45 COVID-19 cases reported at Iqaluit jail
Inmates account for 30 of those positive cases
Justice Minister David Akeeagok speaks at the territory’s twice-weekly COVID-19 news conference Tuesday. (Photo by David Venn)
There are 45 active COVID-19 cases at the Aaqqigiarvik Correctional Healing Facility: 30 among inmates and 15 among staff.
Health Minister John Main provided these numbers at the territory’s COVID-19 news conference on Tuesday.
Justice Minister David Akeeagok said he is concerned with the outbreak but he said the jail, which opened in the fall of last year, has enough room to isolate inmates with COVID-19.
“Thankfully, this new facility has allowed us to have a special wing for those that are dealing with COVID,” Akeeagok said Tuesday. He didn’t elaborate on what the department’s plan is if there are more infections.
Akeeagok announced the first 12 cases of the outbreak at the jail on Jan. 25. At that time, he said there was a backlog for PCR tests and he expected to see an increase in cases.
He also said that part of the Justice Department’s safety measures is to conduct PCR tests every 72 hours.
Visiting and other programming at the jail have been postponed.
As of Tuesday, there are 462 active COVID-19 cases across 18 Nunavut communities, said Premier P.J. Akeeagok. There have been 684 recovered cases and one death during this wave of the pandemic, he said.
“There have been 684 recovered cases and one death during this wave of the pandemic, he said.”
By my calculations the case fatality rate of this wave (let’s call it the omicron wave) so far is .00146%
This is why we need to be careful and let experts be experts. 1 death per 684 cases is .00146 (represented as a decimal), which represented as a percentage first needs to be multiplied by 100. This would make it 0.146%.
Given Nunavut’s small population, we need to be careful to see this as a representative sample.
So what you are saying is the Case Fatality rate is 1/10 of 1% ? Forgive me if that does not seem terribly high, certainly not worthy of the panic some seem to imply.
On a very similar note ….
I’m just not that scared of vaccine mandates with 99% retention rates.
The issue is maybe not completely with the death. Look at the side effects: A totally exhausted Health Care system, HC workers are being infected, businesses are closed because or no staff, the list goes on and on. Spare comments about a low death percentage, especially if you can’t do the math (Case Fatality Rate)
That’s exactly the point, it’s not about fatalities. It’s about the capacity of the health system, the employees of which are totally exhausted right now, nationwide. It’s about people infected with Covid needing to be hospitalized (even if they don’t die) and taking space away from others who badly need it. All over the country there are so many examples of cancer treatments being postponed, kidney transplants being postponed, biopsies being postponed, all because some potatoes wrote all over the internet that the fatality rate is one tenth of one percent and a bunch of people didn’t get vaccinated and a portion of those people ended up needing hospitalization.
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So the fatality rate of Omicron is “only” 0.146%. And the hospitalization rate is “only” 2.7%. But the number of hospital beds in Canada can only handle 0.163% of the population, most of which needed to be used even before Covid. And the hospitalization rate for Omicron of unvaccinated people is 23x higher than people that have had the booster.
So, there have been 9 hospitalizations in Nunavut during the omicron outbreak so far… are you sure you want to make that the “real issue” here? Or do you want another shot at moving those goal posts again?
Well QGH actually has only 35 beds, so 9 hospitalizations would be over a quarter of the beds (or 0.25% according to “Case Fatality Rate”). The estimate is that vaccinated people are 75-80% less likely to be hospitalized, so if we assume an equal number of vax/unvax people (actually 65% double vaxxed now but has changed over time and only 30% have a 3rd) it is likely that 7 of those 9 would be unvaxxed. Assuming the numbers above, that means if nobody was vaccinated, Nunavut likely would have had at least 14 hospitalizations, or 40% of the QGH beds.
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It’s important to remember that QGH has 35 total beds. These beds aren’t just waiting around empty for 14 people to need hospitalization with covid. These beds are used most of the time. “Since the Omicron outbreak” means less than 2 months.
Your calculations are bad.
Funny there is NO mention of if the infected are vaccinated or not. Draw your own conclusions to why this piece of information was omitted. For the last two years you couldn’t mention covid with mentioning it’s kryptonite.
Vaccines will save the day! , they said.
At least we have clean drinking water! Too soon?