text:
Ontario Implements Provincewide Emergency Brake
Post category:COVID / What's New
All 34 Public Health Unit Regions to Move into Shutdown
TORONTO —The Ontario government, in consultation with the Chief Medical Officer of Health and other health experts, is imposing a provincewide emergency brake as a result of an alarming surge in case numbers and COVID-19 hospitalizations across the province. The provincewide emergency brake will be effective Saturday, April 3, 2021, at 12:01 a.m. and the government intends to keep this in place for at least four weeks.
Details were provided today by Premier Doug Ford, Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health, Dr. David Williams, Chief Medical Officer of Health, and Dr. Adalsteinn (Steini) Brown, Co-Chair of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table.
"We are facing a serious situation and drastic measures are required to contain the rapid spread of the virus, especially the new variants of concern," said Premier Ford. "I know pulling the emergency brake will be difficult on many people across the province, but we must try and prevent more people from getting infected and overwhelming our hospitals. Our vaccine rollout is steadily increasing, and I encourage everyone who is eligible to get vaccinated. That is our best protection against this deadly virus."
Ontario's key indicators and latest modelling show that additional measures must be taken. From March 26 to 28, 2021, provincial case rates have increased by 7.7 per cent to 101.1 cases per 100,000 people. Current COVID-19 related ICU admissions are already over the peak of wave two and hospitals in regional hotspots will need to further ramp down scheduled surgeries. COVID-19 related ICU admissions are projected to exceed 650 beds in a few weeks. These increases are being driven by COVID-19 variants, which are transmitted easily and result in a higher risk of death and hospitalization, including in younger populations.
The provincewide emergency brake would put in place time-limited public health and workplace safety measures to help to stop the rapid transmission of COVID-19 variants in communities, protect hospital capacity and save lives. Measures include, but are not limited to:
Prohibiting indoor organized public events and social gatherings and limiting the capacity for outdoor organized public events or social gatherings to a 5-person maximum, except for gatherings with members of the same household (the people you live with) or gatherings of members of one household and one other person from another household who lives alone.
Restricting in-person shopping in all retail settings, including a 50 per cent capacity limit for supermarkets, grocery stores, convenience stores, indoor farmers' markets, other stores that primarily sell food and pharmacies, and 25 per cent for all other retail including big box stores, along with other public health and workplace safety measures;
Prohibiting personal care services;
Prohibiting indoor and outdoor dining. Restaurants, bars and other food or drink establishments will be permitted to operate by take-out, drive-through, and delivery only;
Prohibiting the use of facilities for indoor or outdoor sports and recreational fitness (e.g., gyms) with very limited exceptions;
Requiring day camps to close; and,
Limiting capacity at weddings, funerals, and religious services, rites or ceremonies to 15 per cent occupancy per room indoors, and to the number of individuals that can maintain two metres of physical distance outdoors. This does not include social gatherings associated with these services such as receptions, which are not permitted indoors and are limited to five people outdoors.
On the advice of the Chief Medical Officer of Health, all Ontarians are asked to limit trips outside the home to necessities such as food, medication, medical appointments, supporting vulnerable community members, or exercising outdoors with members of their household. Employers in all industries should make every effort to allow employees to work from home.
"Ontario, like many other provinces and jurisdictions around the world, is in the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and immediate action is required to help turn the tide," said Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health. "Implementing a provincewide emergency brake was not an easy decision to make and is not one we take lightly. As we continue to vaccinate more Ontarians, the end is in sight, but right now these necessary measures will help to stop the spread of variants in our communities, protect capacity in our health care system, and save lives."
The current COVID-19 Response Framework: Keeping Ontario Safe and Open, will be paused when the provincewide emergency brake comes into effect. The impacts of these time-limited measures will be evaluated throughout the next four weeks to determine if it is safe to lift any restrictions or if they need to be extended. With more than $1.6 billion invested to protect against COVID-19, schools remain safe for students and staff. Keeping schools open is critical to the mental health and well-being of Ontario youth. During the emergency shutdown, schools will remain open for in-person learning with strict safety measures in place. The spring break will continue as planned for the week of April 12. In order to support working families, child care will remain open during the shutdown. Child care settings will continue to adhere to stringent health and safety measures so that they remain safe places for children and staff.
"In the last few weeks a significant increase in COVID-19 cases and variants of concern has been observed across Ontario which has put considerable strain on our public health and health care systems," said Dr. David Williams, Chief Medical Officer of Health. "Implementing a provincewide shutdown is needed to bring the third wave of this pandemic under control so that we can save lives, keep our education system open and allow our vaccination program to take hold."
Based on the latest modelling data, variants of concern are continuing to grip the province and drive this third wave of the pandemic. Case rates are rising, younger Ontarians are becoming sicker and ICU capacity is at risk of becoming overwhelmed without stronger public health and workplace safety measures in place.
The 2021 Budget, Ontario's Action Plan: Protecting People's Health and Our Economy, brings the government's total investments to protect the economy to $23.3 billion. This includes an estimated $3.4 billion to support approximately 120,000 small businesses across Ontario via two rounds of the Ontario Small Business Support Grant. Applications for the Ontario Small Business Support Grant have been extended for one week through April 7 and all eligible businesses are encouraged to apply.
Additionally, the new Ontario Tourism and Hospitality Small Business Support Grant will provide an estimated $100 million in one-time payments of $10,000 to $20,000 to eligible small businesses in the tourism and hospitality sector. Businesses required to close or significantly restrict services due to provincial public health measures can continue to apply for property tax and energy cost rebates. Visit Ontario.ca/COVIDsupport for more information on Ontario's supports for businesses.
To ensure that every person who requires care in a hospital can access a bed, the government has invested more than $5.1 billion to support hospitals since the start of the pandemic, creating more than 3,100 additional hospital beds and 500 critical care and high intensity medicine beds. This includes $1.8 billion in 2021–22 to continue providing care for COVID-19 patients, addressing surgical backlogs and keeping pace with patient needs through its Ontario's Action Plan: Protecting People's Health and Our Economy.
The province continues to deploy rapid testing in workplaces, including up to 300,000 COVID-19 tests per week for asymptomatic staff in key sectors such as manufacturing, warehousing, supply chain, mining, construction and food processing. More than 4.7 million rapid antigen tests have been sent to over 1,150 workplaces, including 89 essential industry sites, under the Provincial Antigen Screening Program.
The Ontario government continues to implement its High Priority Communities Strategy to provide targeted supports to communities hardest hit by COVID-19. In these communities 1,000 Community Ambassadors have been mobilized, 30 community testing sites have been opened and nearly 36,000 PPE kits have been distributed to community members.
Get tested if you have COVID-19 symptoms, or if you have been advised of exposure by your local public health unit or through the COVID Alert App. Visit Ontario.ca/covidtest to find the nearest testing location.
Emergency orders O. Reg. 55/21 (Compliance Orders for Retirement Homes) and O. Reg. 8/21 (Enforcement of COVID-19 Measures) currently in force, under the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act, have been extended until April 19, 2021, as the province continues to deal with the impacts of COVID-19.
2021 Budget – Ontario's Action Plan: Protecting People's Health and Our Economy
The Digital Main Street program helps main street businesses build their online presence and reach more customers.
Property Tax and Energy Cost Rebates
Visit Ontario's COVID-19 vaccine web page to view the latest provincial data and information on COVID-19 vaccines.
Visit Ontario's COVID-19 information website to learn more about how the province continues to protect the people of Ontario from the virus.
For public inquiries call ServiceOntario, INFOline at 1-866-532-3161 (Toll-free in Ontario only)
Community Input Required to Inform Fire Master Plan
Chamber CEO To Retire
Ontario Investing $52.5 Million to Recruit, Retain and Support More Health Care Workers


text:
LTB 138/20 – Coronavirus COVID-19 Outbreak declared 'Pandemic' by the World Health Organisation (WHO) – What Does it Mean?
No. 138 /2020
Coronavirus COVID-19 Outbreak declared 'Pandemic' by the World Health Organisation (WHO) – What Does it Mean?
The coronavirus outbreak has now been labelled a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). Declaring a pandemic has nothing to do with changes to the characteristics of a disease, but is instead associated with concerns over its geographic spread. According to the WHO, a pandemic is declared when a new disease for which people do not have immunity spreads around the world beyond expectations.
Cases that involve travellers who have been infected in a foreign country and have then returned to their home country, or who have been infected by that traveller, known as the "index case", do not count towards declaring a pandemic. There needs to be a second wave of infection from person to person throughout the community.
Once a pandemic is declared, it becomes more likely that community spread will eventually happen, and governments and health systems need to ensure they are prepared for that.
An 'epidemic', on the other hand, is a sudden increase in cases of an illness or disease that can be unique to one country or community.
Ultimately, the WHO gets the final say when a pandemic is declared. There is no threshold, such as a certain number of deaths or infections, or number of countries affected, that needs to be met. For example, the 'SARS coronavirus', identified in 2003, was not declared a pandemic by the WHO despite affecting 26 countries. However, its spread was contained quickly, and only a handful of nations were significantly affected, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Canada.
'Pandemic' is not a word to use lightly or carelessly the WHO have stated clearly. It's a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over. The last pandemic was in 2009 with the 'Swine Flu H1N1 Virus'. That pandemic, which was first detected in Mexico, killed an estimated 200,000 people and hit young adults and children hardest. The 'Coronavirus-COVID-19 Virus' pandemic on the other hand is killing mostly older adults with underlying health conditions.
If declaring a pandemic triggers global panic, this can defeat the purpose of trying to raise awareness stated the WHO. Much has been written about whether the declaration of 'Swine Flu (H1N1)' as a pandemic in 2009, caused unnecessary panic, overwhelming emergency departments and causing governments to overspend on antiviral medications. Medical experts state "It should be remembered that Coronavirus symptoms are generally mild and most people recover within six days."
Now the WHO has declared Covid-19 a pandemic, what will it mean for the way the outbreak is treated and prepared for?
The WHO has stressed that using the word "pandemic" does not signal a change in its advice. It is still urging countries to "detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilise their people". The change of term does not alter anything practically as the world has been advised for the last few weeks to prepare for a potential pandemic, which has hopefully been taken seriously by all countries.
The use of this term however highlights the importance of countries throughout the world working cooperatively and openly with one another and coming together as a united front in our efforts to bring this situation under control.
See attached Links: (updated daily):-
UK Government Policy Paper – Coronavirus action plan: a guide to what you can expect across the UK https://emails.cwu.org/t/d-l-mjjsjl-jtfltlrlr-i/
Public Health England Paper – Coronavirus (COVID-19) – 5 things you can do to protect yourself and your community https://emails.cwu.org/t/d-l-mjjsjl-jtfltlrlr-d/
https://emails.cwu.org/t/d-l-mjjsjl-jtfltlrlr-h/
Department of Health and Social Care and Public Health England – Number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases and risk in the
https://emails.cwu.org/t/d-l-mjjsjl-jtfltlrlr-k/
https://emails.cwu.org/t/d-l-mjjsjl-jtfltlrlr-u/
https://emails.cwu.org/t/d-l-mjjsjl-jtfltlrlr-o/
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: countable loops and OpenMP Some OpenMP related documents state that in order for a loop to be treated by OpenMP it must be "countable" providing different definitions for a loop being "countable":
• the number of iterations in the loop must be countable
  with an integer and loop use a fixed increment.
• the loop count can be "determined" ( what does it mean "determined"? )

Is it indeed the requirement of OpenMP? Or is it requirement of a specific compiler implementation of OpenMP?
Also, can the following loop - doesn't seems to be countable - be parallelized by OpenMP ( note that the question is if the code can be pararallelized and not if there is a way to create a parallel equivalent of this code )
for ( i = 0; i < cnt; )
{
 x1 = 2.0 * x - 1.;
 if ( x1 < 1.0 )
 {
  i = i + 3;
  x = x*2.;
 }
 else // if ( x1 >= 1. )
 {
  i = i + 2;
  x = x/2.;
 }
}

A: The OpenMP standard requires the Canonical Loop Form

The canonical form allows the iteration count of all associated loops to be computed before executing the outermost loop. The computation is performed for each loop in an integer type.

This isn't exactly restricted to integers, you may use pointer types in C and random access iterator types in C++ which are logically translated to integers.
The loop variable must not be modified within the for loop (except for the increment expression). Therefore your example is not valid OpenMP code.
Further restrictions are that the loop test must be a relation comparison <, <=, >, or >= - not != or something more complex. The increment must be constant throughout the loop. The missing increment expression in your example also invalidates it.
You can read about this in the OpenMP standard section 2.6.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Q: Using [Authorize] without SimpleMembershipProvider Is there a way to use...
[Authorize(Roles: "Administrator")]
public class SomeController : Controller
{
    ...
}

...with my own Roles database table, without using SimpleMembershipProvider?
My Users and Roles model classes:
[Table("Users")]
public class UserModel
{
    [Key]
    public Int32 ID { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public String Name { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public String Password { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public virtual RoleModel Role { get; set; }
}

[Table("Roles")]
public class RoleModel
{
    [Key]
    public Int32 ID { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public String Name { get; set; }

    public virtual ICollection<UserModel> Users { get; set; }
}

Does someone have the same problem?

A: You should create your own Authorize attribute by inheriting from AuthorizeAttribute class
public class CustomAuthorizeAttribute : AuthorizeAttribute
{

}

Then you can configure it however you like.
Also you can take a look at these questions on Stackoverflow:

*

*Custom Authorize Attribute

*ASP.NET MVC 4 Custom Authorize Attribute with Permission Codes (without roles)

A: I ran into the same problem and I used a custom attribute. But my roles weren't as sophisticated. I needed to be able to give multiple roles to a user so I just used a string collection to do that. I used this custom filter
CustomAuthorize(UserRole="AUTHORIZED_ROLE");

 public class CustomAuthorizeAttribute : AuthorizeAttribute
    {
        public string UserRole { get; set; }
        protected IUnitOfWork uow = new UnitOfWork();
        protected override bool AuthorizeCore(HttpContextBase httpContext)
        {
            var isAuthorized = base.AuthorizeCore(httpContext);
            if (!isAuthorized)
            {
                return false;
            }
            var currentUser;//Get Current User
            if(UserRole==currentUser.Role.Name)
            {
                return true;
            }

        return false;
    }

    protected override void HandleUnauthorizedRequest(AuthorizationContext filterContext)
    {
        filterContext.Result = new RedirectToRouteResult(
                    new RouteValueDictionary(
                        new
                        {//redirect where you want to in case of not authorized.
                            controller = "Home",
                            action = "AccessDenied"
                        })
                    );
    }


There was a period of about 20 minutes starting at about 09:30 this morning when certain users (those on "homes-1″) may have had problems accessing their home directories. This was traced to a "garbage-in garbage-out" problem in the script that does the routine filer housekeeping, and corrected itself next time the script ran. The cause of the original "garbage-in" is still not known, but steps have been taken to detect it in future and abort the script before any damage is done.
This entry was posted in Local IT systems and tagged filer. Bookmark the permalink.


A study carried out by researchers from Denmark has investigated switching from originator to biosimilar etanercept 1-year post switch .
In April 2016, Denmark implemented a national guideline mandating non-medical switching of all patients treated with the originator etanercept Enbrel to biosimilar etanercept, Benepali (SB4).
A total of 2,030 patients treated with etanercept were identified in the nationwide quality registry, DANBIO, of which 1,623 (80%) were switched to Benepali. A previous study has found that 'changes in disease activity 3-months pre-switch and 0−3 months after the switch were comparable'. The authors therefore investigated the 1-year retention rates and reasons for withdrawal in etanercept-treated patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), psoriatic arthritis (PsA) and axial spondyloarthrits (SpA) who switched to Benepali ('switchers') and characterized etanercept-treated patients, who did not switch to Benepali ('non-switchers').
In switchers, 276 patients (18%) stopped treatment with Benepali during follow-up, mainly due to loss of efficacy (54%) or adverse event (28%). In RA, characteristics associated with withdrawal were no concomitant methotrexate and higher patient's global score (all p < 0.05) whereas gender, age and dose were insignificant. In PsA, associated factors were female gender, higher patient's global score and lower doses, whereas no significant factors were found in SpA.
Compared to non-switchers, switchers more frequently had PsA (22%/12%), received co-medication with methotrexate (48%/42%), were men (40%/35%), were rarely treated with 25 mg etanercept (1%/43%) doses and had lower patient's global score [29(13-54)mm /33(14-62)mm] [median(IQR)], (all p < 0.05) whereas age was similar.
These data were presented at the American College of Rheumatology's (ACR) 2017 Annual Meeting, which was held on 19−24 October 2017 in San Diego, CA, USA.
The results showed that 18% of switchers withdrew during the 1-year follow-up.
The authors concluded by saying that 'comparison of the withdrawal rate with a historic etanercept-treated patient cohort is ongoing and will be presented at the ACR'.
The authors of the abstract  did not provide any conflict of interest statement.
1. Glintborg B, et al. One-year clinical outcomes in 1623 patients with inflammatory arthritis who switched from originator to biosimilar etanercept – an observational study from the Danish Danbio Registry. American College of Rheumatology's (ACR) 2017 Annual Meeting; 19-24 October 2017; San Diego, CA, USA.