Montreal City Weblog

Kate 08:47 on 2020-04-14 Permalink Reply  

• david100 12:14 on 2020-04-14 Permalink

  Between March 22 and April 4, 2020, all pregnant women at two NYC hospitals were tested. 13.7% were positive and, of these, 87.9% were asymptomatic.

  We can talk about what makes pregnant women different, but for almost 14% of these to test positive (this is pcr, not antibodies test) during just this period, it has to mean that in NYC you have a much much higher infection rate than people people generally realize.

  You can find the study here, along with a bunch of sometimes interesting comments: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1249873227939266560

• david100 12:19 on 2020-04-14 Permalink

  The implication here, of course, is that this virus is not even close to as deadly as the tested-to-deaths ration is indicating.

  The lockdown should be exactly calibrated to hospital capacity (no problems in Quebec right now) and the economy should get started back again in some basic ways.

  Back to my construction point that someone ridiculed: before this and after this, there’s a housing crisis Montreal. This whole lockdown may decrease prices some, but prices need to drop a lot to get back to our historical averages – which we low by Canadian standards and which, I’ll remind you, are the very reason that our special culture could flourish. When housing costs are high, everything suffers.

• walkerp 12:51 on 2020-04-14 Permalink

  The argument is still out on the upsurge in housing costs. You can somewhat address it by increasing supply, but the pandemic may have put a huge damper on demand (it is the turning of real estate into a global investment vehicle that is the biggest driver of prices in Canadian cities). Now, if we actually enforce airbnb regulations, that demand goes down even more. I don’t see the rush to suddenly increase supply. How much will this really benefit lower and middle-income potential homebuyers versus giant development corporations?

• Faiz imam 13:26 on 2020-04-14 Permalink

  Many other cities are seeing a collapse of the airbnb industry that is leading to a surge in long term rental coming on to the market.

  is this happening in montreal too? it could go a long way to fixing the housing crisis.

  especially if the isolation lasts till july 1st

• david100 13:42 on 2020-04-14 Permalink

  I keep waiting for the Montreal Aibnb apocalypse story, but Montreal’s reporters – usually so good about spotting trends and writing about the Montreal version – have let us down.

  If Airbnb were banned, it might help in some of the most popular neighborhoods, most studies show that the aggregate impact would be modest.

  Real estate speculation is a big problem, of course. Property as an asset class + transnational capital + low interest rates = trouble.

  And I’d buy that the drop in growth is going to hit the demand for housing . . . except that Canada is by far the world’s easiest developed country to move to, and all the feeder countries that send their people are either worse hit than Canada economically, and/or had terrible economies and low opportunity to begin with.

  With this steady demand, and central bank and government recovery measures that are even more likely to favor investors, there’s no reason to believe that investors will drop existing Montreal residential units as an asset class.

  So, unless we turn off the immigration spigot or take measures against capital flowing into the housing market, we’re going right back to our problem with unmet demand for units pushing up the costs of housing for all.

  Mark this post so you can return to it in six months.

• Raymond Lutz 13:55 on 2020-04-14 Permalink

  The finance, insurance, and real estate markets won’t recover ever, sur toute l’ostie d’planète. This event has a magnitude we can’t really appreciate yet. More important than the Great depression or WWII. Maybe we’re done with delocalization, globalization, financialization, American exceptionalism, deceitful US bipartism, Trump presidency, Macron presidency, austerity, the whole fucking enchilada. Unless they send the Black Shirts… don’t forget “Les origines patronales du fascisme italien”…

• Alison Cummins 19:56 on 2020-04-14 Permalink

  David100,

  I agree it’s interesting to have data, but “infected people are often asymptomatic” and “most people who have it don’t die or even require intubation” are things we’ve known since the very beginning, right along with “asymptomatic people can transmit the infection.” The assumption has always been that there are far more cases than reported positive tests, and public health messaging has been about protecting other people because “you might be infected and not know it.”

  The paper was about the utility of swabbing on non-respiratory floors, not a major revelation about how the virus isn’t that bad after all.

  For *most* people it’s not that bad or even innocuous. For some people it’s terrible. Young and fit health care workers are dying of it.

  People over 70 too, of course. People like my father. He’s 78 and has a 9-year-old daughter who might be going back to school in a few weeks. So how do they do that? Send her back to school and prepare to make her an orphan any minute now? Homeschool her for a year or two until they have a good vaccine? Send her to live with another family? Does my father move out to live the next couple of years in isolation?

  You might not think it’s such a big deal, that they should have been prepared for him to keel over anyway given his age, but it matters. His wife is only 38 but she’s only just started to become fluent in english. She doesn’t bring in an income yet because she’s busy studying to bring her reading up to third-grade level.

  Yes, they should have thought about this before. But this is the situation and now I’m worrying about what to do when I have an orphan and a not-yet-autonomous single mother on my hands in the next six moths. In Ontario. So whether the virus is “not that bad” or not, it’s very, very bad for me.

• Raymond Lutz 05:01 on 2020-04-15 Permalink

  “this virus is not even close to as deadly”… Is death the only pertinent metric? No:

  “There is evidence that COVID-19 could cause long-term lung and kidney problems.”
  “COVID-19: Recovered patients have partially reduced lung function”
  “Video reveals lung damage in US coronavirus patient: ‘People need to take this seriously'”