Category Health economics
Rapid Vaccinations Can Help Avoid the `Third Wave’ in Ontario
The following is a guest post by Miguel Casares (Universidad Publica de Navarra, Spain), Paul Gomme (Concordia University), and Hashmat Khan (Carleton University) Of utmost importance is improving our understanding of the complex interactions between: (a) the epidemiology that describes the evolution of the coronavirus/COVID-19; and (b) the social and economic choices of individuals. Towards […]
Can the Great Barrington proposal save the economy?
The Great Barrington Declaration argues against universal lock-downs: Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular […]
A Simple Micro/Macro Corona Tax Model
I want something you could teach to first or second year economics students. Using tools they already have in their toolkit. MICRO Start with a Demand and Supply model of the market for haircuts. If we put a $1 per haircut tax on buyers of haircuts, the demand curve shifts vertically down by $1, reducing […]
Public Health Spending and Pandemic Preparedness
As the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada begins to peak, there have several discussions and perspectives offered on how prepared Canada was for this pandemic as well as whether we moved quickly enough to address the situation. Obviously, the situation has improved markedly given that there is now time for these retrospectives […]
This is no virus for old men
Statistics Canada has just released a dataset with detailed anonymized information on all confirmed COVID-19 cases in Canada, available for download here. Unlike many of the available trackers, the Statistics Canada data reports cases by date of onset, defined as "earliest date available from the following series: Symptom Onset Date, Specimen Collection Date, Laboratory Testing […]
Regional disparities in hospital bed access across Canada
Thank you to Kayle Hatt and Kevin Andrew for generating some of the numbers and charts behind this post, and for helpful suggestions. The number of acute care hospital beds per capita is an imperfect measure of a health care system's ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, beds are easy to acquire, […]
Covid-19, Italy and Lessons for Canada
by Thomas Barbiero, Ryerson University and Livio Di Matteo, Lakehead University As Italo-Canadese and members of the large Italian diaspora throughout the world, we have found the COVID-19 situation in Italy truly heart-wrenching. As we write, Italy is the hardest hit country outside of China with over 60,000 confirmed cases and over 6,000 deaths. The […]
How prepared is your hospital for COVID-19?
I've written a blog post for the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP). It begins: One widely touted response to the COVID-19 pandemic is to “flatten the curve” — to spread COVID-19 infections over time, so that the medical system can cope with them. Yet a cold hard look at the numbers suggests our […]
Rising Health Spending Is Not Just About Seniors
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) has released its 23rd annual report on health spending in Canada – National Health Expenditure Trends, 1975 to 2019. As a member of the CIHI National Health Expenditures advisory panel, it is always great to see the wealth of data on trends in health spending across Canada. Total […]
The Hospitalization Life Cycle
The Canadian Institute for Health Information has just released a report on Hospital Stays in Canada which provides a plethora of interesting tables on hospital stays in Canada at a national and provincial level. Both the age-standardized hospitalization rate (per 100,000 population) and the age standardized average length of stay (in days) in Canada have […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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