Police are indicating that they will be patrolling streets vigorously for anyone breaking traffic rules, after a month plagued with traffic deaths and injuries. Watch out for ticket traps.
A small demonstration was held in Cabot Square on Wednesday to deplore the death of two Inuit women in traffic, in two different incidents over the last couple of weeks.
A mural portraying Nelson Mandela is to be painted on the Union United Church in commemoration of Mandela’s visit to town 30 years ago.
The Journal describes more homeless camps along Notre-Dame East, as does La Presse. Closure of temporary shelters is being blamed. The city is preparing to rebuild a rooming house in Ville-Marie, and obviously we need more like this, but Quebec is not being generous to the city when it comes to housing.
We need rooming houses… a lot more. But we also need special tenancy rules for them, because they are more shared than standard apartments and one resident can be a lot more disruptive to the harmony than with other dwellings.
We really do. A lot of people would be off the streets if they could have a clean bedroom and bathroom and share kitchen and social rooms with others. The problem is that someone would have to be paid to oversee the situation and keep the common rooms reasonably clean.
Actually, regulations forbid a private kitchen. You can have a microwave for cooking. Though, today you could get most of what you get with a kitchen with a toaster oven or an air fryer, if you know how to use it. (An air fryer is the reverse of an oven, it heats from the top rather than the bottom.)
Yes, you need someone there. But usually that’s an owner, who’s running the place. But as I said, they need legal protections that allow them to kick someone out immediately for violation of the law/rules. For example, unless they are very well trained, most people can’t handle alcoholics/drug addicts in such a situation, those people need to be removed to a specialized rooming house. And we still need those, but those need specialized training.
The standard Quebec lease and protections won’t work in this kind of situation… you can’t wait for a rental court to give an exclusion order.
A candlelight vigil is on the point of beginning at Dorchester Square to commemorate the losses in Beirut Tuesday.
Update: Some reports on the vigil with photos and thoughts on how difficult it is to help when international travel is limited.
Gatherings of 250 people – this CBC item is illustrated with a rather larger crowd – are now permitted in Quebec, meaning that festivals can now resume.
A few festivals are actually on the schedule. I’m updating the festivals list in the sidebar, putting in 2020’s dates, commenting out the ones that seem to be missing in action.
Seems to me the pandemic will bring the definitive coup de grâce to the World Film Festival.
Fantasia Film Festival is going ahead virtually on August 20. Just mentioning it because I see you’ve noted a few festivals that have gone virtual, as opposed to being cancelled outright.
Thanks, GC. I don’t know how that dropped off my list, but it’s now back on.
Many hospitals around Montreal are adding temporary modular buildings to function as Covid isolation wards – which means the medical establishment here is bracing for a surge in cases after the rentrée.
Dr Theresa Tam is warning us that Covid may be around for a long time. And a study shows that, even if a vaccine is created, a lot of Canadians will delay getting it, or refuse to get it at all.
Not only that, but the vaccine to be effective will require herd protection, so +/- 75% of the population.
Literally every community in Canada has a hockey rink. Dr. Joanne Liu was saying how all COVID+ patients should be kept out of the hospitals to keep hospitals from shutting down and/or becoming vectors of the virus, but that the govt doesn’t want this because it looks bad. The arenas aren’t being used anyways… they’d be perfect isolation spots. Instead govt orders new construction. This is all about greasing palms. The political class couldn’t have been more inept had they tried.
Problem there is that people might want to use the rinks for hockey.
The temporary hospital buildings were announced in May or June, because while you can do some stuff under a tent, treating people outdoors in the winter isn’t really feasible. Like everything else with this disease, people need space — and those old hospitals that kept 4 people to a room aren’t going to cut it.
Hospitals need hot zones and cold zones and to do that safely in winter means space, and lots of it.
As for arenas — they are being used. Hockey camps take place all summer (and there have been outbreaks) and skating for all starts Sept. 1 (at least in my neighbourhood).
They’d also be terrible isolation spots. There is no medical gear on hand. Accessing washrooms would be difficult at best. They’re gloomy and not designed to be heated.
Commandeer some buffet halls instead of arenas if you really need people inside 🙂
re: Tam’s conference – I think the odds of Canadians wearing masks and avoiding people for 3 years is slim to none. Since now countries like the Czech Republic and Slovakia have lowered their numbers so much that they are basically maskless and back open after 8 weeks even without a vaccine, it will become harder to justify the various strategies we are using. It really looks like we really botched it by not recommending face covering at the same time as we shut down. Hindsight, of course.
I hope you’re right, JaneyB, but I’ll wait to see how things look a few weeks after schools reopen.
Several hockey arenas were used for temporary hospitals (Jacques Lemaire in Lasalle comes to mind) as well as other uses. Doug Harvey in NDG was used as a temporary home for the local food bank. As others have said, they’e not really well suited to the purpose on a long term basis. They lack the necessary electrical and plumbing infrastructure for example. Most of the arenas are starting to install ice at the moment and the ones that do have ice are already seeing heavy usage.
A hospital is way more than beds. There is massive infrastructure behind it. A hockey arena might be fine for minor things (something like an ice storm where people need a place to stay), but you need that infrastructure for anything much serious. I had xrays a few times, a camera down my throat a bunch of times, I guess it was an electrocardiogram twice, dialysis for ten weeks, endless laundry, awful hospital food three times a day. Adjacent to the hospital means these resources are close.
Remember, this is for the very serious cases. They were telling people with mild symptoms to stay home.
I’ll note that the article quotes Dr. Fauci as being more optimistic about a vaccine. This guy is no mere administrator. His name is on a paper about my rare disease, I gather he did something significant about how to deal with it. So he seems to know what he’s doing.
Michael Black, I see so many contradictory things about the possibility of a vaccine that I do not know what to think. Some reports say immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2 doesn’t last long enough for a vaccine to work. Even if we do get a rock‑solid vaccine, enough people will refuse the shot that we may not be able to immunize enough of the population.
Used to be you couldn’t enroll your kid in school without a smallpox vaccination certificate. If the Covid vaccination comes and it works, maybe a rule like that could be revived.
I find it interesting that the federal government is already signing contracts with pharmaceutical companes to buy a vaccine that doesn’t yet exist.
I’m hoping that this will bring back all the regular vaccine requirements to go to a public school (barring a medical exemption).
Héma-Québec’s study finds that 2.23% of Quebec adults aged 18 to 69 have caught Covid-19, suggesting a number closer to 125,000 people who have caught it here, vs. the official figure of 37,000 cases in that age group. That’s a lot of people walking around without symptoms, possibly spreading it.
Update: Santé Quebec’s official numbers say 60,000 Quebec residents have caught the virus so far.
Ephraim 12:23 on 2020-08-06 Permalink
Again with the short term random tickets instead of a concerted plan on how to actually handle the problem?
What we really need is a common ground set of rules for traffic. That means we all need to understand road safety, pedestrians, cyclists, skaters, boarders, cars, motorcycles, trucks, etc. Not only do we have more bikes on the roads, but we also have newer electronic cars that are “programmed” to follow a standardized “rules of the road.” But if people don’t know how to follow those “rules of the road” we are going to end up with other types of accidents. As two examples, electric cars can accelerate very quickly, you can’t assume the acceleration speed based on legacy acceleration. And more and more cars have AEB (automatic emergency braking) and a sudden move by a cyclists or a pedestrian into the road or too close to the car, can actually cause an accident because the car will brake suddenly…. even if you perceive it to be safe, the computer calculates trajectory and brakes. (Whiplash for the car occupants, car hitting them from behind, etc.) These cars have radar and lidar, things we couldn’t have even dreamed of years ago.
The fact is, more and more of the “rules of the road” are being programmed into a car. But that means that there are a certain amount of expectations as well. We also need better signalling and lines.
Apparently some of the new cars have problems with rural merges, where the merge lines aren’t painted as per the standard code and the cars seeing two lines so far apart that the car lunges to the right to stay between them… a problem outside of Montreal and Quebec, where they saved money by not painting in those lines.