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Tuesday
Elise Stolte: Alberta needs to know if staffing crunch, profit motive made outbreaks worse
Columnist Elise Stolte writes:
In some outbreaks, COVID-19 slipped unnoticed through the doors of a long-term care facility and exploded. Nearly every resident on the floor got sick, an average of one in four died.
In other facilities, it barely spread at all. Why?
That’s got to be a critical question for health and government officials as they set out to rewrite Alberta’s 35-year-old Continuing Care Act — a lengthy process starting now with a public survey (available until Jan. 29), a round of consultants’ reports this spring and new legislation this fall.
There’s little doubt a new continuing care act is necessary.
Read more.
Tuesday
Canadians are a long way from achieving herd immunity: report
Despite high infection rates in the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians are still a long way from achieving herd immunity, according to a national report.
The report, compiled by the Canadian Blood Services and Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force (CITF), found that only 1.5 per cent of healthy Canadians contain detected antibodies in the second wave of the pandemic. The result is based on the analysis of 33,680 blood samples from blood donor centres across Canada — with the exception of Quebec and the Territories — collected during October and November last year.
“Community transmission has been more intense in this sustained second wave,” Dr. Catherine Hankins, CITF co-chair, stated in a release on Monday. “However, even using serology to add cases to our count that never came to light through formal diagnostic tests, it is clear that the vast majority of Canadians remain vulnerable to COVID-19.”
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