May 29, 2020 Health Policy Are people going to wear face masks in their home based on an observational study without adequate statistical power, specific and possibly non-representative population group with self-reporting bias?
May 25, 2020 Epidemiology SARS CoV-2 testing to be provided to all Ottawa residents with no prerequisites. Need to be aware of false positive/negatives when screening large asymptomatic population.
May 21, 2020 Epidemiology As Ontario opens up, the public-health-strategy-cart is ahead of the proverbial contact-tracing-and-testing-horse. Get your surfboard ready just in case.
May 20, 2020 Allergy/Immunology Although no plausible cancer-causing biological mechanism has been proven, J & J throws in the towel. Also, virus exposure time a factor in risk of successful infection among other factors.
May 15, 2020 Health Policy What the US does or does not do to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 infection rates may spill over onto Canada. So far, the outcome does not look promising.
May 13, 2020 Health Policy Health Canada’s approval of SARS-CoV-2 antibody test has its limitations but is a good first step to prepare for the easing of restrictions. Public health policy decisions will depend on its availability in significant quantity.
May 12, 2020 Epidemiology Unfortunately, we do not have the tests and contact tracing availability to fulfill the WHO “extreme vigilance” guidelines to safely return to work and reopen schools in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada.
May 11, 2020 Epidemiology Some provinces are acting prematurely to ease restrictions if we look at what has happened with cluster outbreaks in South Korea and in Germany. These are countries that are better prepared than us and it still happened.
May 7, 2020 Epidemiology A million tests done in Canada over the past few months falls far short of what is required moving forward. It will have to be multiples of this within shorter time intervals if we want to resume “normal” life.
May 6, 2020 Epidemiology Los Alamos Lab uses computational analysis of 6000 coronavirus sequences to conclude that a mutated strain is now dominant. Clinical implications remain unknown and study needs to be peer -reviewed and published.
