if the other published numbers are right, then the magic number you want to look for in the united states before this starts to slow down on it's own is 200,000 deaths.

but, i'm still calling for 350,000 deaths there, minimum.

in canada, the magic number is about 25,000.

so, this is the irony - as they are (much) closer to the hump than we are, they could get through this faster than us.

look at new york, today. the rest of the country will be there in another six weeks. i see no end to this here, at all - we could be dragging our asses through this six months from now.

fwiw, an ifr of .3% would suggest a true case count in the united states that is in excess of 50 million people. at .6%, considered a high estimate nowdays, it would suggest over 25 million cases.

in canada, a .3% ifr would suggest almost 3 million total cases, whereas a .6% ifr would suggest nearly 1.5 million.

if the ifr is under 0.3%, which i think is closer to the consensus since the last time i looked when 0.6 was considered reasonable, it would suggest pushing two million cases in quebec, given the death count of 5687.

and if it's more like 0.1%, which was the lowball i used in my model, then you'd be looking at 5.687 million cases. in ontario, .6% is 460K cases, .3% is 930K and .1% is 2.782 million cases.

obviously, nobody knows the exact number of people that have been infected in ontario or quebec. but, when your experimental indicators gives you a range in the 600K-5700K range, and your study throws out 125,000 (no doubt with a large error rate), you've either overturned the existing science or you've done something terribly wrong.

why would they lie?

so canada can win on twitter.

relative to the warped understanding of reality presented by twitter. of course.

well, maybe faulty tests are more likely...

maybe.

i wouldn't put it past them.

it's not consistent; there's something underlying what they did across the country that is deeply flawed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently has a best guess of 0.65% for the IFR. 

so, that 4.5% in quebec, as well as that 2.5% in ontario, are really red flags as to consistency in the data.

if the death rate for the virus is 0.6%, a more acceptable estimate, than we would expect upwards of a million total cases in quebec, at this point. even if you creep it up to 1%, you're still looking at upwards of 600,000.

as we've seen low-ball testing throughout canada, the most reasonable way to explain the dramatic disconnect is to point fingers at the tests. i know that the media was focusing on false positives when these tests rolled out, but the actual issue in front of doctors was false negatives. that is, the tests available at the time were known to miss a large number of cases. it's still hard to recoup reasonable numbers out of the ones presented, given published error rates, unless you assume that they're over-sampling rural areas relative to urban areas.

again, there's really only two possibilities, given that we know that death rates are pushing 1% at the very highest, and should be lower in advanced health care systems like canada.

1) canada has an astronomically high death rate, compared to similar countries or
2) the data is drastically underestimating the prevalence of antibody immunity in the general population

...and (2) is far more likely.

that 4.5% death rate in quebec is a higher number than can be calculated by naively dividing out the number of deaths by the number of actual found cases in the united states, which is roughly 3%.

so, i don't expect those results to hold up.

really, if i didn't know any better, i might think there's been an attempt to fit the data to naive who numbers, and an attempt to downplay any regional spread.

and, to be clear: i wouldn't trust the canadian government to tell me the time of day when we're standing directly below the peace tower. they have a history of just rank dishonesty, especially in times of crises. truth is malleable to a greater cause. and, if i didn't know better, i might think that's exactly what it's all about.

so, i'll wait for some independent analysis.

but, what have we sacrificed all of this for, if we're no closer to ending it? what have we gained, in all of this misery, if the end result is one of the highest death rates in the world, and no immunity to show for it?

i mean, you might look at those numbers and think you won some kind of stupid game or something because you kept the infection rate the lowest.

but, you're not winning if it means the death rate is the highest.

so, i'm going to assume that the canadian government must be using malfunctioning tests that are missing a lot of positives, and expect that independent testing eventually adds up a little bit better with the data in front of us than the government results have.

so, call me skeptical...

i mean, what's the death rate in quebec if there's only 125,000 cases? it's 4.5%! quebec's health care system has poorer outcomes than other places in canada, but those are 3rd world mortality rates.

in ontario, the official stats would suggest a 2.5% death rate, which would imply ontario must have a terrible health care system.

the numbers are just not consistent with the facts that we have, meaning:

1) our health care results have been alarmingly poor or
2) they're wrong.

i think (2) is probably more right than (1).

but, we'll need to wait for independent studies to verify the results.

it's very frustrating to consider the possibility that the government has banned everybody from having fun for months, with no end in sight, and we're not even close to immunity yet.

and, it's not consistent with findings in other hard hit areas. bc was not hit hard, but montreal had a proper pandemic, and toronto at least saw a substantive number of cases. with that many cases, if there's not substantive immunity developing, why not?

there have been a lot of reports of these antibody tests missing a lot of positives. we've seen this across this country now, and while the bc results seemed reasonable, the ontario results did not and the quebec results are just not believable at all. if you're to take these studies seriously, the prevalence seems to be about the same across the country, and differences in testing and outcome are just error.

i guess if the results are correct, it means we're going to need to see a whole lot more dead canadians before we get through this.

but, i'm going to put out a call for non-government bodies to do some antibody testing in canada, because what the government is presenting to us doesn't make any sense.

the longer it takes to build immunity, the longer this goes on for.

i don't want to be the least immune, weakest, most vulnerable country in the world :(.

https://nationalpost.com/news/national/almost-125000-quebecers-aged-18-69-infected-with-novel-coronavirus-study

i've made my concerns about china relatively clear over a long period of time. they are an expansionist, imperialist civilization that would see this continent as empty land to colonize. if they could, they'd enslave us and move in - don't trick yourself into believing otherwise.

and, they are a different civilization; no aristotle, no jesus, no alexander. the only meaningful historical point of diffusion was via mongol expansion, and they came merely to slaughter and subjugate. expect no different in the future, should it end that way.

so, canada has a choice that needs to be made in a broader civilizational context than i think is currently fully understood, or is even fashionable to try to understand. it's our nature to be open, and that's preferable, but we need to maintain some lines of defence.

yet, my concerns be as they may be, i know that history is littered with decadent aristocrats that are just as happy to sell their nations out to rising tyrants as they are to try to mount a defence.

if the chinese were to stop shipment of a vaccine to canada over a legitimate legal process involving a relative of a valued member of the ruling clique (rather than any actual threat to it's security), it would reflect rather poorly upon them. that is corruption, plain and simple.

faced with this kind of corruption in the chinese ruling class, canada should not be compliant, or wonder what may have been had it been more compliant. rather, it should seek a greater level of autonomy in the production of this material.

as it is, i do not believe that vaccine research is an area that has been harmed by the neo-liberal order in this sense, although manufacturing a vaccine in the end may be an open question - and something that the federal government should be monitoring and perhaps altering the capacity for.

so, one hopes this does not actually happen; if it does, it should be seen as a disincentive to integrate supply chains with the chinese, rather than as an incentive to be compliant.

https://nationalpost.com/health/china-spat-may-be-threatening-canadas-bid-to-get-early-access-to-leading-covid-19-vaccine-experts

and, now it's time for the inevitable round of trivially criticizing sexism in the media around a prominent candidate, or, as it would be, category of candidates - 'cause all them black women are all the same, right. it's via occupying that unique intersection point between gender and race that the negro female develops her unique characteristics, and artificially imposed hindrances within society.

listen, these gender roles are ancient; they're cultural, they're symbolic, they're religious, they're remnants of something that developed socio-biologically and they're baked into every day life. we're just beginning to understand them, we're not even close to making them go away. so, it's up to individual candidates to define themselves transcendent to their assigned roles, and that's going to be hard for as long as those cultural realities remain around us as we exist, in our lives.

so, it's kind of just background noise. you're yelling at the moon. it's how things are, and something women know they just have to deal with.

i'm not opposed in principle to the symbolic placement of a black woman on the throne as a placation tactic, as i think even the most cynical instance of the concept would have positive ramifications, socially. but, i just don't see a candidate i could actively support, and am finding myself more attracted to 2024 instead.