Quinte Fishing

Well folks. 700 cases today, highest ever for Ontario. Our neighbours to the west having 300+ and our neighbours to the north east having almost 90.

I really hope we don’t miss the fall walleye hunt due to closed boat ramps. The financial impact to the area would be huge and the mental health aspect for many of us would be a large problem.


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Bob MacMillan
Owner/Operator
Kingston Sport Fishing
https://kingstonsportfishing.ca/

I hope not, BigMac. The impact of a second shutdown would be terrible - both on the County and across Ontario, both financially and for the health of our society.

But, in my (somewhat studied but admitted far from qualified) opinion, it is not necessary at this point!

Here's an interesting source for Covid data on Ontario: https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data

If you look at new active cases, yesterday's 700 is a record as you say. But is the Second Wave really here? Does it really exist even?

In my opinion, active cases is a terrible way to track the disease due to the vagaries of how and who we are testing and how that has changed over time. For example, the published data says that Ontario gave over 4 times more daily tests last week than during the April peak. Add in asymptotic carriers, false positives, who gets access to tests, etc., etc. - makes my head spin.

Actually outcomes from having covid, like hospitalizations, ICU admissions and deaths, do a much better job of tracking impact and prevalence, in my opinion. Hospitalization are indeed up over the last two weeks, from 47 to 128 patients and ICU admits are up from 17 to 29. A cause for concern, sure, but in comparison to the April peak, the record for hospitalizations was 1,008 (May 1) and peak ICU admissions was 261 (April 12). Looking at the ultimate outcome, there were 11 covid deaths in the province in the last week, compared to 369 in the last week of April. There have been 28 deaths in the first 28 days of September; May averaged 38 PER DAY. (And yes, there is latency in death statistics due to the course of illness but even if you time-shift diagnoses back 14 days, the conclusion is the same).

I guess where I am going with this is that the media and government's fixation on using new active cases as the primary measure doesn't show the whole story. At this point, it is not that bad. So I tell my kids: wash your hands, don't pick you nose, zoom call your grandparents... but keep on keeping on.

Oh, and let's keep fishing.

All the best, be safe,
Dano