 million doses of the new crown vaccine have been administered in the U.S. to date, and 19.21 percent of Americans have been vaccinated. Earlier this week, Biden said that by April 19, all adults in the U.S. will be able to get the vaccine.
The third wave of the outbreak continues to spread rapidly under the red light in almost all provinces across Canada. Ontario has issued an emergency ICU alert, B.C. has added more than 1,200 cases for 2 consecutive days, A.C. and Saskatchewan have added record numbers, Mann has officially declared a third wave of the epidemic, and Quebec’s Premier has announced a change to stricter anti-epidemic measures. …… Prime Minister Theroux has also called on provincial governments and health departments to tighten restrictions immediately!
Last week, Canadian hospitals admitted an average of more than 2,500 patients per day, a 7 per cent increase over the previous week; an average of 860 new intensive care patients per day, a 23 per cent increase. Also last week, the country averaged more than 6,800 new cases and 30 new deaths per day. The mutated virus currently ravaging the nation is so contagious and hits young people with such precision that the chances of an infection turning into a serious hospital admission are rising rapidly, and the number of newly crowned patients in the nation’s ICUs is approaching an all-time high.
Federal Chief Public Health Officer Wing-Sze Tam warned that the current mutant strain is driving a resurgence in the country, with more seriously ill patients pouring into hospitals and pushing the health care system to its limits. Just last week, Ontario’s Hospital for Sick Children announced that it had freed up eight intensive care unit beds for adult patients with new crowns to help expand Toronto’s critical care unit capacity, but today it still seems far from enough, and with the steep increase in critical care patients, it’s not just beds that are in short supply, but staff as well.
Dr. Michael Warner, the doctor in charge of the intensive care unit at Toronto’s Michael Garron Hospital, said on the 10th that the province now has 572 patients being treated in the intensive care unit, an unprecedented number, and on Friday the 9th alone, the province added 77 new critically ill patients!
“Unfortunately, this situation is going to get much worse. According to current records, there are 2,300 intensive care unit beds in Ontario, but in practical terms, we’re not fully using them because we’re understaffed.” He called on Ontario and the federal government to coordinate the shortage of ICU nurses and deploy nurses from other provinces to support Ontario because the situation in the ICU is really dangerous.
Disliked? Canada in no rush to open border with US
In an interview with Power& Politics, a current affairs program on CBC English, Dominic LeBlanc, a senior minister in Canada’s federal Liberal government, said there is still too much uncertainty about the new coronavirus outbreak in the coming months and that it is too early to discuss reopening the land border with the United States.
Trudeau’s cabinet minister for intergovernmental affairs, Dominic LeBlanc, noted that the Canadian federal government’s hope is that with a much higher rate of vaccination against the CCA virus and a much lower number of confirmed new cases of the virus each day, the federal government can discuss with provincial governments the easing of restrictions against the disease and with the U.S. government the mutual opening of land borders.
Dominic LeBlanc said he understands the desire of Canadians to be able to visit family and friends in other provinces and travel to the United States after more than a year of pneumonia from the Chinese Communist virus. But the decision to open up inter-provincial travel is up to the provincial government, and opening the land border with the United States is a decision that needs to be coordinated between the U.S. and Canadian governments.
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