quebec Teachers in quarantine and a temporary shutdown mark Day 2 of back to school in Quebec 20 staff placed in preventive isolation after positive test. On only the second day back in class for thousands of Quebec students, problems at several schools — including a temporary shutdown and more than a dozen teachers in quarantine — served to illustrate the challenges ahead amid the pandemic. At Polyvalente Deux-Montagnes in the Lower Laurentians, students in grades 9 and 10 were told to stay home Friday after a teacher tested positive for COVID-19, becoming the second staff member to catch the disease. The school also placed roughly 20 more teachers in preventive isolation. Students are likely to return to school Monday, if the school can get the replacement staff necessary.

heart Covid-19 does NOT cause heart damage, as blockbuster study had basic calculation error Just over a month ago, a paper from Germany entitled, ‘Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)’, was published in the journal JAMA Cardiology. It was based on 100 people recently recovered from Covid-19, who underwent MRI scans to find factors associated with damage to their hearts. The only problem with the conclusion of the paper is that almost every piece of data given to support it was wrong. As more and more media breathlessly reported that Covid-19 will eventually kill everyone with heart attacks, the mathematically minded on Twitter – including Darrel Francis, a Professor of Cardiology at the National Heart and Lung Institute – began to point out obvious miscalculations and mismatches in the results of the study. The authors appeared to confuse medians for means, and data points present in the graphs were absent elsewhere. In essence, the paper was riddled with remedial mistakes that the first few hundreds of thousands of people who read it (or scan the last few sentences) failed to notice.