{"id":14156,"date":"2020-05-08T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/airpurifierspecialist.com\/store\/?p=14156"},"modified":"2020-05-18T01:00:18","modified_gmt":"2020-05-18T05:00:18","slug":"after-the-flood-how-the-next-wave-or-waves-of-covid-19-will-look-in-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/airpurifierspecialist.com\/store\/after-the-flood-how-the-next-wave-or-waves-of-covid-19-will-look-in-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"After the flood: How the next wave (or waves) of COVID-19 will look in Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Picture a stone falling into water. Depending on the angle of entry, it could splash and sink and never rise again, or it could skip, in shrinking leaps \u2014 once, twice, again and again, until it disappears. It could be the only stone. It could be the first of several. It might be the largest. Or it might be a preview of a larger stone, with a deeper splash, to come.<\/p>\n

In most Canadian provinces, with Quebec the tragic exception, the first wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is beginning to recede. On Wednesday, with case growth stagnant and the health-care system coping well, British Columbia announced a cautious plan to reopen society in the coming weeks. New Brunswick, where the virus that causes COVID-19 never really took hold, already has a plan in place. In Ontario, many businesses will be allowed to reopen for curb-side pick-up beginning next week.<\/p>\n

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The problem is, you have folks thinking, okay, we did it, we’re done<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That gentle easing has many Canadians dreaming of a world where they could soon see their grandkids, hug their friends or go back to work. But experts who have studied this virus and past pandemics believe, almost universally, that the first wave was just the beginning of COVID-19, in Canada and around the world. They expect the disease to be part of our lives for at least the next 18-24 months. And what they\u2019re worried about now, as much as anything else, is complacency. \u201cThe problem is, you have folks thinking, okay, we did it, we\u2019re done. Let\u2019s get back to regular life,\u201d said Dr. David Fisman, an infectious diseases specialist and a professor of epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. \u201cThe problem is the virus is still here.\u201d<\/p>\n

WAVE OR WAVES?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No one is 100 per cent sure when the next wave will come or what exactly it will look like when it does. \u201cThere will be a second wave, right? I think it\u2019s inevitable. The question is how big is that going to be?\u201d said Dr. Isaac Bogoch an expert on infectious at the University of Toronto.<\/p>\n

Around the world, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists are racing to to answer that question as best they can. Last week, a group of scientists at the U.S. Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) released a study<\/a> that predicted three possible scenarios for the coming waves.<\/p>\n

In the first scenario, the rocks keep falling. The first wave, the one just cresting now, is followed by a repeating series of smaller but still significant waves throughout the summer and into the fall before diminishing sometime in 2021. In that scenario, the waves are hard to predict, in timing and location. And every time they hit, extreme physical distancing might become necessary again.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to recognize that we don\u2019t fully \u201cunderstand why peaks occur in pandemics like this,\u201d one of the authors, Michael Osterholm, the director of CIDRAP, told a briefing of the New York Academy of Scientists. \u201cThis virus, if it\u2019s acting like a flu virus, may very well be in its own schedule and its own time. So the top scenario is one where it happens and then it just continues to burn and burn and burn and burn until basically enough people have been infected.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that scenario, we\u2019re in for a lot of more of this, basically, over and over again for at least another year, with more deaths, more isolation, and more waxing and waning clamps on the economy.<\/p>\n

The second scenario looks a lot more like the Spanish Flu. In that projection, the first rock was just a preview and the current wave isn\u2019t the worst of it. Instead, after tapering off over the summer, COVID-19 returns in the fall with a bang, causing a larger, more significant wave that tears through the population before burning off in a series of much smaller waves over the next year.<\/p>\n

That was the general pattern 100 years ago. In that scenario, full social isolation would likely return next fall, but might not be necessary after that.<\/p>\n