1) Has the emergency room of Santa Cabrini Hospital become the canary in the #COVID19 mine in Montreal? On Friday, the east-end hospital urged people to avoid going to its ER following an outbreak among four staff. In this thread, I will concentrate on the city’s ER predicament.

2) During the #pandemic's first wave, Montreal’s ERs were eerily quiet as people stayed away in droves. But during the second wave, that's no longer the case. Santa Cabrini’s ER was still filled to beyond capacity Friday night despite its public appeal for people to stay away.

3) City ERs are treating more walk-in patients with #COVID19. It’s not a high number, but there are cases. And with congested ERs, it becomes harder to separate infected patients from those who aren’t. What’s concerning about Santa Cabrini's cluster is it occurred among ER staff.

4) As I wrote about earlier in the @mtlgazette tonight, hospital staff are burned out during this second wave. Many exhausted ER nurses must work double shifts, making it increasingly riskier for them to protect themselves against the insidious virus. https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/quebec-health-system-headed-for-massive-burnout-in-pandemic-expert-warns

5) As the pandemic wears on in the coming months, the risk increases of more outbreaks like the one among Santa Cabrini's ER staff. Yet the government doesn’t seem to have a plan to address this. Premier François Legault has ruled out raises for nurses beyond the inflation rate.

6) Should more ER staff become infected, they'll have to stay home, as is now the case at Santa Cabrini, draining hospitals' already thin resources. Add to this the chance of even a mild flu season, with coughing patients turning up in ERs, and you start to get the grim picture.

7) Meanwhile, Montreal posted 237 #COVID19 cases Friday, down from nearly 300 the day before, as the orange line indicates in the chart below. Although Quebec collected more than 27,000 blood samples two days ago, there’s likely a #coronavirus testing backlog to be cleared.

8) At the neighborhood level, the city centre comprising Côte-des-Neiges, downtown and Parc-Extension continues to driving #coronavirus transmission. But there are also lots of cases in the east end, including in Saint-Michel and Saint-Léonard, whose patients go to Santa Cabrini.

9) By comparison, the number of #COVID19 hospitalizations and ER admissions appear to have peaked at the McGill University Health Centre, according to the MUHC chart below. Whether this is a one-day blip or a trend for the better remains to be seen.

10) Another potentially positive development is a decline in active #COVID19 cases in schools and in shuttered classes. Please see the Education Ministry's chart below. But since Thursday, http://covidecolesquebec.org  has reported 52 more schools with positive cases. End of thread.