142 more deaths in Quebec in 24 hrs
One hundred and forty-two (142) more people have died from COVID‑19 in the last 24 hours in Quebec. More than 100 of these deaths were in Montreal.
Montreal North is a serious hot spot in the city.
It’s just outside town, but 64 people have COVID-19 in a Cargill meat processing plant in Chambly. If this sounds familiar, it’s because a lot of people also got sick in a Cargill plant in Alberta last month.
Chris 21:24 on 2020-05-10 Permalink
The media loves to put these numbers out, but is 142 a lot? How many people die per day usually? According to the Institut de la statistique Québec, it seems the answer, in 2018, was 188 deaths per day. So that’s a huge chunk! Then again, maybe it’s just me, but the way some media portray it, you’d expect it to be 10x a usual day.
And the Montreal CMA is almost 50% of Quebec’s population, so 100/142 is not _hugely_ disproportionate. In fact, you’d expect big cities to have more spread/cases.
jeather 22:08 on 2020-05-10 Permalink
Chris, Kate posted an article that answers that just yesterday. This week Montreal has had 3x as many deaths as usual (40/day), so that’s 50-60 excess yesterday alone, if we read “more than 100” as 101-109.
I would definitely love more specific info on the average death rate per day/week prior to this year and this year.
Kevin 22:08 on 2020-05-10 Permalink
I think you’ll find that normally, the largest number of people dying from a single cause is about 55 per day, and it’s pretty all-encompassing: cancer.
So having three times that number dying from a single disease is pretty significant.
david11 22:24 on 2020-05-10 Permalink
And almost everyone dying is from groups that we knew to be and identified as vulnerable months ago.
So that it’s still happening is a major failure on the part of the Legault government.
Crash the economy, crash the government’s borrowing, and don’t even take the measures we need to in order to protect the very few people who are genuinely vulnerable.
It’s not a conspiracy or lie that people are dying – they are! The conspiracy is that our government is massively bungling this challenge.
david11 22:27 on 2020-05-10 Permalink
And of course that the thrust of reporting is still – still ! – taking the government’s side, when it should be absolutely skeptical of both nuking the economy and the totally unsatisfactory measures they’ve been taking to identify and protect the tiny percent of the population that will – no exaggeration, will – die from this if they contract it.
Kate 23:11 on 2020-05-10 Permalink
david11 – no matter what we do, we can’t seal off CHSLDs and everyone who works in them. Those workers are on your bus and in your metro and in your grocery store and on your street, and not everyone who gets sick and dies is an old age pensioner. We still have to flatten that curve.
Until mid-March I worked in a business where several of the workers were well over 60, and the owner’s elderly father used to come in almost every afternoon to do some mysterious paper shuffling. In fact, I think it may have been me who pushed the owner to act and close down, after I pointed out to him that his father was getting exposed daily to a random crew of sales guys and trades guys who were always coming and going, visiting other businesses, lunching with people from other businesses.
I don’t know whether my old boss will reopen the business or be able to rehire everyone who was working there till mid-March, but I would not want to be sitting where I was, exposed to all kinds of people walking inches away from where I was working, coughing on me in some cases (yes) – and I wasn’t even in a public-facing job. But I certainly was not in a bubble, AND it would mean going to and fro every day on a bus. I am not elderly and I’m fairly healthy but that was not a job I’m willing to die for, you know?
Alison Cummins 01:30 on 2020-05-11 Permalink
On March 9, BC had Canada’s first covid death. It was in a long-term care centre.
They managed their stuff though. The death rate from covid in BC is less now than it was a month ago. No bubble required, just competent public health direction.
We are
Kate 10:21 on 2020-05-11 Permalink
Alison, if you want to complete your thought, please post again and I will link them up.
Kevin 11:24 on 2020-05-11 Permalink
david∞
In my opinion, there are two or three big failures from this government.
In order of seriousness, the biggest problem is the failure in contact tracing in order to isolate new patients. This is the crucial step, and the government — or the bureaucracy — has fallen on its face onto a garden rake. This is why Montreal can’t reopen. This is why the disease has run rampant through seniors’ homes. This is why we’re going to have a second wave in ROQ very soon.
Quebec has nowhere near the number of tracers necessary, they’re not reaching the people needed, and they are frequently failing to get the message through. We need hundreds, if not thousands, of contact tracers. They need to be able to speak to people in their mother tongue. They need to be able to reach people on the phone and some of these patients need to be seen in their homes — or moved out of their homes into an area where they can be isolated.
If you want to open the economy, Quebec needs to trace contacts, and do it faster.
The second problem is the bureaucracy completely failing to match skilled medical workers/orderlies with the posts that need to be filled. 8 weeks in and the bureaucrats still can’t do it. That’s ridiculous. Whether it’s language laws or turf wars or something else, some bureaucrats have their heads up their ass. That’s why the army was called in– because it’s a way to bypass the bureaucracy.
The lack of testing is the third problem but it’s the most understandable, since every authority in the world needs the same chemical reagents to run the tests. There are things the government could be doing to be more efficient about it, but again, that requires a skilled and competent bureaucracy to get things done.
I’m not worried about “the economy” because while some segments are failing, others are being innovative and succeeding. We’ve got the social safety net and it’s doing its job. And you can see south of the border what happens when that doesn’t exist.
walkerp 13:19 on 2020-05-11 Permalink
Very well summarized, Kevin. I think we see here what a deep structural failure the Quebec health system is as well as several other civil services (education comes close). Instead of trying to fix these institutions, the CAQ wanted to do a soft neoliberal end-run around them.
The coronavirus has shown that strategy to be a complete disaster and revealing that not only is their ideology impractical for the situation but they also lack the expertise to handle it tactically. They showed this early in their tenure, but we forgot in the first few weeks when Legault responded appropriately to the emergency.
There is still time for them to get back to that place of treating this pandemic like the crisis it is. The Quebec people would accept it. I wonder what pressures are on them that they are breaking down so quickly?
Chris 23:21 on 2020-05-11 Permalink
jeather, guess I missed that link, but most stories don’t give the baseline numbers, making comparisons hard.
One nit though: we can’t assume that every covid death is a ‘new’ death, some of those people would have died in this day/week/month due to some other reason, especially since so many of the dead skew old.
Also note that not every place counts equally, Quebec counts presumed-covid deaths, other places count confirmed-covid deaths. We’ll have better numbers only later.