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thinking through the VOC situation in #Alberta in light of what @CMOH_Alberta said yesterday. This will be a bit lengthy. The summary: there better be some compelling info not public, b/c Dr. Hinshaw's "clarifications" provide no comfort in my opinion (1). #COVID19AB https://twitter.com/CMOH_Alberta/status/1360348812104130562
thinking through the VOC situation in #Alberta in light of what @CMOH_Alberta said yesterday. This will be a bit lengthy. The summary: there better be some compelling info not public, b/c Dr. Hinshaw's "clarifications" provide no comfort in my opinion (1). #COVID19AB https://twitter.com/CMOH_Alberta/status/1360348812104130562
Start here. Based on announced cases since 01/25 when the first non-travel VOC was announced, doubling time is 6.48 days. The first VOC overall was announced on 12/28, but back dated to 12/15. W/ public data using 12/15 the doubling time is 7.95 days (2) https://twitter.com/CMOH_Alberta/status/1360348815858036740
As well, they claim to have "retrospectively tested all returning travellers who’ve tested positive since the fall." This after claiming "Alberta has the most complete screening approach in the country." (3) https://twitter.com/CMOH_Alberta/status/1360348813941178370
If we are to have such confidence in our screening, then we should have confidence that no variant case was imported previously, right? B117, which is majority of VOC, didn't explode until early December, so a case being imported on 12/15 makes sense (4) https://mobile.twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1356676871124094976
So simultaneously we're being told that we have the best testing and screening in the country, but we can't possibly draw any conclusions from the data. If we can't yet make inferences about how VOC are behaving here, then what justification is there for lifting restrictions? (5)
We're facing an exponential threat potentially even worse than the one we faced this past year, and apparently our CMOH has no idea what's happening. The proper response under this uncertainty is to take a precautionary approach until we *can* make some inferences. (6)
The one piece of solid information we apparently can have some confidence in is not reassuring. (7) https://twitter.com/KarlParkinson7/status/1360402547748442112
Let's just look at February numbers. There have been 3732 cases reported in Feb. If 3% are VOC then that means 112 VOC in 11 reporting days. There have been 171 VOC in total, so 59 prior to Feb 1. (8)
So in Feb, when we have been operating with "the most complete screening approach in the country" cumulative VOC counts are exhibiting a doubling time of 7.82 days. That is really bad. (9)
Now, what would make this not so bad? Could they all be from a single cluster and are all now quarantined? This seems unlikely for two reasons. 1, VOC are spread b/w zones. 2, we know of cases in unrelated households (10)
https://twitter.com/BabychStephanie/status/1356376552808714240
https://twitter.com/BabychStephanie/status/1356376552808714240
So we know there is community spread. Can we trust test-trace-isolate to prevent this from spiraling? That didn't work in the fall. If we have the ability to halt spread of more transmissible variants we should be able to halt old COVID. Yet we continue to have comm spread (11)
A key piece of test-trace-isolate is *testing.* Places like NZ and AUS that can halt outbreaks through test-trace-isolate show the ability to rapidly scale testing. Look at NSW when they were fighting their Dec cluster, then compare to AB. Here testing is going down not up. (12)
If test-trace-isolate is going to contain this, we should see a pattern of a rapid scale up of testing, finding lots of cases, then case counts falling off sharply. Instead, testing is going down and VOC cases continue to be found everyday. (13)
In conclusion: there better be some compelling info not public, b/c Dr. Hinshaw's "clarifications" provide no comfort in my opinion. #COVID19AB (fin)
