The Challenger     (Image credit https://blog.historicenvironment.scot) We all know Murphy's Law that states that if something can go wrong it will. After that law became famous, a number of clever people added to "Murphy's Laws" and I've even seen books about Murphy's Laws. It is very true that "You always find something in the last place you look."  One that I read that has relevance to this blog post is, "In any accounting problem, the source of the error is the figure that is obviously correct." Without being aware of it, our lives can be driven along a ..read more

Husna Rizvi writes in New Internationalist... In 1955, virologist Jonas Salk was asked about the intellectual property rights of his polio vaccine. To which he responded: ‘There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’ Salk’s choice to make the vaccine patent free ultimately beat back the US polio epidemic by 1962. The pharmaceuticals industry has ballooned in size since then, reaching an estimated value of $1.2 trillion in 2018, made possible by a patents system that grants firms at least 20 years’ exclusive rights to manufacture, sell and market new drugs. ...According to Médecins S ..read more

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There is so much more to improving quality than increasing inspections - and inspections need to focus on what really matters: management responsibility. In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties of the last century W. Edwards Deming was teaching auto manufacturers that you cannot inspect in quality, it has to be built in. Catching defects at inspection is too late. The Japanese listened and their auto industry overtook the American industry in quality, sales and profits - in that order. Quality drove sales which in turn drove profits. For the last seven years or more in Ontario we have been fo ..read more

Given that deaths lag new infections by almost 3 weeks I am actually starting to feel a solid glimmer of hope that Canada is starting to turn the corner, although Quebec is far from out of the woods still ..read more

With the gross deficiency of testing in Canada, it strikes me that no numbers have any reliability except for number of deaths associated with COVID-19. Even that is going to be increasingly suspicious as we do not report number of collateral deaths - people who needed critical care for other reasons such as stroke, coronary or other organ distress, but for whom there were no critical care beds available. So, anyway, here is my chart of the mortality rate in Canada reflecting number of days to double. Data obtained from CTV News: Tracking every case of COVID-19 in Canada. The present average ..read more

Two charts today The first uses the same format as yesterday, but as at today according to data from CTV News: Tracking every case of COVID-19 in CanadaTo be clear, the charts reflect new cases for each day, not the cumulative total of all cases. The second starts from Feb 22 and limits provincial bar charts to the top 4: BC, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. All provinces are still reflected in the Canada total numbers. I strongly recommend that you read this article by TED speaker Tomas Pueyo. It is a longish read in which he cogently makes the case for copying China, Korea and Singapore b ..read more

This is not good The curve is becoming more perpendicular, not flattening Data derived from CTV News: Tracking every case of COVID-19 in Canada ..read more

This chart is based on figures published today at 10:30 pm by CTV News: Tracking every case of COVID-19 in Canada https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/tracking-every-case-of-covid-19-in-canada-1.4852102 It is following a predictable curve given how the disease has progressed in other countries ..read more