Your daily COVID-19 update

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “How could the CDC make that mistake?” — Ashish Jha, a Harvard professor, upon hearing the U.S. Centers For Disease Control had combined two different types of COVID-19 tests—viral tests that confirm if someone is currently infected and antibody tests that look for past exposure—into one overall “testing” number. The skewed statistics make it appear states are doing more tests for the virus than they actually are, and finding fewer active infections

The number of Canadians infected with COVID-19 has passed 81,000, while 6,100 people have died. Worldwide, five million people have been infected while 330,000 have died.

The massive number of COVID-19 outbreaks at long-term care facilities in Ontario and Quebec was, in part, the result of the provinces attempting to shore up their hospital systems early in the pandemic, the Globe and Mail explains. Rather than being transferred to hospitals, most of those LTC residents who got infected with the virus remained in those homes, and many of them died there.

With 1,700 military personnel—many of them medical staff—working in overwhelmed LTC homes in Ontario and Quebec, it was only a matter of time before some of them would contract the virus. Last week, that count stood at five. Today, it rose to 28.

Though Vietnam, population 97 million, shares a long border with China, it has recorded only 300-odd cases and not one death. How? By overreacting quickly with extreme but sensible measures, explains the BBC.

In March, demand for AG Hair’s products evaporated. So the Coquitlam, B.C., firm pivoted to making hand-sanitizing products. It was a sharp learning curve, Brenda Bouw writes in Maclean’s, as the company scrambled to get needed government regulatory approvals and switch its production lines to the new products.

In a Medium post that resonates with exhausted parents, Will Oremus writes about how he and his spouse turned their five-year-old’s obsession with Pokémon into a homeschooling curriculum, including math: “We taught him how to subtract Rockruff’s 50-damage surprise attack from Beedrill’s 130 hit points.”

“The world we’re living in now affords us some time to slow down,” writes Rachel Jansen in Maclean’s. “Laziness is a privilege; take it while you can.”

The Dutch nature program Vroege Vogels didn’t believe Jos Baart when he messaged to say that “Europe's biggest owl, the Eurasian eagle-owl, had made a nest in a planter in front of his window. Not only that, she had also hatched three giant chicks!” Then they saw the video.

—Patricia Treble

As of the latest update, this is the number of confirmed cases in Canada. We're updating this chart every day.