Since mid January, and even earlier, Canada “squandered its chance to stop” the COVID-19 disease from consuming the country, as did many countries, according to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
At the same time that Dr. Tedros was all but screaming out warnings, the Canadian government said, “Canada is at low risk“and the US White House said “no risk”. This has brought Canada much pain.
At that point Civil Society, the UN and the WHO raised the alarm that North America was headed for big trouble like what can be seen in these numbers.
17 May 2024
by Micheal John
Dr. Tedros said, “prepare for the worst while China buys you time to do that.”
History is likely to judge the WHO very kindly. Donald Trump will not win any prizes think the experts today, some of whom, like Dr. Tedros, seem furious if recent video posts on Twitter are an indicator.
Trudeau needs to be told that in Canada, mass poverty might kill more people than COVID-19, hence restarting the economy needs to be given an extremely high priority. Indigenous Canadians and Canadians in remote areas face grave risk if economic recovery does not make its way into those communities quickly.
Teach Canadians to wear respirators and send as many back to work as possible. Meanwhile Test, test, trace. Serology tests are also important.
“Canadian federal government is getting its act together. There are a few amazing, very Canadian science-based ideas Ottawa is putting to work,” notes Dr. Anderson of The RINJ Foundation.
This article will share those ideas with readers.
Governments are claiming in Ottawa and in Toronto that their amazing feats have prevented 360,000 deaths and 120,000 deaths respectively. They forget the golden rule of pandemic modeling. It’s worth ignoring. Do the right thing at the time for the patient. You cannot always predict the outcome. Two things cannot be predicted: the exact behaviour of the novel virus and the behaviour of scared people.
“Canadians could perhaps better realize COVID-19 is a respiratory disease passed from human to human. This happens when an infected person exhales severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in their breathe. It comes from deep in their lungs through the air to another person who then breathes in the virus-clustered-to-lung-debris/air mix,” suggests a physician in Syria during a conversation about why Canada and the United States failed to prepare for COVID-19. “They just don’t accept the warnings,” says Dr. Buni.
Meanwhile watch and learn from a Canadian humanitarian in human solidarity with the world against COVID-19
First the mask debacle. Some masks one should not bother to wear. Only one will do the wearer and everyone else any good.
“The best way to protect frontliners is to zero the number of COVID-19 cases. That is everyone’s job. Don’t become infected,” is what health workers say they want readers to know.
Apparently the Ontario governments mistakenly believes its all about lauding their recent testing numbers which don’t add up anyway.
“For that goal it is important that all Canadians learn how to properly wear their N95 masks (Watch video) or stay home resolutely,” suggests Dr. Anderson.
“In Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore where SARS1 is well remembered, people wear N95 masks every day. For decades,” says nurse Ursula, now working as a busy nurse practitioner in Munich, Germany.
“The N95 respirator used for sanding furniture is fine if it has ‘NIOSH:N95’ printed on its labeling. They filter up to 95% of .3 micron particles. That means that because of the sticky lipid shell of the coronavirus, SARS2 will stick to the outside of the mask. Don’t touch that mask. (Watch video),” suggests Sharon Santiago, the Pacific Regional Director for The RINJ Foundation, a global civil society humanitarian group presently donating respirators, gloves and masks as well as staffing to many countries’ COVID-19 fight.
Three such team members were lost in China.
Meanwhile in Canada the advise of some well-meaning parties seems politically motivated. Twitter tweeters are unfairly pumping vitriol against Dr. Theresa Tam over a mask flip flop. The mask issue is unresolved. And the mistake is easy to understand but the mistake is costing lives.
George Gao, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention says, “The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks.”
In the context of Ebola, WHO believes that the respiratory disease COVID-19 is not airborne. Wrong. It is a respiratory disease. It is not however airborne as is the newly discovered Ebola strain in scientific terms. Insofar as what the public can understand, the novel coronavirus is airborne. In a confined space like a 30,000 sq meter hospital, or a grocery store, SARS-CoV-2 can substantially fill spaces and infect other people if enough infected persons are breathing in the same space. The evidence in China is unequivocal.
“The virus is most easily spread from deep in the lungs in a cough which in China hospitals aerosolized .3 micron sized particles and larger. Ventilation filters did not stop them and everyone got sick,” notes communicable disease specialist nurse Sara Qin.
Many people have seen images of the bruised faces of health workers in Wuhan and other parts of Hubei Province in China.
“It’s like being in space,” said nurse Sara Qin from Wuhan. “You cannot take your mask off for a second or we all drop like flies in a bug spray,” she added. Three of her colleagues perished in that manner having inhaled large viral loads.
Think Outside the Box.
SARS-CoV-2 is not exactly a living thing. But while it has no fins, legs, wings or any means of mobility, it is living when it attaches to another more enabled cell. That’s wicked. China President Xi Jinping called it “evil”. Nurses call it “The Beast”.
It is an RNA-packed sack made of protein and lipid. It has some basic DNA. It is all about procreation and needs a cell with an engine for reproduction. It will hijack yours.
SARS2 does two main things when it finds a host. It kills the T-cells, the soldier cells, in a mammal’s body (i.e.: human). And it attaches to the ACE2 receptor on human pulmonary cells. It wants the lungs and because its methodology is to scoop into your cells and alter the DNA, the human immune system freaks out and over actively tries to flush the invader and may drown the patient.
It is much smaller than bacteria and it will float around in dense air for a little bit of time—a few minutes. In 7km/hr winds it has traveled 3km. By that time the viral load anyone would receive would be very small if indeed it was still viable. FPMag heard this compared to celebratory gunfire on New Years Eve. The chances of being hit are low.
What worries scientists is the closed-in spaces. Grocery stores can be deadly. Many coughs in one corner of a store can put a significant load into lungs a distance away if the coughing is into a moving gentle airflow or sufficient to fog the space. This is known from Chinese experience.
Two meters of separation will guard a person from heavy droplets of lung debris which fall in quick order if they are bigger than 5 micron. That’s five full microns of matter and more. Splat. Not so with small loads under 1 micron. They float around.
“Horrendous mistakes and some bad advice given to public has caused wider spread,” says nurse.
In Asia, one cannot get home in many areas without wearing a proper mask. They are stopped by soldiers. That’s because Asians have known for years that SARS would be back. Everyone has a mask.
Protection of the vulnerable must include infants as well as seniors. Infants are not having a good outcome with COVID-19. Photo Credit: Xinhua. Photo Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
Canadians do not buy masks from emergency inventories. They did not buy them from the now missing Ontario government emergency stockpiles nor do they visit hospitals and buy from their inventory either. Sales numbers indicate they went to Canadian Tire over the past decade to buy masks for grinding, sawing, sanding, car repair etc.
Don’t be the designated shopper and leave your N95 on the workbench to go to the market bare-faced & become infected because of government’s reprehensible blaming and shaming.
The reason government’s make these decrees is because they failed to builld emergency inventories of medical personal protection equipment, just like the World Health Organization which is understandably stuck on a definition that only applies to Ebola.
Politicians blame and shame the public to dodge an electoral reprimand.
What do medical practitioners want? No more cases. True care providers focus on disease prevention. The fact that government failed to inventory enough PPE gives Canadians all the more reason to avoid being hospitalized for a COVID-19 infection. Stay home. Don’t become infected with COVID-19.
COBVID-19 is a deadly respiratory disease and thus must be treated as a deadly respiratory infection. Wearing a flimsy piece of cloth across the mouth will not protect. Stay home. Grow vegetables in your yard, window sill or or order online. Even then, complete infection precautions from the deliverer and the packaging must be taken.
The N95 in Canadian basement workshops isn’t depriving anyone of anything; and the best thing Canadians can do is deprive hospitals of their sadly sick selves. The politician’s banter is outrageous blaming and shaming. The citizen comes first. Politicians have lied badly. It is the ultimate betrayal to claim that the public is killing nurses and doctors by wearing their masks. This has infuriated real medical frontliners. Cashiers, delivery drivers, bus drivers, gas station attendants, home care workers, all must wear a fit-tested N95 mask and stop the spread of disease.
The goal should be infection spread prevention for this respiratory disease.
The World Health Organisation has done an amazing job and its leader Dr. Tedros warned Canada until he was blue in the face, to no avail. Ottawa said, ‘it’s not coming here’.
WHO is understandably stuck in an Ebola moment that is hard to get out of. It does not have PPE inventory either. (Everyone on Earth can technically be correct saying WHO saved their lives from Ebola. But for the UN health group it has been very draining.) Ebola in Africa could have killed millions more.
WHO has been overworked and left broke. That is apparently not the case for the hotshot Americans buying up masks around the world with huge wads of cash. The point is that the N95 mask conundrum is not the problem of individual Canadians.
Elderly COVID-19 patient in Italy. Photo: EPA-EFE
Photo Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
Wear a fit-tested respirator mask to the grocery store if you have one. Use best hand-hygiene techniques and wear your cleaning gloves if you have them. Otherwise stay away from other people, the better choice.
Each Canadian is able to make certain that they and their family do not become infected. Government will not be at their bedside when they die from a heavy virus load and the concomitant pneumonia, cardiomegaly, sepsis and cardiac arrest.
“Just don’t contract this virus,” says Michel Francis, a nurse practitioner running numerous clinics in the Amazon Basin of Venezuela.
That means zero unprotected close contact with any other person. And if you are not trained or self-trained to fit test a mask, and skilled in that personal protection for disease prevention, don’t even go there.
The goal needs to be to prevent all infections, not make sure that nurses at the urgent care department are wearings fresh masks when hordes of infected Canadians arrive by ambulance. Prevent all infection at any reasonable cost.
Prevent every infection.
Of no use to healthy persons seeking to protect against the SARS-CoV-2 Virus. These surgical face masks are useful for keeping the nurse’s spittle off patients when speaking. Photo Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
Wearing spit barriers doesn’t cut it. Here is an example:
In Montreal, a group of a few dozen nurses providing home care to seniors have begun to contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus and many are now sick with COVID-19. Four persons FPMag spoke with are infected, two are hospitalized.
They work for a company called CLSC de Riviere-des-Prairies.
Health Canada was contacted by FPM.news and its reaction was one of disinterest. The Montreal company selling the services of the nurses however, reacted firmly to warn and isolate their employees as two or more of their patients entered Montreal hospitals, tested positive as their conditions escalated to a critical, life-threatened state. There are many dozens, maybe hundreds of patients in the contact list of these nurses and the patients they were attending in a home care regime. It is an incipient, dangerous spread among highly vulnerable Canadians.
The community spread in Canada may only be just beginning. Over the next two weeks, the evidence will be telling. The number of deaths is predicted to increase and the case numbers will be doubling every three to four days, say the scientists and researchers who investigate the global pandemic and update the Live Data Updates.
Speaking to the son of the two failing seniors, FPM.news heard exasperated panic and raging anger at Health Canada’s blasé response to his other family members, all falling sick, who also contacted Health Canada.
Canadians do not seem to believe COVID-19 is real, until they are sick. Among patients who are ill enough to present at a hospital, because their induced viral load is high enough to make their condition rapidly acute, over 5% will die say statistics on millions of cases around the world.
One feature of the tardy Canadian response to the COVID-19 Pandemic is its focus on science and research and development. $275 Million for science as an event-oriented solution to a public health crisis seems light but hopefully the door is open for more financial assistance to those who can help prevent future occurrences which are bound to happen.
It needs to be said in the context of the SARS1 experience it is reprehensible that the Canadian governments failed Canadians in their zero preparedness for SARS2. Ontario failed above all.
Ontario is missing 55 million N95 respirators and other personal protection equipment (PPE) that was bought and inventoried by previous Ontario governments which predicted that SARS would happen again.
The issue of the missing inventory is less important than the deaths this failing has caused.
Ontario government missteps in the recent past killed Canadians. The Canadian Federal Government moved fast to cover its own tracks.
The Canadian Federal government told Canadians that Canada was at a very low risk of being impacted by the SARS-CoV-2. Blind stupidity listened to the warnings of the US Centres for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and the government of China. Worse than that the statistics coming from China coupled with the Canadian experience with SARS1 told Civil Society that trouble was on the way. And Civil Society made its warnings very clear.
Since failing to recognize the seriousness of the global pandemic to Canadians, the Canadian federal government has stepped up to the plate with a good choice of bat.
“Test, Treat and Trace,” as Dr. Tedros of the World Health Organization encourages, works.
Canada needs to follow the examples of these countries in no particular order:
- United Arab Emirates
- South Korea
- Taiwan
- Singapore
- Germany
Dr. Theresa Tam is a Canadian physician and politician who was appointed in June 2017 by Canadian Federal Health Minister Jane Philpott to head the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Dr. Tam’s devotion to Canadians and to her job has driven the testing regime quickly upwards and that is showing good results but is till scanty by comparison to the best of the world on a per capita basis.
In order for Canadians to resume their lives they will need to know that it is safe to do so. Testing Canadians with instant results then isolating the positive-indicated patients is needed to stop the spread of the disease in conjunction with a massive lockdown that continues until real evidence indicates otherwise.
Serology testing is also indicated.
“Serology refers to using antigen-antibody reactions in the laboratory for diagnostic purposes. Its name comes from the fact that serum, the liquid portion of the blood where antibodies are found is used in testing.” Cite: UC Davis Library, the California State University
It needs to be said that because of global climate change and the enormous damage done to the environment by burning fossil fuels and pouring chemicals into the wild, the worst imaginable pathogenic viruses, likely some 200, will be released by failing species that cannot suppress their virus loads because of failing-habitat stressors.
What that means is that there will be many more diseases unless climate change is mitigated and human pollution of Earth is stopped.
Warning issued to USA and Canada by Civil Society in January 2020
- American belligerence against Canada could blow up in Trump’s face. As Russia & China deliver tons of medical supplies to countries in need, including the United States, is Trump stealing Canada’s N95s? Ironically, it is possible, even likely that Canada’s contribution to America’s medicine needs might trump Trump’s masks.
- USA and Canada must boost healthcare fast and lockdown, say experts. It has not started yet. Bill Gates calls this COVID-19 situation a “nightmare scenario” in a CNN Town Hall session. “Community spread without mitigation, is going to kill many…”
- Is the nCoV a piece of a Biological Weapon that leaked? Canada may have some answers. Suspicions against China have arisen because of a number of peculiar coincidences. Is the 2019-nCoV an element in the development of a bio-weaponized Coronavirus in Wuhan? “The only thing that really matters is caring for patients.”
- Meng Case: Canada’s Attorney General must resign. CDNPoli Opinion The racist component of the Trump regime is aligned against Iranians and Chinese. Here is yet another installment in the story of a high profile female industry leader from China who is accused of helping Iranians get some used, outdated computers.
- Canada’s Surrogacy to Trump, Chapter 2020. A review essay. Canada’s surrogacy to Trump has caused Canada to become more racist, more white supremacist, more misogynistic, and is destroying federalism. Is Canada prioritizing effectively? Ottawa is peeing all over China and stirring up squabbles about sanctions against Iran.
Actions of the Canadian governments over the past 17 years have inexcusably forgotten SARS1.
In Canada the data indicates the country may be at an incipient stage of a series of nasty made-in-Canada epidemics.
Canadians seem to be getting the message to some extent that staying home and away from all other persons is what it takes to protect the most vulnerable persons in their communities. Canadians are not willing to abandon their own belief in invincibility but are willing to protect the seniors in society. (But infants who contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus also die, assuredly.)
Canada’s focus on science will feed a globally trending competition to find pharmacological solutions to SARS-CoV-2. But we need to look at other fearsome diseases, including Ebola.
A $275 million Canadian fund for coronavirus research and medical countermeasures is part of the Government of Canada’s response fund. This particular funding will be used to advance projects that are already underway by university researchers and others to respond to COVID-19, and ensure domestic supply of potential vaccines. These research efforts can move quickly, and include:
- $192 million in new projects that will be prioritized under the new Strategic Innovation Fund COVID-19 stream to deliver direct support to Canadian companies for large-scale projects. These companies include:
- AbCellera, a Vancouver-based biotech company that has built the world’s leading technology for antibody discovery, is at the forefront of developing antibody-based drugs to treat and prevent COVID-19. AbCellera’s technology is being used to search blood samples of patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to find naturally-produced antibodies that can be used for treatment and prevention. AbCellera was the first company in North America to receive a sample from a convalescent patient, and within days identified over 500 human antibodies that are candidates for development as a treatment. The company has partnered with global biopharmaceutical company Eli Lilly to rapidly manufacture and distribute a treatment with the goal of beginning clinical trials in July 2020.
- Medicago, a Quebec City-based company with 20 years of experience in plant-based vaccines and therapeutics, that has identified a viable plant-based vaccine candidate currently at the pre-clinical testing phase. Funding will allow Medicago to rapidly move forward on clinical trials and then quickly shift to scaling up production for pandemic response.
- Funding for the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization – International Vaccine Centre (VIDO-InterVac), one of the largest and most advanced infectious disease research facilities in the world. With $11 million in funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, VIDO-InterVac will be able to strengthen its existing expertise in coronavirus research and to help develop a vaccine for COVID-19. An additional $12 million from Western Economic Diversification Regional Economic Growth Through Innovation program will help VIDO-InterVac expand its bio-manufacturing capacity to support clinical trials.
- Funding of $15 million for the National Research Council of Canada to upgrade its Human Health Therapeutics facility in Montréal to develop, test and scale-up promising vaccine candidates to be ready for industrial production. This will involve certifying the facility for GMP quality assurance to ensure that their human pharmaceuticals and biologics, including vaccines, are consistently produced and controlled. This certification will support a more effective roll-out and production of vaccines, and help ensure that any vaccines produced by the facility can be made available to Canadians and people around the world more quickly.
- Support for BlueDot, a Toronto-based digital health firm, with a first-of-its-kind global early warning technology for infectious diseases. The company was one of the first in the world to identify the spread of COVID-19.