Canada has authorized Pfizer covid vaccine for 12-15 year olds. Yay! If only we had enough to actually give it to them. Were still stuck at 55 plus and certain health conditions in my province doe to supply problems. But, supply is supposed to increase later this month and into June. I think its reasonable to hope that my kids will be able to get shots by September. Which would be so great!

We got a lot of mileage out math war card game. I would edit the deck at first (combine 2 decks, and use only cards numbered 1-5), then add higher numbered cards in, then take out the 1's and 2's etc. We used it to drill subtraction and multiplication too. (and fractions). Denise Gaskins has a page devoted to variations on math war. Eternallytired's "Eat it" dice game could be extended with role playing dice (10-sided or 20-sided dice). I wish I'd thought of this idea, my kid's would have loved it.

A quick google gives me numerous papers and stats suggesting that covid rates (cases per 100 000) are higher in rural areas than in urban areas, and so are death rates. One, Two, Three, four, five. The absolute numbers are lower for rural areas because the populations are smaller, but the relative numbers are higher. Rural is not protective.

Also, agricultural processing facilities (meat packing plants etc) are mostly rural. Migrant farm workers living in crowded conditions are also mostly in rural areas. I don't think that "rural" is going to change the percentage immunized needed to achieve herd immunity.

I don't know. There is plenty of indoor social activity in rural areas. Right. And lots of American urban areas that aren't actually all that dense. NYC density is the exception, not the rule.

Cautious optimism in Ontario today. Our case numbers have been falling, and finally our ICU numbers seem to have stopped rising - they fallen by a little itty bit for 2 days in a row (900 two days ago, 889 today). Edited ; 900 not 9002 - quite different numbers!

I disagree. Broadly, screening for asymptomatic disease is a major part of preventive care. More specifically, with respect to testing for infectious disease, we do test broadly for asymptomatic infections in certain populations. We have universal HIV and syphilis testing for pregnant women here. MDs who perform high risk procedures are all tested for HIV and HepB at regular intervals as part of maintaining a license to practice. Hospital workers are regularly tested to tuberculosis. Blood donors are tested for HIV. edited to fix spelling typo. tuberculosis.

I started using a headlamp because I already own one for camping. Not sure I'd buy one just for this purpose (though it is pretty great)

Not a change in raw population numbers, rather a change in who is getting sick with covid and in what numbers. Sheer volumes of young people who are sick, and sick enough to need hospitalization, sick enough to need ICU care. 40 year-olds haven't had to compete with other 40-year olds for ICU and beds before. We are still making room for everyone at this point, but true overwhelm requiring ICU bed triage is a real possibility in the near future if numbers requiring ICU beds keep climbing. And "making room" right now means improvised ICU's and transfering patients all over the province, sometimes by mass casualty ambulance bus. That in of itself is going to nudge mortality upward - chaos in the system adds risk, which will translate to increased mortality.

I've never worked up the nerve to try it. I wouldn't even have o order my own - my 11 year old likes his pho with everything in it - beef tendon, tripe, the works. I could just take a nibble of his. He also has lovely skin....

I use my camping headlamp. It's just the right brightness and points right where I'm looking.

I question the biological plausibility of collagen supplementation. Collagen is a really big molecule. Proteins get broken down into amino acids and small peptide molecules when digested. Eating more collagen to get better skin seems a bit like eating meat to passively make bigger muscles. I think the thinking is that your body can re-make the particular simple peptides that collagen breaks down into into new connective tissue. But, eating meat products should provide plenty of collagen in the diet. I don't think that very many North Americans are collagen deficient. Vegetarians' bodies make connective tissue just fine without eating any collagen at all, so obviously our bodies are capable of making collagen without ingesting it. Here's a Japanese paper that summarizes the postulated mechanism: "Effects of Collagen Ingestion and their Biological Significance". And also states: "the adequate ingestion of a nutrient from the diet results in supplemental ingestion of this nutrient having little or no beneficial health effect." Maybe I'll order the beef tendon in my pho next time.

I actually think it's prudent. The data on these (Regeneron and other covid MAb cocktails) remains preliminary and largely unpublished. These are also very expensive treatments that just aren't widely available. In a publicly funded healthcare system, the bar for evidence is pretty high, especially for expensive therapies. Can't justify spending oodles and oodles of public money on therapies that might work. I think that restricting use of these agents to trial settings is appropriate at this time. I also think that our powers-that-be are doing a really good job of keeping up with the evidence as it evolves, and changing the protocols as the evidence warrants.

Not sure what you mean by early home care methods? There are some covid-at-home homecare programs, though these are usually used to facilitate earlier hospital discharge, rather than pre-hospital. If you mean drug treatments, then no. This is the current therapeutics protocol. There are no specific treatments indicated for mild covid at this time (outside of clinical trials).

"ASHphalt" pronunciation is dominant here. Actually, I don't think I've ever heard it pronounced asphalt locally, always aSHphalt. Google tells me that this is a regionalism.

It probably is upper-bounds for North America, absent variants - but the data is somewhat flawed because of lack of testing at the time, no? I suppose antibody data gives us a pretty good idea of what the true case numbers were. Excess deaths for each age group will be the most reliable, I think. But that sort of data takes time; we have it for New York, but won't for our current third wave here for quite some time.

I think India and Brazil would be the current upper-bounds test cases. Variants and high proportions of young people in their populations. Unfortunately, with the degree of systems collapse that's happening there, data systems fall apart too.

I'm not expressing myself well. Mortality rates will increase in generally when health care systems are overwhelmed. In this wave, the overwhelm has been driven by young, working people, who are disproportionately requiring hospitalization and ICU care as compared to previous waves. Their mortality rates are going to be higher than they would have been if the system weren't overwhelmed. Edited - previous, not precious! There is nothing precious about covid, that's for sure.

It won't be directly comparable to New York for lots of reasons: Covid is a different disease now than it was then (at 75% of our cases are variants), covid care has evolved, we have a completely different healthcare system where everyone is insured and pays zero dollars OOP for hospital care, universal access to primary care with zero cost OOP, more robust social safety nets, less obesity, generally healthier population at baseline. Our mortality rates for young people are going to increase and likely have already - but the data tend to be published cumulatively, so it's hard to parse it out. May main point was that when people quote stats like 80% of deaths are in people over 80, well, that's not true anymore. Vaccinating only the old and high risk won't work, it literally isn't working here. We are in a very ugly third wave with true healthcare system overwhelm, driven by young, working people. And they are SICK.

Yes and no. We didn't have a New York-like first wave here, so Canadian data will change. I think younger people actually are worse off because of the sheer volumes of them. We are overwhelmed with younger people, and going to have to triage/ration care among younger people. Young and otherwise healthy people who would have previously have been chosen for the bed in a triage situation will now be competing with similarly "young and healthy" others. The variants are certainly more contagious, and hence at the very least they indirectly more deadly - they've pushed us into an overwhelm situation.

Looking at COVID mortality stats by age group can misleading, I think, because so much has changed over time. It's definitely true that early in the pandemic, the vast, vast majority of deaths were in the very elderly. Because their risk is higher at baseline, and because nursing home overwhelm itself contributed to excess deaths in that age group. But, now things have very much changed here. The very elderly (80+) are vaxed, and relatively few are getting sick. Fewer than half of recent covid deaths in the province are in this age group in the last few weeks (compared to this group comprising 80 to 90% of deaths early in the pandemic.) The mortality rate for young people here is going to increase, because both because of deadlier variants, and because of hospital overwhelm. We aren't officially in triaging/rationing ICU care here yet, but I can tell you that on the ground, hospital overwhelm is causing changes in who gets admitted and who gets sent home.

This strategy literally isn't working here. We are in the middle of a third wave, driven by younger, healthier people, that is stressing hospitals to the max (record numbers of transfers, record numbers of ICU admissions, improvised ICU's, parking-lot wards in tents, one Toronto hospital diverting and transferring out yesterday because they are running out of oxygen. Our highest risk people are vaccinated (long term care, organ transplants, elderly, among others) and they aren't the ones getting sick. Our hospitals and ICU's are spilling over with 40 and 50 year olds. It's a combination on variants and just sheer numbers. Exactly this.

Me too. I love them! DH says the same thing - "millennial anti-theft device" When DH and I started dating way long ago, he drove an ancient Sentra that had to be push started more often than not. Always backed into parking spaces, preferably at the ends of aisles, pointing down hill.

Here, most people pronounce it SING-gu-lair, LOL. Seriously, I think drug companies give drugs unpronounceable generic names so that people will default to the easier to pronounce trade-names instead. Locally, Mon-te-LOO-kast. The e is a schwa.

Historically maybe? I think these special doctor pronunciations originally came about from historical British influence in medical culture. But mostly it's just copying one's elders in order to fit in to the medical culture. Canadian-born-and-raised residents and medical students suddenly shift to these pronunciations. (Not everyone does it. When it happens, though, the transformation is slightly funny to behold, as though putting on a white coat causes it). Much of medical professional education is informally absorbing the professional culture* - indoctrination, so to speak. *ETA - while sleep deprived and ever-competing with peers for that residency spot/fellowship spot/staff position. Medical education systems can cause some weird behaviours.