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In Canada, the vast majority of cases have been associated with long term care facilities, hospitals, prisons, and meat packing facilities. The majority of dea
by cperciva 6y ago
In Canada, the vast majority of cases have been associated with long term care facilities, hospitals, prisons, and meat packing facilities. The majority of deaths had been associated with long term care facilities -- because that's where the old (and thus highly vulnerable) people are.
These all share in common the traits of having lots of people in close contact for extended periods -- and in many cases, have a steady influx of new people coming in.
The most important health measure taken in British Columbia -- aside from providing workers with masks, of course -- has been to restrict long term care workers to working in a single facility. In other places, workers routinely work multiple part-time jobs and have spread the virus between facilities; fortunately that was stopped very early in BC, and our death toll so far is only around 150 (out of a population of over 5 million).
- AlexanderDhoore 6y agoIt's the same in Belgium. At some point half of the deaths came from care homes. Here they even restrict workers to a certain floor or area in the care homes.
- Tepix 6y agoWhy are there so many deaths in Belgium? It‘s terrible!
- jariel 6y agoBelgium is counting anyone who dies with covid-like symptoms as a covid death, even without a test. So while everyone else is probably underreporting, Belgium is overreporting.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoCorrect Our minister of health is a doctor ( although she is ridiculed in public media because of her weight), it led to overreporting Covid cases. A pure politician would probably want to underreport.
- AlexanderDhoore 6y agoI can't answer this. But I heard that Belgium actually counts cases differently from other countries. We also count the deaths of people that have not been tested but who are strongly suspected to be Covid-19. Whereas other countries only count those who actually tested positive. https://www.euractiv.com/section/coronavirus/news/belgium-says-transparency-explains-high-virus-death-toll/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/coronavirus/news/belgium-sa...
- 1_player 6y agoI've heard "actually counts cases differently from other countries" for at least 3 other European countries. I don't think that phrase means very much.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- NicoJuicy 6y agoYes it does, since Belgium was the first one to do it like this. It's possible that other countries now also count this way, but I'm not aware of that/haven't heard it. So, I don't think that other countries count the same way. Our way of counting has an average of 2 * more deaths in statistics. Since we count suspected cases as confirmed in the statistics. It's a huge difference. -- What are the other countries + sources then? I have only seen it mentioned ( and mentioned it myselve) for Belgium.
- 1_player 6y agoI've heard it often in both British and Italian media to explain why their figures are higher than neighbouring countries, using the same exact reason: we (did) count suspected cases as confirmed. Not saying you're wrong, just pointing out the fact that all these figures have huge margins of errors and we'll know the true extend of it when we'll be way past it.
- NicoJuicy 6y ago
- toyg 6y agoProbably a bit of overreporting as others said, but also because it’s a very compact, dense, urban country with a large transient population moving between other heavily-affected areas (France and Netherlands).
- NicoJuicy 6y agoBelgian counts every possible Covid related death, even if it's not confirmed to be Covid. This frees resources to do something more useful and stress health care less, since we don't test deaths. We just count them as a possible Covid case and add it into the statistics. Roughly, it seems that halve of the cases are Covid related. So we have the worst case scenario in statistics every time, the only downside is that not everyone knows this and it seems way worse then it is for them. Even Trump doesn't seem to know this :) Source: I'm from Belgium and informed ;)