Your daily COVID-19 update QUOTE OF THE DAY: “An even harder moment is coming.” — Archbishop Carlos Castillo of Peru, after he filled Lima’s cathedral with 5,000 portraits of those who have died of COVID-19. He’s worried about the poor affected by the economic collapse, saying, “It would be terrible if in the times to come we have thousands of these photos—but dead of hunger.”
The number of Canadians infected with the virus has passed 100,500, while 8,200 people have died. Worldwide, 8.1 million people have been infected and 440,000 have died. Though migrant workers who work in the nation’s agri-food industry went into a 14-day quarantine on their arrival in Canada, they then moved into crowded bunkhouses on farms. It was, one former worker explained to the Globe and Mail, a “recipe for COVID-19 to spread like wildfire.” To date, at least 600 workers have tested positive in Ontario alone. Two Mexican workers have died. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control combed through data on more than 1.7 million patients, including more than 100,000 who died of COVID-19. The CDC discovered that those with underlying chronic medical conditions, including heart disease or obesity, were hospitalized six times more frequently than healthier people infected with COVID-19; they also died 12 times more often. British researchers say dexamethasone, a cheap, readily available steroid, may be useful for treating COVID-19 patients. Though researchers say it doesn’t appear to help with milder symptoms, “for patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40 per cent to 28 per cent,” the BBC explained. “For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25 per cent to 20 per cent.” The Oxford study used it on 2,000 patients, comparing their results with 4,000 not given the steroid, though experts caution the details are from a press release and the study hasn’t been published yet. By contrast, the drug Remdesivir appears to just shorten recovery time. “People are kind of freaking out,” said Jahkeen Washington, co-owner of a boutique gym told the New York Times. Why the panic? The surge in home workouts means there is a nationwide shortage of kettlebells, resistance bands and other exercise equipment. And it’s not just the United States. From personal experience, I can tell you that Canadian suppliers have also been stripped bare. —Patricia Treble As of the latest update, this is the number of confirmed cases in Canada. We're updating this chart every day. 
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