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One-in-three Canadians developed severe loneliness amidst the second wave of COVID-19

Pandemic-induced public health measures, such as social distancing and stay-at-home orders, while successful in decreasing the transmission of COVID-19,…

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Pandemic-induced public health measures, such as social distancing and stay-at-home orders, while successful in decreasing the transmission of COVID-19, could exacerbate pre-existing mental health challenges, including loneliness, one of the major public health concerns in pre-pandemic times.

Credit: Dr. Shen (Lamson) Lin. (Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2022.08.131)

Pandemic-induced public health measures, such as social distancing and stay-at-home orders, while successful in decreasing the transmission of COVID-19, could exacerbate pre-existing mental health challenges, including loneliness, one of the major public health concerns in pre-pandemic times.

A new nationwide study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders estimated that in Canada, 34.7% per cent of the population, or just over one out of three Canadians, experienced severe loneliness in the second wave of COVID-19 infections, in January 2021. Moreover, this estimate of Canadian loneliness was substantially higher than statistics (14%–27%) reported elsewhere in the world during the pandemic.

“This concerning magnitude implies that during the pandemic lockdown, severe loneliness was ubiquitous in Canada,” says the sole author, Dr Lamson Lin Shen, an assistant professor in City University of Hong Kong’s Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, who conducting the research while finishing his Ph.D. degree at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. “This is probably due to the disruption in daily social activities, which normally help people cope with stress, as well as the intense social isolation caused by the lockdown measures implemented in many provinces of Canada.”

Based on the population-representative data from the Canadian Perspective Survey Series, collected from 25 to 31 January 2021 (during the larger second wave of the pandemic in Canada), the study adopted a machine-learning approach, Classification and Regression Tree (CART) modelling, to discover population patterns of loneliness symptoms measured by the standardised UCLA 3-item loneliness scale among 3,772 participants. The CART algorithm found that migrants who experienced pandemic-triggered job insecurity, such as business closures, layoffs or absence from work due to COVID-19 diagnosis, were the among the groups most at risk of severe loneliness.

“It is not surprising that immigrants were particularly vulnerable to isolation and loneliness in pre-pandemic times, because they were in a new environment, where they may have faced a variety of post-migration stressors, such as language obstacles, limited social networks, and a diminished sense of community belonging,” says Dr Lin. “What struck me the most is that my study discovered the double jeopardy of immigrant status and an unstable job situation during the COVID period.”

According Dr Lin’s findings, individuals who experienced job instability during the pandemic had double the odds of experiencing severe loneliness compared to people who were securely employed, after controlling for confounding variables, including sociodemographic factors. Among those experiencing insecure employment, the prevalence of loneliness was substantially higher among immigrant population than among Canadian-born residents (86.2 % vs. 48.7 %).

“The COVID-19 pandemic indeed amplified immigrants’ susceptibility to loneliness,” says Dr. Lin. “This may be due to the fact that many migrants to Canada are over-represented in low-paid, low-skilled, unstable jobs, such as retail positions, cleaners, or cashiers, that require extensive interaction with the public, so they are at greater occupational risk of COVID-19 infection and consequential employment insecurity.”

In addition, Dr. Lin’s research identified several at-risk groups of loneliness that are consistent in ordinary times, including youth and adolescents, women, people with a low educational background, people living alone, people with a limited social circle (less than three persons), binge drinkers, and past-month cannabis users.

His study also demonstrated that, compared to Canadians who did not experience loneliness, severely lonely individuals in Canada were 1.7 times more likely to seek treatment from mental health professionals, 1.5 times more likely to seek informal support for mental health concerns, and 1.8 times more likely to have unmet mental health needs.

“My findings further shed light on the importance of building an equitable mental health care system in the pandemic response and recovery in Canada and other immigrant-receiving countries of the world,” said Dr Lin. “Primary care providers and mental health clinicians should assess loneliness symptoms in their routine patient examinations. At the community level, social care organisations should develop early prevention and intervention programs targeting high-risk groups with a greater burden of loneliness, especially for immigrant and marginalised populations.”

Paper: Lin, S. (2022). The “loneliness epidemic”, intersecting risk factors and relations to mental health help-seeking: A population-based study during COVID-19 lockdown in CanadaJournal of Affective Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2022.08.131

https://www.cityu.edu.hk/research/stories/2022/11/03/cityu-scholar-used-machine-learning-approach-detect-risk-factors-loneliness-symptoms-during-pandemic


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Canadian dollar edges higher as retail sales rebound

Canada retail sales climb 2% The Canadian dollar has posted losses on Friday. In the European session, USD/CAD is trading at 1.3446, down 0.28%. Canada’s…

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  • Canada retail sales climb 2%

The Canadian dollar has posted losses on Friday. In the European session, USD/CAD is trading at 1.3446, down 0.28%.

Canada’s retail sales jump

Canada’s retail sales rebounded in impressive fashion on Friday. Retail sales in July jumped 2% y/y, following a -0.6% reading in June and beating the 0.5% consensus estimate. On a monthly basis, retail sales rose 0.3%, up from 0.1% in June but shy of the consensus estimate of 0.4%. The good news was tempered by the August estimate, which stands at -0.3% m/m and would be the first decline since March. The Canadian dollar showed little reaction to the retail sales release.

The Bank of Canada doesn’t meet again until October 25th and policy makers will have plenty of data to monitor in the meantime. The BoC has been walking a tightrope that will be familiar to most central banks, that of trying to balance the risks of over and under-tightening. The difficulty in finding the right balance was highlighted in the BoC summary of deliberations of the policy meeting earlier this month.

The BoC decided to hold the benchmark rate at 5.0% after concluding that earlier rate hikes were having an effect and slowing economic growth. The summary indicated that policy makers were concerned that a pause might send the wrong message that rate cuts might be on the way. With inflation still above the BOC’s target, the central bank is not looking at rate cuts and stressed at the September meeting that rate hikes were still on the table and that inflation remained too high.

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USD/CAD Technical

  • USD/CAD is testing resistance at 1.3468. The next resistance line is 1.3553
  • 1.3408 and 1.3323 are the next support lines

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Quantitative Tightening Is Not Biggest Threat To Global Yields

Quantitative Tightening Is Not Biggest Threat To Global Yields

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

The Bank of England’s…

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Quantitative Tightening Is Not Biggest Threat To Global Yields

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

The Bank of England’s quantitative tightening program shows that unwinding central-bank bond portfolios, even with outright sales, need not be disruptive for markets. The greater risk for US and global yields comes from positive stock-bond correlations driving risk premia wider.

The BOE has been a pioneer and a thought leader in QT. While the Fed and ECB have only allowed bonds to run off naturally to help achieve their balance-sheet contraction goals, the BOE has sold gilts outright in addition to allowing bonds to mature.

So far, it has not led to any significant market disruption. This enabled the BOE Thursday to increase the pace of reduction in the Asset Purchase Facility (APF) from £80 billion last year to £100 billion over the coming 12 months from October (while holding Bank Rate steady). As colleague Ven Ram also noted, the schedule of maturing bonds next year allowed the bank to keep gilts sales unchanged from last year while increasing the total amount of the APF’s decrease.

The QT watchwords from the bank are “gradual and predictable.” If gilt sales are conducted in such a way, then market disruption should be minimized. The chart below shows the BOE’s own assessment of the impact of bond sales on the market.

The BOE estimates that of the ~40 bps of term-premium increase since the MPC voted to begin QT in February 2022, about 10-15 bps comes from QT specifically – small in comparison to the overall rise in yields since that time.

QT or bond sales, though, are not the most critical risk facing bond prices in the current cycle. Rising and now positive stock-bond correlations threaten to lead to a structural rise in bond risk premium, and lower prices. The correlation is now positive in the US, Japan, and the UK.

In a positive stock-bond correlation world, bonds lose their portfolio-hedge and recession-hedge capabilities, and thus become less sought after. The penny has not fully dropped yet, but the negative term premium for bonds is increasing, and is prone to rising much higher as they become less desirable.

Yields of developed market countries are biased structurally higher, but QT is unlikely to be the culprit. Instead, it allows central banks to reload their capacity for a future time when they may need to restart quantitative easing, in order to stabilize the market from sharply rising term premia.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/22/2023 - 09:10

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How ducks, geese and swans see the world – and why this puts them at risk in a changing environment

Our airspace has only started to become cluttered recently – many birds are struggling to navigate through it.

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The blue duck (Hymenolaimus malacorhynchos) is a species endemic to New Zealand. Graham Martin, CC BY-NC-SA

Each year, millions of birds fly into power lines, wind turbines and the other man-made structures that litter the open air space. These collisions frequently result in the death of birds and, if power systems go down, disrupt our lives and pose financial challenges for power companies.

Numerous bird species, including macaws in Brazil, geese and swans in the UK, and blue cranes in South Africa have been found to be susceptible to collisions with power lines. But any flying bird can fall victim to such a collision.

In some places, these collisions happen so often that they can jeopardise local populations of endangered species.

But birds are highly evolved flying machines. They can fly in tightly packed flocks that weave and turn to our delight and wonder. So why do they fly into things?

According to our latest research, the answer lies in how they see the world. We found that looking directly ahead is simply not that important to many species of duck, geese and swans.

A flock of swans flying past a power line.
Seeing what’s ahead is not that important to many species of duck, geese and swans. Marijs Jan/Shutterstock

How birds see the world

Exploring the reasons behind why birds are victims of collisions has led to new ideas that challenge our fundamental perception of what birds are. In the past, scientists have described birds as “a wing guided by an eye”. This implies that flight has been central to moulding bird vision throughout their evolution.

But now it is safe to conclude that a bird is instead best characterised as “a bill guided by an eye”. Rather than flight, the main driver of the evolution of bird vision has been the key tasks associated with foraging, in particular detecting food items and getting the bill to the right place at the right time in order to seize them. Alongside the detection of predators, this is the task that bird vision has to get right day in, day out.

Birds differ in how much the view from each eye overlaps (called the binocular field of view). The more the eyes look straight ahead, the more the view from each eye will overlap – much as human eyes do – thus broadening the binocular field. For a bird such as a duck, with its eyes positioned high up on either side of the head, the view from each eye will be very different (with smaller binocular field).

We measured binocular field size across a broad range of 39 species of duck, geese and swans. We found that the key driver of diversity in vision between species is their diet and how they forage for food.

Birds that primarily use their vision to locate foods such as seeds, or selectively graze on plants, tend to have broader binocular fields.

However, the binocular fields of species like mallards and pink-eared ducks are much narrower. These birds rely less on their eyes for foraging and more on touch cues from their bills. The vision of birds like these instead provides them with a comprehensive view of the region above and behind their heads.

Birds certainly need to have some visual coverage in front of them. But with eyes placed high on the side of the head, resulting in a very narrow binocular field, they are restricted to retrieving rather scant detail from the distant scene ahead. What matters to them more is placing their bill accurately at a close distance and seeing who is coming at them from the side or from behind.

Two pink-eared ducks in water.
Pink-eared ducks rely less on their eyes for foraging. Imogen Warren/Shutterstock

This finding is not confined to ducks, geese and swans. It probably generalises to all birds, except perhaps some owls (which have more front-facing eyes and rely upon sound to locate prey). The great majority of birds are therefore vulnerable to collisions.

However, it is larger birds like geese, swans and bustards that face real problems. Their restricted forward vision is compounded by flying fast and being unable to change direction quickly. These birds also often fly in flocks, and at dusk and dawn when the light level is lower.

Warning birds of hazards ahead

Understanding the vision of birds from the perspective of foraging and predator detection improves our understanding of what causes collisions. But, more importantly, it allows us to do something about it.

We must not assume that a bird’s view of the world is the same as ours. We are specialised primates with eyes on the front of our heads, and we see the world in a very different way to birds, not only with respect to visual fields but also acuity and colour vision. So, we must try to take a proper “birds’ eye view” of the problem.

Birds are also flying fast. But, as they do so, they are taking in only gross information of what lies ahead – much as we do when driving our cars. As with car hazard warnings, it is necessary to alert birds using markers that may seem excessive.

Birds that are vulnerable to collisions have evolved to fly in airspace that only recently has started to become cluttered. To be clearly visible to a bird, especially to species like ducks and geese, devices that warn birds about hazards ahead must be large, highly contrasting and produce flicker.

When marking hazards, there is no place for subtlety.

Jenny Cantlay received funding from NERC and the RSPB for her doctoral research on avian vision whilst at Royal Holloway University.

Graham Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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