CATEGORY / epidemiology

by Raywat Deonandan, PhD
Epidemiologist & Associate Professor
University of Ottawa
(I add my credentials to these COVID-19 blog posts in case they get shared. I want readers to know that my opinion is supposedly an educated and informed one)

Revel in the miracle, my friends. And make no mistake: it is a miracle. Yes, it’s a human-fabricated miracle, but the arrival of efficacious vaccines against COVID-19 in less than a year since the declaration of pandemic is nothing short of a stupendous and near-supernatural achievement. I fully expect a few Nobel Prize nominations to come from this endeavour, and they will be well deserved.

Unsurprisingly, almost all the media questions I’ve been getting these past few days have concerned the vaccine. And while I think most people are pretty clear on what’s going on, I thought I would summarize some of the key points in this post.

So here we go.

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by Raywat Deonandan, PhD
Epidemiologist & Associate Professor
University of Ottawa
(I add my credentials to these COVID-19 blog posts in case they get shared. I want readers to know that my opinion is supposedly an educated and informed one)

Slovakia did an amazing thing this month. They tested two thirds of their population over a couple of weekends to find close to 58,000 active cases. The UK was so inspired by what they saw, that they did a similar thing in Liverpool, as well.

That got my spouse (a family doctor) and I talking this morning about whether mass testing could be a tolerable way out of the COVID mess for parts of Canada. So this blog post is a real-time thought experiment in which I take a stab at describing how such a strategy might work in some Canadian provinces.

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by Raywat Deonandan, PhD
Epidemiologist & Associate Professor
University of Ottawa
(I add my credentials to these COVID-19 blog posts in case they get shared. I want readers to know that my opinion is supposedly an educated and informed one)

Earlier this week, Dr Andrew Morris tweeted, “We need a national debate on COVID strategy,” and tagged many national leaders.

He’s not wrong. Early on in the pandemic, it was assumed by many epidemiologists that we were pursuing the “hammer and dance” made famous by Thomas Pueyo, and that I had written about back in March. The idea back then was that we would endure harsh economic restrictions to buy time to deploy more public health tools and to enact our long term strategy for enduring the pandemic. (more…)