Announcement from the Chief Public Health Official of Canada on 26^th July 2020

On 26^th July 2020, Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, made the following announcement today:

She reported that there have been 113,556 cases of Coronavirus in Canada, along with 8,885 deaths and 87% of people are now recovered.  She went on to say that laboratories all over Canada have tested over 3,761,927 persons for the Coronavirus to date. In the past weeks, a mean of 44,000 people has been screened every day, with 1% coming out positive and also an average of more than 485 cases being declared daily from all over the country.

She went to say that living with Corona is tantamount to making a clear-cut parity between re-starting activities while keeping the rate of spread on a low. She further reiterated that living with the Coronavirus was not without its risks in the absence of an inoculation.   She stressed that as the Canadian society and economy restarts, there will surely be continued occurrences of cases and clusters of the Coronavirus; hence the reason to progress gradually with caution in the process of living through the next chapters of this pandemic.

She further announced that current national intelligence data indicate that youths aged 20-39 years are adjudged for the highest occurrence rates overall age grades in Canada.  For the current week that is; 15^th -22^nd July, the frequency rates were highest for males and females within the 20-29 year age grade, at 14.4 and 13.8 cases per 100,000 populations, individually. This is also accompanied by occurrence rates of 9.4 and 7.0 cases per 100,000.

She emphasized further that people in any age grade, not only the elderly, can experience devastating health repercussions due to the impediment associated with the Coronavirus.  She stressed that younger Canadians are not invulnerable to acute illness. She said that 63% of Coronavirus cases declared to the Public Health Agency of Canada in the past week were youths under the age of 39 years and a third, that is, 31% of these were admitted to hospitals for their illness. She pointed out that our public health goal is to reduce acute illness and gross deaths at trying times of the pandemic.