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The lessons Canada can take from the U.S.'s mishandling of COVID-19 – CBC.ca

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Nearly two months ago, a health-care adviser to two U.S. presidents burst out in frustration when asked whether Americans would see a quick spike in new COVID-19 cases as states reopened.

Zeke Emanuel, who served in the Obama White House and has informally advised President Donald Trump, expressed exasperation that people kept looking for an immediate effect.

Launching into a sermon about the mathematical realities of exponential growth rates, Emanuel said the disastrous consequences of reopening too early would only emerge around early summer.

“Two months, not two weeks,” Emanuel said in early May. “That’s likely when you’ll see the effects of what we’re doing today. … That’s when people will recognize, ‘Wow, now we’ve got 1,000 cases today, 3,000 cases tomorrow, 6,000 the next day.'”

He predicted the country would awaken to the disaster around mid-July. 

It’s happening ahead of schedule.

Few people wear masks as they walk on the beach pier in Oceanside, California, on Monday, despite rising COVID-19 case numbers in the state. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

The U.S. has surpassed 127,000 deaths and case counts are rising rapidly in numerous states, mainly in the south. An alarming surge has forced Texas to pause its reopening plans. Hospitalizations have hit record highs in Arizona and in California.

Florida has backpedaled on its reopening bullishness. A governor who recently accused the media of fear-mongering over COVID-19 — wagging his finger at reporters over what he characterized as “black helicopter” conspiracy theories — was forced to announce Friday that bars would close again as Florida experienced an astronomical spike in positive tests.

“This is what happens when you reduce social distancing measures and you have community transmission ongoing and those two things collide and it just spreads,” said Jason Kindrachuk, an assistant professor of viral pathogenesis at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg and Canada Research Chair of emerging viruses.

Kindrachuk said that Canadians would be well-advised to take lessons from the American response to the pandemic. 

“We can take that information and posit here in Canada that as we reduce social distancing, especially in regions that are more population-dense, we’re likely going to see a resurgence in cases, because ultimately the virus is still in our communities and it’s still able to spread.”

U.S. South hard-hit

On Friday, the troubling trendline in the U.S. prompted the White House to resume its previously suspended coronavirus press conferences. Vice-President Mike Pence maintained the country is largely better off than a few weeks ago, but said 16 states have rising case totals and, more worryingly, a rising percentage of positive test rates.

While this virus is an evolving phenomenon, rendering any broad conclusions risky, here’s what we know about the places in the U.S. experiencing outbreaks: they’re mostly in the south; mostly in states that reopened early and aggressively and resisted the widespread use of masks; and mostly run by Republicans, unlike an earlier wave that primarily struck northern, Democrat-led states.

The rapid increase in cases and hospitalizations is due to the push to reopen states without first establishing proper systems of tracking and treating cases, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. 

“It’s never been a question whether or not we would get more cases when people started to socially interact,” he said. “The question always was, could we keep those cases occurring at a pace that was manageable?”

Adalja said, “clearly in those states that are under stress right now, there hadn’t been enough preparation for these cases.”

He said states facing a strain on their health-care systems squandered opportunities during lockdowns to expand their capacity and prepare for a spike in cases. 

People line up to get tested for COVID-19 at a drive through testing site in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 20. (Matt York/Associated Press)

“From the very beginning, this outbreak has really been mismanaged in terms of what the government response should have been,” he said. “People thought that they could get away with going back to the norm – not realizing the virus was still there.”

Adalja said some parts of the U.S. that were spared large outbreaks of COVID-19 early in the pandemic wrongly assumed they wouldn’t be hit hard after lifting lockdown measures — or that they could adequately handle the number of new cases.

He said that’s the main takeaway for Canada as provinces hit hard by COVID-19, like Ontario and Quebec, move to lift lockdown measures.

“What you can learn is that the virus hasn’t disappeared, that social interaction is going to drive new cases,” Adalja said. “The key thing is: Can you handle those new cases?”

U.S. testing more, finding more cases

The initial debacle over the lack of testing in the U.S. is well-documented, as are Trump’s boasts about the amount of testing and his later suggestions that the government should reduce tests, because they only reveal more positive cases.  

Another story about U.S. testing is less well-known. It’s that the U.S. has surged ahead of Canada in testing per capita, thanks to public-private partnerships.

In Canada, all COVID-19 testing is done through the health-care system at hospitals or designated testing sites. But in the U.S., different people have different access to tests. 

For example, Washington, D.C., resident Carlos Sabatino said he got a test in 20 minutes. Feeling some symptoms, he went to a drive-thru at a CVS Pharmacy, was handed a kit, told how to perform a nasal swab, cleaned the kit with sanitary wipes and gave it back.

Three days later, he went online and got the results, which declared him COVID-free. His health insurance covered the cost. “The whole experience, door to door, took 45 minutes,” he said. “I was surprised how efficient it is.… Frankly, I was impressed.”

Sabatino learned about the pharmacy’s testing after giving up trying to get a test from the city government. He was deterred by the brutally long lines and the news that he would only get results by mail, in a week.

But Sabatino is one of the lucky ones. Disparities in U.S. health care are a constant problem.

Some Americans have access issues, while others describe ghastly insurance bills. Video from some locations in the U.S. south shows huge lineups.

WATCH | Large lineups at U.S. testing sites:

Traffic is seen at a standstill as drivers wait at drive-thru COVID-19 test sites in the U.S. 1:11

This pandemic has exposed deep inequalities in U.S. health care, with Black Americans less likely to access care and far likelier to become critically sick

This week, a former U.S. health-insurance executive said the system had failed and he apologized for previously disparaging Canadian public health care. 

Testing capacity was slow to ramp up in the U.S. early in the pandemic, leaving the virus ample time to spread across the country before it could be exposed. Even now, testing shortages are being reported in the latest hot spots.

That’s why experts say the percentage of tests turning up positive results in the U.S. is drastically higher per capita than in Canada. If you test early and often, you identify cases quickly. If you test late, early cases will be missed and the positivity rate will be higher.

For each positive case in Canada, an average of 110 people are being tested. In the U.S., that number currently sits at about one for every 17 tests

“When I look at the U.S. scenario, it’s … almost like watching a train wreck in slow motion, because a lot of it is quite predictable, mostly because they were really, really behind on getting testing started,” said Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious disease physician at the University of Alberta. 

“They’re expanding their testing now, but the percent positivity of their test is still going up, which is horrifyingly scary.”

Saxinger said that leaves only one tool to address the rising case numbers in the U.S. – reinstating lockdown measures, which is what Texas and Florida have done.

“The problem that I see coming is if you open when you don’t have the capacity to control things, it’s really hard to get the genie back in the bottle, because the populace is not down with that,” Saxinger said. 

“I don’t know how well the reinstitution of public health measures will go if a place has had the more stringent measures, releases them and then goes back.”

In U.S., masks turn political

One difference between the Canadian and American experience is that partisan politics has infected the U.S. response. 

Seemingly every aspect of this pandemic has taken on a partisan tinge, from social distancing to medicine — for instance, being for or against hydroxychloroquine, once thought to be an effective COVID-19 treatment, became a proxy for whether Americans were pro- or anti-Trump.

Masks have also become something of a political status symbol. 

Even masks have become political. Joe Biden, left, always wears one in public. Trump, right, has mocked Biden and a reporter for wearing them. (Jim Bourg/Reuters, Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

“There is a sense of, ‘This is the US of A and I can do whatever I damn well please,'” said Dr. Linsey Marr, an expert in the transmission of viruses by aerosol at Virginia Tech. There are “certain segments [of the population] that are very anti-government, that don’t want to be told what to do.”

That much was acknowledged by the country’s largest movie chain: AMC Theatres said masks had become politicized and would not be mandated for moviegoers. In the ensuing public uproar, it reversed course.

A Pew survey this month found a 23-percentage-point gap between Democrat and Republican voters on whether they claim to wear masks in stores all or most of the time.

WATCH: Trump holds controversial rally in Tulsa, Okla.:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in months didn’t have the attendance he bragged about, but the Tulsa, Okla., event was a glimpse at what animates supporters and at Trump’s playbook for re-election. 2:27

The president’s own statements helped shape that conversation. They include early predictions that COVID-19 would quickly disappear, mockery of politicians and reporters for wearing masks and his repeated demands that states reopen faster than recommended by the White House’s own guidelines.

In battling the spread of COVID-19, masks may be a game-changer. An investigation by the Philadelphia Inquirer found a strong correlation between a state’s mask rules and its recent case rate. 

“The irony here is that if everyone were willing to put on a mask, I think we could get back closer to normal without having this huge spike in cases,” said Marr. “Otherwise, we’re all going to be restricted in our movements and the economy.” 

Trump rally exposes divide

When it comes to masks, staunch Trump supporters made their feelings clear at a recent indoor rally in Tulsa, Okla.

A minuscule percentage of the crowd wore masks — this despite a surge in cases in that state and news that a handful of Trump campaign staffers had tested positive.   

Event organizers were even handing out masks. Most attendees took one. Few put them on.

U.S. President Donald Trump held a campaign rally at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Okla. on June 20 while infection rates in the state continue to rise. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

“Science [has come] out to show this coronavirus is a lot less deadly than people thought it was going to be,” said rallygoer Jason Yeadon. “I think the numbers are overblown and data will show that in the end.” 

He blamed the “supposed professionals” for pressuring elected officials to shut down the economy and insisted governments overreacted in the first place. 

‘I’m not a prophet’

The current spike in cases across the U.S. comes as no surprise to Zeke Emanuel, the former Obama health-care adviser.

“Anybody who’s studied two weeks of epidemiology could have predicted this,” he said in a follow-up interview this week. “I’m not a prophet — this was entirely predictable.”

Saxinger said given the high percentage of the population in both the U.S. and Canada still susceptible to COVID-19 infection, neither country is out of the “line of fire” when it comes to major outbreaks of the disease. 

“Although we might be feeling like we dodged that bullet, that bullet is still possible in a lot of places in Canada,” she said. 

“People are just so hungry for everything to be normal and so they’re acting like it is – but it clearly is not. The virus is not gone and as soon as you start mingling, it starts going up.”

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Justin Trudeau’s Announcing Cuts to Immigration Could Facilitate a Trump Win

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Outside of sports and a “Cold front coming down from Canada,” American news media only report on Canadian events that they believe are, or will be, influential to the US. Therefore, when Justin Trudeau’s announcement, having finally read the room, that Canada will be reducing the number of permanent residents admitted by more than 20 percent and temporary residents like skilled workers and college students will be cut by more than half made news south of the border, I knew the American media felt Trudeau’s about-face on immigration was newsworthy because many Americans would relate to Trudeau realizing Canada was accepting more immigrants than it could manage and are hoping their next POTUS will follow Trudeau’s playbook.

Canada, with lots of space and lacking convenient geographical ways for illegal immigrants to enter the country, though still many do, has a global reputation for being incredibly accepting of immigrants. On the surface, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver appear to be multicultural havens. However, as the saying goes, “Too much of a good thing is never good,” resulting in a sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, which you can almost taste in the air. A growing number of Canadians, regardless of their political affiliation, are blaming recent immigrants for causing the housing affordability crises, inflation, rise in crime and unemployment/stagnant wages.

Throughout history, populations have engulfed themselves in a tribal frenzy, a psychological state where people identify strongly with their own group, often leading to a ‘us versus them’ mentality. This has led to quick shifts from complacency to panic and finger-pointing at groups outside their tribe, a phenomenon that is not unique to any particular culture or time period.

My take on why the American news media found Trudeau’s blatantly obvious attempt to save his political career, balancing appeasement between the pitchfork crowd, who want a halt to immigration until Canada gets its house in order, and immigrant voters, who traditionally vote Liberal, newsworthy; the American news media, as do I, believe immigration fatigue is why Kamala Harris is going to lose on November 5th.

Because they frequently get the outcome wrong, I don’t take polls seriously. According to polls in 2014, Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives and Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals were in a dead heat in Ontario, yet Wynne won with more than twice as many seats. In the 2018 Quebec election, most polls had the Coalition Avenir Québec with a 1-to-5-point lead over the governing Liberals. The result: The Coalition Avenir Québec enjoyed a landslide victory, winning 74 of 125 seats. Then there’s how the 2016 US election polls showing Donald Trump didn’t have a chance of winning against Hillary Clinton were ridiculously way off, highlighting the importance of the election day poll and, applicable in this election as it was in 2016, not to discount ‘shy Trump supporters;’ voters who support Trump but are hesitant to express their views publicly due to social or political pressure.

My distrust in polls aside, polls indicate Harris is leading by a few points. One would think that Trump’s many over-the-top shenanigans, which would be entertaining were he not the POTUS or again seeking the Oval Office, would have him far down in the polls. Trump is toe-to-toe with Harris in the polls because his approach to the economy—middle-class Americans are nostalgic for the relatively strong economic performance during Trump’s first three years in office—and immigration, which Americans are hyper-focused on right now, appeals to many Americans. In his quest to win votes, Trump is doing what anyone seeking political office needs to do: telling the people what they want to hear, strategically using populism—populism that serves your best interests is good populism—to evoke emotional responses. Harris isn’t doing herself any favours, nor moving voters, by going the “But, but… the orange man is bad!” route, while Trump cultivates support from “weird” marginal voting groups.

To Harris’s credit, things could have fallen apart when Biden abruptly stepped aside. Instead, Harris quickly clinched the nomination and had a strong first few weeks, erasing the deficit Biden had given her. The Democratic convention was a success, as was her acceptance speech. Her performance at the September 10th debate with Donald Trump was first-rate.

Harris’ Achilles heel is she’s now making promises she could have made and implemented while VP, making immigration and the economy Harris’ liabilities, especially since she’s been sitting next to Biden, watching the US turn into the circus it has become. These liabilities, basically her only liabilities, negate her stance on abortion, democracy, healthcare, a long-winning issue for Democrats, and Trump’s character. All Harris has offered voters is “feel-good vibes” over substance. In contrast, Trump offers the tangible political tornado (read: steamroll the problems Americans are facing) many Americans seek. With Trump, there’s no doubt that change, admittedly in a messy fashion, will happen. If enough Americans believe the changes he’ll implement will benefit them and their country…

The case against Harris on immigration, at a time when there’s a huge global backlash to immigration, even as the American news media are pointing out, in famously immigrant-friendly Canada, is relatively straightforward: During the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, illegal Southern border crossings increased significantly.

The words illegal immigration, to put it mildly, irks most Americans. On the legal immigration front, according to Forbes, most billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants. Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name three, have immigrants as CEOs. Immigrants, with tech skills and an entrepreneurial thirst, have kept America leading the world. I like to think that Americans and Canadians understand the best immigration policy is to strategically let enough of these immigrants in who’ll increase GDP and tax base and not rely on social programs. In other words, Americans and Canadians, and arguably citizens of European countries, expect their governments to be more strategic about immigration.

The days of the words on a bronze plaque mounted inside the Statue of Liberty pedestal’s lower level, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” are no longer tolerated. Americans only want immigrants who’ll benefit America.

Does Trump demagogue the immigration issue with xenophobic and racist tropes, many of which are outright lies, such as claiming Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets? Absolutely. However, such unhinged talk signals to Americans who are worried about the steady influx of illegal immigrants into their country that Trump can handle immigration so that it’s beneficial to the country as opposed to being an issue of economic stress.

In many ways, if polls are to be believed, Harris is paying the price for Biden and her lax policies early in their term. Yes, stimulus spending quickly rebuilt the job market, but at the cost of higher inflation. Loosen border policies at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment was increasing was a gross miscalculation, much like Trudeau’s immigration quota increase, and Biden indulging himself in running for re-election should never have happened.

If Trump wins, Democrats will proclaim that everyone is sexist, racist and misogynous, not to mention a likely White Supremacist, and for good measure, they’ll beat the “voter suppression” button. If Harris wins, Trump supporters will repeat voter fraud—since July, Elon Musk has tweeted on Twitter at least 22 times about voters being “imported” from abroad—being widespread.

Regardless of who wins tomorrow, Americans need to cool down; and give the divisive rhetoric a long overdue break. The right to an opinion belongs to everyone. Someone whose opinion differs from yours is not by default sexist, racist, a fascist or anything else; they simply disagree with you. Americans adopting the respectful mindset to agree to disagree would be the best thing they could do for the United States of America.

______________________________________________________________

 

Nick Kossovan, a self-described connoisseur of human psychology, writes about what’s

on his mind from Toronto. You can follow Nick on Twitter and Instagram @NKossovan.

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Former athletes lean on each other to lead Canada’s luge, bobsled teams

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CALGARY – Sam Edney and Jesse Lumsden sat on a bench on Parliament Hill during an athlete celebration after the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.

Having just represented Canada in their sliding sports — Lumsden in bobsled and Edney in luge — the two men pondered their futures together.

“There was actually one moment about, are we going to keep going? Talking about, what are each of us going to do? What’s the next four years look like?” Edney recalled a decade later.

“I do remember talking about that now. That was a big moment,” Lumsden said.

As the two men were sounding boards for each other as athletes, they are again as high-performance directors of their respective sliding sports.

Edney, an Olympic relay silver medallist in 2018 and the first Canadian man to win a World Cup gold medal, became Luge Canada’s HPD upon his retirement the following year.

Lumsden, a world and World Cup bobsled champion who raced his third Olympic Games in 2018, leaned on his sliding compatriot when he returned from five years of working in the financial sector to become HPD at Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton in July.

“The first person I called when BCS reached out to me about the role that I’m in now is Sam,” Lumsden said recently at Calgary’s WinSport, where they spent much of their competitive careers and now have offices.

“It’s been four months. I was squatting in the luge offices for the first two months beside him.

“We had all these ideas about we’re going to have weekly coffees and workouts Tuesday and Thursday and in the four months now, we’ve had two coffees and zero workouts.”

Canada has won at least one sliding-sport Olympic medal in each of the last five Winter Games, but Edney and Lumsden face a challenge as team leaders that they didn’t as athletes.

WinSport’s sliding track, built for the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary and where Edney and Lumsden did hundreds of runs as athletes, has been closed since 2019 needing a $25-million renovation.

There is no sign that will happen. WinSport took the $10 million the provincial government offered for the sliding track and put the money toward a renovation of the Frank King Lodge used by recreational skiers and snowboarders.

Canada’s only other sliding track in the resort town of Whistler, B.C., has a fraction of Calgary’s population from which to recruit and develop athletes.

“The comparison is if you took half the ice rinks away in the country, hockey and figure skating would be disarray,” Edney said.

“It just changes the dynamic of the sports completely, in terms of we’re now scrambling to find ways to bring people to a location that’s not as easy to get to, or to live out of, or to train out of full time.

“We’re realizing how good we had it when Calgary’s (track) was here. It’s not going to be the end of us, but it’s definitely made it more difficult.”

Lumsden, a former CFL running back as well as an Olympian, returned to a national sport organization still recovering from internal upheaval that included the athlete-led ouster of the former president and CEO after the 2022 Winter Olympics, and Olympic champion pilot Kaillie Humphries suing the organization for her release to compete for the U.S. in 2019.

“NSOs like Luge Canada and Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton, they’re startups,” Lumsden said. “You have to think like a startup, operate like a startup, job stack, do more with less, especially in the current environment.

“I felt it was the right time for me to take my sporting experience and the skill set that I learned at Neo Financial and working with some of the most talented people in Canada and try to inject that into an NSO that is in a state of distress right now, and try to work with the great staff we have and the athletes we have to start to turn this thing around.”

Edney, 40, and Lumsden, 42, take comfort in each other holding the same roles in their sports.

“It goes both ways. I couldn’t have been more excited about who they hired,” Edney said. “When Jesse was coming in, I knew that we were going to be able to collaborate and work together and get things happening for our sports.”

Added Lumsden: “We’ve been friends for a long time, so I knew how he was going to do in his role and before taking the role, having the conversation with him, I felt a lot of comfort.

“I asked ‘are you going to be around for a long time?’ He said ‘yeah, I’m not going anywhere.’ I said ‘OK, good.'”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 4, 2024.

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Billie Jean King Cup and Davis Cup encourage donations for Spanish flood recovery efforts

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MALAGA, Spain (AP) — With the finals of the Billie Jean King Cup and Davis Cup set to be played in Malaga, Spain, this month, the International Tennis Federation is making a donation to the Spanish Red Cross to support relief and recovery efforts for the recent catastrophic flooding in the country.

The ITF and its two team tournaments said in a news release Tuesday that they “express their deepest sympathy to the victims and support for the communities and families affected by the devastating floods in Spain and its regions.”

The Billie Jean King Cup and Davis Cup, along with the ITF, “are donating to the Cruz Roja, and we encourage all our fans and followers to contribute as well.”

The ITF did not say how much it is donating.

Authorities have recovered more than 200 bodies in the eastern Valencia region after heavy downpours caused flash flooding. Police, firefighters and soldiers continued to search Tuesday for an unknown number of missing people.

The Billie Jean King Cup matches are scheduled for Nov. 13-20, and the Davis Cup — the last event of 22-time Grand Slam champion Rafael Nadal’s career — is set for Nov. 19-24, all in Malaga.

___

AP tennis:

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