We received the following message from Dr. Jennifer Kwan, a family physician, inviting health providers to add their signature to a petition calling on mandatory masks in Canada in three high-risk settings: all indoor spaces outside the home, crowds, and public transit. We support this request wholeheartedly and I already signed and urge you to do the same! And – as important – let’s start to personally abide by this call.

The official counting of deaths is just a fraction of the real toll of COVID-19 in about every country affected by the pandemic. The New York Times, doing important work, found at that least 60,000 more people have died during the coronavirus pandemic than the official Covid-19 death counts report, a review of mortality data in 15 countries shows — providing a clearer, if still incomplete, picture of the toll of the crisis.

Public health officials – both provincial and City of Toronto – distinguished between two different COVID-19 disease processes, during their second modeling press conference on April 20th – the spread through community and the spread of the virus through congregate settings. They claimed, cautiously, that COVID-19 spread in the community has peaked but that spread is growing in congregate settings. The evidence of the virus’ devastating effect on long-term care and retirement homes has been laid out in these reports.