The city is sending non-essential workers home.
Cirque du soleil has now laid off 95% of its workers.
The cases of COVID-19 at the Jewish seem to have been contracted in the Caribbean. That coronavirus sure travelled fast.
Are Quebec’s health care facilities ready for the surge?
Official city page on the city’s measures vs. the rona.
Some pieces on how to apply for emergency benefits.
Explainer from CBC. Questions and answers from Radio-Canada: you can submit a question to them.
There are 121 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Quebec as of Thursday.
A possible case in the Rivière-des-Prairies prison has caused dismay. People serving weekend sentences are still obliged to show up and serve their jail time in a group setting (at other jails).
Ste-Justine hospital is providing drive-thru testing, but you need to make an appointment with 811 first. There are no at-home tests although some scammers are claiming to offer them.
The city is allowing the delay of tax payments in response to the crisis.
Although there had been thoughts of launching Bixi sooner than usual, it won’t be back before the usual date of April 15.
Quebec’s first death from COVID-19 was Mariette Tremblay, 82. Her family’s message to Quebecers is to stay home.
FYI, I’m seeing trucks with BIXI stations getting ready to be installed in my neighbourhood north of Parc Jeanne-Mance. They may be all done by the end of this month!
Transit app has published numbers showing the decline of transit use under COVID-19’s heavy manners. STM use is down 79% as of today, March 19 and Exo trains and suburban transit a little more.
Grocery stores have reduced their business hours.
The Journal reports that someone diagnosed with COVID-19 visited the NDG library earlier this month.
Foreign students have been asked to leave their Concordia residences within four days.
Lots more to come. Funny how being home is making me more busy.
Is reducing business hours really a good idea, though? The stores are already pretty packed with people stocking up. Reducing business hours will mean more people in the stores at the same time. This makes it difficult for social distancing.
I’ve been counting things again (my absolute favourite pastime).
The last two days have averaged 128% increases. (March 18–19)
During the previous four days, the average daily increase had been 145%. (March 14–17)
The four days before that, 135%. (March 9–13)
For the nine days before that, the average daily increase had been 123%. (February 29–March 8)
So it looks like we may have gotten over some kind of hump.
Alison, you might be interested in the numbers Hugh McGuire crunched on the same topic. Update: Hugh published a link to his spreadsheet on Google Docs.
I’m pretty horrified looking out my window this afternoon watching people strolling down Monkland as if it’s a holiday..really really hope it’s not a broader public complacency (especially with NDG library news)
There are more people than usual walking around, I see that as a positive, as long as you are outside walking at a distance of a few meters from anyone.
I agree with dwgs. People walking around (but maintaining distance) is a good thing. The alternative — everyone cooped up for weeks — would result in people cracking up and doing completely stupid things, or having mental breakdowns. Going for a walk is a nice, safe way to keep your head clear.
Thanks for the numbers, Kate et al.
@ Anon88 – even the Bay Area’s ‘shelter-in-place’ orders, which are currently more strict than here, consider outdoor activity as ESSENTIAL:
“Engaging in outdoor activity, such as walking, hiking or running provided that they maintain at least 6 feet of social distancing.”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/us/shelter-in-place-coronavirus-trnd/index.html
Il y a un joli simulateur online de vitesse de contagion VS confinement sur le site LeMedia (allez au bas de la page pour modifier les paramètres)
And anyone else saw that flawed Reuters dispatch about SARS-COV-2 claiming “New coronavirus can persist in air for hours”? The original article (10.1056/NEJMc2004973) used 5 μm aqueous droplets for their study but they fail to mention at this size it takes less than 1 second to dry out, even in 90% RH! (10.1016/j.jaerosci.2017.10.009 ). As I wrote on my mastodon account:
Si on ne vous tousse pas dans la face, vous êtes OK (tenez-vous à une distance de 2m). Vous n’êtes ni malade (pas de symptôme) ni immunodépressif? Ne portez pas de masque, c’est inutile et même plus risqué: les gens masqués ont tendance à se toucher plus souvent le restant du visage.
PS: Use sci-hub.tw to resolve the mentioned digital object identifier (DOI)
Went to the grocery store… they don’t get it yet. And they better get it soon… too many people at a time. It’s a quick way to end up with one case and having to contact all the clients… and you really don’t want to be in the news as an epicentre. Or worse, have the government go to decree, like in Italy… 6 people in the store at one time.
Douglas 23:59 on 2020-03-19 Permalink
This is worst than the great recession of 2009 in the US.
The bailouts will make 2009 look like nothing.
Kate 00:49 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
Yes yes, but you have to get a grip, Douglas. Money is a fiction. Health is not.
Douglas 09:39 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
Money is fiction until you need it to buy food.
DeWolf 10:13 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
We’ve never lived through anything quite like this so it’s impossible to say how sticky the recession will be. Businesses are laying off workers like mad but only because they are temporarily shut down. Unless the government throws up its hands and lets everybody in the country go bankrupt, those businesses will reopen in a month or so when we’ve gotten through the worst of this, and they’ll need to hire back the workers they laid off.
Raymond Lutz 12:40 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
Hmmm, moi aussi je crains les répercusssions économiques des lock-downs… (even if I’m a self-described socialist) see for exemple https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/03/11/it-is-easy-to-overdo-covid-19-quarantines/
We should organize adaptive triggering of suppression strategies as mentioned in “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand” (10.25561/77482)
ie tuning schools, commerces lockdowns at a finer spatial and temporal granularity than at province level and for long periods.
The authors predict US and UK “Critical care beds occupation” peaking well into 2020 and even in 2021…
Douglas 15:40 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
Raymond
From the article:
“deaths from the loss of the economy would be far greater than the direct deaths from the coronavirus.”
Very very true. Absolutely true.
walkerp 17:20 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
We are drowning in excess. I am hearing at this point an economic downturn equal to the Great Depression is a possibility. That is going to be rough, but I don’t know how you possibly conclude that will lead to more deaths than the disease itself.
The reason there is so much anxiety about the economy is because it is the elites who will suffer the worst. They still think they are shielded from all the woes of an unequal society, including a disease that does not discriminate. Thus the delays by the Trump administration.
We can survive poverty and in many ways this bloated economy was doing more harm to the world and the planet than a depression will. Almost all the wealth generated in the last two decades has gone entirely to further pump up the 1% and increase the social divide.
Fuck the economy. We need to turn society’s attention to our health and to the planet’s health. That means we all tighten our belts. We had a choice and we didn’t take it and now we don’t have a choice.
Douglas 18:44 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
“Fuck the economy”. Lol. That’s rich. Good decent people are being laid off, suffering financially, and going more into poverty. The poor are getting poorer here, the middle class is being crushed.
Contrary to what you may believe, the rest of the world doesn’t actually want a bolshevik revolution.
Elites aren’t suffering. Trust me on that one.
Uatu 00:43 on 2020-03-21 Permalink
I’m interested to see the outcome of this pandemic. Social security was the result of the great depression. Britain’s NHS was formed in the aftermath of WW2. Social programs are usually the result of collective misery so maybe there’s a similar result coming? Some articles I’ve read suggest basic income maybe the next thing especially in a world where pandemics are recurring and effect everyone regardless of political bent…
Raymond Lutz 08:57 on 2020-03-21 Permalink
Well said, Uatu. Isn’t Trump wanting some kind of emergency UBI? “Jimmy Dore – Pelosi Is Blocking Direct Cash Payments To Citizens.WTF?”
https://youtu.be/NKtB9f2ezzg
Kate 10:10 on 2020-03-21 Permalink
The thing I wonder about that $1000 to Americans is that the Trump administration is doing this in the spirit in which you give a persistent panhandler $2 hoping he’ll leave you alone. “What else can they possibly want? I gave them a thousand bucks each!”
Trump and his coterie have no idea about the real cost of living.