Quebec has unveiled its plan for coping with a second wave of Covid this fall. I listened to some of the presser on radio and they were heavily stressing that nobody would be allowed to work shifts at different CHSLDs. The shortage of CHSLD workers, forcing people to divide their shifts between locations, seems to have been a major reason for so many outbreaks in those establishments early on in the pandemic. Now they’ve trained a bunch more workers, so it shouldn’t be a concern.
Updates from August, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Tony Accurso has squeezed out of legal trouble before, but now he’s up on charges of bribing people in the Canada Revenue Agency and will go on trial early next year. Accurso was sentenced to four years in 2018 but has yet, I believe, to do any time.
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Kate
This summer, bike sales have been high, but this piece reaches to imply that bike theft is equally high even though it doesn’t have figures to support the claim.
Meezly
There’s a certain kind of low when someone steals a bike that has a kid seat or chariot. I’m on a parent google group and someone recently had her bike stolen in the 20 minutes she took shelter from the rain at a pizza place with her two toddlers. Not sure if it was locked or not, but I assume it was. She relied on that bike during the pandemic and was beyond upset.
So please be careful with your bikes out there!
Kate
I don’t think bike thieves have a moment to waste on who might own the bike or have need of it. My first stolen bike was a second-hand one-speed (before that was cool), stolen from outside my high school. It was clearly not a rich kid’s toy, but someone thought it was worth taking.
If thieves think anything, they think we’re fools to leave property where they can easily take it, and we deserve what we get. But I don’t think they even exercise their imaginations to that extent.
Ephraim
My first bike had a pedal fall off, so I ended up learning how to ride it with the missing pedal. Certainly kept it from being stolen… they didn’t know how to drive off with a missing pedal.
But that being said, who’s going to stop bike theft? The police? They are a reporting agency with a record of recovery of stolen items that is as effective as swiss cheese to catch water. Like with everything else, it is going to either take a concerted effort to make bike’s unsellable on a secondary market, or people taking enough care that they aren’t stolen. Heck, cars are a heck of a lot larger and the police can’t find them when stolen, either…. and there have all kinds of marking to prevent theft.
dwgs
Unless it’s a high end bike the thief is usually a junkie or a crackhead or similar. Back when I used to work in bars we would see stolen stuff on the regular. These people are not stopping to debate the ethics of stealing from little kids or inconveniencing their parents.
MarcG
I also understand the stolen-bike problem to actually be a poverty/addiction problem.
Kate
Any theft can be that, MarcG, and a quick opportunistic theft might be. But I think it’s often a question of low cunning and greed. Toula Drimonis wrote this week about how her bike was stolen, along with a bunch of other bikes, from the parking space in her condo building in St-Henri. That took planning, and it also meant having a truck to haul the stolen bikes away. That’s a lot more than your average junkie has to hand.
MarcG
Maybe I’m naive but I find it hard to believe that someone who’s not poor or addicted would steal a bunch of bikes in order to sell for them for, what, a thousand bucks? Is it possible that some people make a normal life (paying rent, buying groceries) out of schemes like that?
Kate
On a larger scale, yes. Absolutely yes.
Blork
I’ve only had one bike stolen, many years ago when I lived on de Bullion just below Mont-Royal. I made the mistake of locking it for a few minutes outside of my apartment but not locking it TO anything. Gone.
Miraculously, I found it an hour later, leaning against a fence in a parking lot a couple of blocks away, the lock still attached. I guess the thief had left it there while going to get a saw or bolt cutters.
Meezly
@MarcG. yes, absolutely. There are indeed networks of professional bike and/or stroller thieves working the neighbourhoods that do this as a business and probably make a living out of it. Higher end strollers and chariots are prime targets as they are harder to lug up the stairs of upper floor apartments so tend to be left outside.
I’ve seen enough surveillance footage to see that most thieves are very cunning, organized and opportunistic. One parent reported that one thief scoped out their stroller around 1:30am, first time to check how the stroller was locked. Then he left (presumably to his car) and came back with snipers, cut the lock, left again to put his sniper away (I suppose to not get caught with snipers AND a stolen stroller at the same time), then came back one last time and walked away with the stroller.
It’s true. Whether you’re a thief out of desperation or profession, you’re not considering how you’re inconveniencing someone by stealing. There is a certain level of scumbaggery that is a personality requirement for organized theft.
Blork
This would be a good time for a re-watch of “Bicycle Theives,” the Italian neo-realist film from Vittorio De Sica (1948).
js
Isn’t there some way to put homing devices on decoy bikes to find out where thieves take them? If every cyclist in town contributed say a buck there’d be plenty of moolah to be awarded to vigilante “biker gangs” comprised of fed-up cyclists to track down and extirpate bike theft rings.
CE
Here’s a nice little short film that gets inside the heads of bike thieves and those who have had their bikes stolen.
Kevin
Js
Yes. They are not cheap.I’d rather our mayor order police to crack down on bike theft and the shops that sell stolen bikes.
Ephraim
Kevin – The police can’t crack down on bike theft. Heck, they can’t crack down on car thefts or murders, either. Listen to the You’re Wrong About: Murder podcast for a basic understanding of police solving crimes or rather, don’t. The biggest job of the police is taking police reports, not actually solving crimes… solving crimes is TV fiction. It’s one of the reasons that people want reform.
I’ll give an example of police corruption so that people better understand this. Police love to get overtime because… well, it’s overtime… higher pay, brings up their pension funds, etc. So, how do you get overtime when you can’t get overtime? Arrest someone for a crime just before the end of your shift. It doesn’t matter if it sticks or doesn’t stick, because you aren’t responsible for prosecution. But you can’t go home until all the paperwork is done and that’s… overtime.
Now, there are multiple ways to stop this, for example, have partners on two different 8 hour shifts that are 4 hours apart. You arrest someone near the end of your shift, your partner has to do the work. But they don’t. And they don’t really look at the stats for this, but in cities where this happens, prosecutors know about it and just toss those cases. But it is corruption. It’s like bartenders who overpour for tips… it’s stealing/corruption, but who’s going to stop them? You have to watch everything they do. There is even more corruption, like statistical corruption.
Unless everyone had their bike’s marked and had a tracker, the police do absolutely NOTHING but take a report. Oh and hope you don’t report your bike as stolen, because that increases their reported crime statistic. Ever feel like they really don’t want to take your report? That’s because they don’t want to… if you report crime, it ruins their statistics.
Kate
Ephraim, we really do not have a murder problem here. We don’t get many murders, and most are either domestic (and it’s obvious who did it) or else gang-related, in which case the cops usually know who did it and just have to find the guy. Look at the two murders this month – they were pretty sure who’s likely to have done it, and their suspect has already been caught and is going to be charged on Thursday.
I don’t think car theft is at the level it used to be either, but that’s probably more the improved technology than any increase in police diligence.
Ephraim
Kate, doesn’t matter if it’s murder, car theft, burglary, etc. The police are highly ineffective other than taking reports. And then I didn’t even touch on the fact that so much crime is unreported because businesses, like banks, don’t want their name listed with crime. The police don’t find stolen items (unless it by chance ends up at a pawn shop and even then the pawn shop makes you BUY it back, even though it’s yours and they received stolen property). They don’t do anything when you report your CC stolen. They don’t know how to follow computer crime, for the most part. They take reports, give out a few tickets, break up fights, tell you that your party is making too much noise, etc. Heck, when the break-in rate for cars was super-high, the didn’t even bother to put in bait cars (okay, Vancouver did). They just took reports. Oh and when they find drugs, they overvalue it, because big numbers impress us. They get prostitutes to move to a new street, because well… NIMBY. They get drug deals to move to a new street, because well… NIMBY.
That’s exactly the point, the police don’t really solve crime, technology solves crime. In the case of car theft, the question is… who has an interest in lowering crime… the car manufacturers who sell a new car when a car is stolen? The garages and body shops that work on repairing a car? The insurance company, that makes a profit off of selling you insurance? Nope. Just the consumer, who wants their car NOT to be stolen. The British government was at the forefront of some of the changes to cars including more parts getting the VIN inscribed and the passenger side key disappearing. But I car could be encrypted to prevent it from being stolen. Imagine a 128-bit encryption key for each engine, no encryption key, even hot-wiring a car won’t work. There are 500 stolen cars in Canada each day. I’ve had one stolen. Police found it after it was burnt, to keep the police from being able to use forensics.
A Tesla is can’t be stolen easily, it reports it’s location all the time, it reports it’s VIN when you go to a Supercharger. It basically becomes a problem when stolen, because you can’t put it on an official charger, you have to lock out it’s cell service and it’s updates, etc. It becomes a devalued orphan anywhere in the world.
Kevin
Ephraim
I never expected them to be good at it. (The police tech stories I could tell you).
I just figure if we have to have cops I’d rather them work on stolen property instead of killing people having a mental health crisis.Ephraim
Kevin in both cases, a total waste of money. They aren’t trained to handle people in a mental health crisis, hence the need to move money towards social workers. They aren’t trained to handle the homeless, hence the need to move money into homeless shelters. And they don’t have a clue on how to stop bicycle theft. And the best function of the police is community outreach and being trusted by the community so that they could know what is going on, but they have militarized themselves and abused their powers so we don’t trust them. We should basically make the cars friendlier, their uniforms friendlier, ensure that they follow the laws as an example to us all and then people will trust them enough to tell them when they see bicycle theft, car theft, etc. The best results from policing actually happen when people trust and respect the police… something the Montreal police are VERY FAR from.
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Kate
People are flying here and testing positive for Covid. CBC describes Canada’s borders as shut tight but obviously there are still planeloads of people getting through.
DeWolf
The border is closed to non-residents but you can still get in if you’re a citizen, a permanent resident or if you have a valid work/study visa. Non-Canadians can also enter if they’re visiting immediate family who live in Canada.
Bill Binns
I have flown into Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver since early June and all the “safeguards” basically amount to the honor system. Once you know the magic words to repeat over and over (No symptoms, going straight home for 2 weeks, here’s my mask etc) you sail right through. I went through a lot of trouble to gather “essential worker” paperwork but I haven’t been asked for it once. Simply stating that I am an essential worker has worked like “open sesame” every time I have been questioned.
Systems that assume lying doesn’t exist tend to be wildly ineffective.
DeWolf
Aside from the Atlantic provinces, there are no restrictions on travel within Canada, so it’s no wonder you weren’t stopped, Bill. The mandatory quarantine is for people coming from outside of the country and it is indeed enforced through random check-ins – I know several people who have done it.
walkerp
Yes, from anecdotal experience, coming in from another country is quite strict. A friend and a family member both did it and they all got phone calls and even believe police cars were cruising by their house.
Bill Binns, “Systems that assume lying doesn’t exist tend to be wildly ineffective.” is inaccurate. It’s not a binary outcome. Lying must be assessed as a risk factor. What percentage of people lie? How much would that impact the overall outcome? In this specific case, I would roughly estimate that lying would be a minor impact and not make it “wildly ineffective”, given general culture behaviours in Canada and that it is in most people’s best interest to not get sick. Let’s avoid exaggerated language and excluded middles in online discussion.
Josh
@DeWolf: The territories have restrictions, too.
Faiz imam
My in-laws drove to Canada from New Jersey to spend a couple of months in Toronto.
They are Canadian citizens and got in no problem, but they were given a long lecture on proper behaviour, and are under strict quarantine.
Seriously, CBSA calls them 4 times a day, every day, to make sure they are home.
jeather
I’ve known people who came back to Canada from the US and they’ve had random police show up at their house to check that they are in quarantine. I believe they also will quarantine you if your plan doesn’t seem feasible.
Kate
Thanks to all who explain the firmness of our quarantine. It’s good to know.
Bill Binns
I wasn’t clear. I have returned to Canada from the US through YUL, YYZ and YVR since early June. On each of those flights I was coming from a Covid hotspot too (Houston, L.A. and Miami).There have been no phone calls to my house and the only time I had my temp taken was once at LAX.
JaneyB
There are restrictions on in-Canada travel. Like the Maritimes, Western Canada has a bubble in effect. They require 14 day self-isolation which in Manitoba at least will include phone checks both robo and human, fines etc. Also any friends you are meeting for pleasure will grill you on your measures because everyone wants to keep trouble out. I realize Wpg is not on everyone’s bucket list lol.
Kate
JaneyB, I have friends from Winnipeg who lived here for 20 years before going back. They tell me they are implacable about pandemic measures, even though the infection rate there has never been high. But one reason they went back was to look after an elderly parent, so they’re motivated to keep a tight bubble. I have a standing invitation to go visit but won’t be taking it up anytime soon.
CE
@Bill,Binns, did you quarantine after those thrips to the US? Especially after visiting hot spots?
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Kate
Pedestrianization of streets is not a one-size-fits-all response to the pandemic, some streets thriving better than others with the change. Maybe they need more clowns.
I rarely link Bill Brownstein, but it’s typical that in this otherwise decent piece on a longtime downtown bartender quitting after 39 years because business has dried up, that he has to drag in the shortage of parking as a key problem. People are not going downtown to drink because they can’t park, they’re not going downtown to drink because they know it’s risky. Like people found plenty of parking along Ste‑Catherine Street in the before times, you know? Anyway, people shouldn’t drink and drive, so that should be moot.
DeWolf
I’m not sure why people are mystified that the downtown lunch crowd has disappeared when the vast majority of office workers are staying home. It’s as if people still can’t get it through their heads that there’s a pandemic going on…
Kate
My impression is that some people blame Plante for not making it more attractive for people to go downtown to shop, eat and drink. But most people who shopped, ate and drank downtown did so because they were already there, for work or for classes.
Ephraim
Plenty of clowns available, but can you get them back into bright coloured camo pants and to wear red noses?
Chris
It’s the Gazette, they are contractually obligated to whine about the lack of unlimited and free parking. 🙂
Kate
It really is a reflex with them, Chris. Probably because they know 90% of their readership lives in the West Island and drives everywhere.
Kevin
Was it only last month that Plante asked people to drive downtown and go shopping?
In any case, I’m not going to walk around St. Laurent – I don’t live there. I’ll walk around my own neighbourhood.
DeWolf 18:31 on 2020-08-18 Permalink
There have been scary projections about a second wave being even worst than the first, but I just don’t see how that would be possible. We know so much more about the virus than we did back in March and now we’re all in the habit of wearing masks, washing our hands frequently and keeping distances when and where we can. Maybe I’m being naïve but at this point we know what to expect. I guess we’ll see how countries like Italy and France handle their current resurgence in cases.
Raymond Lutz 19:18 on 2020-08-18 Permalink
“There have been scary projections about a second wave being even worst than the first, but I just don’t see how that would be possible.”
Simple: mutations. For now, mutation D614G ONLY resulted in an increased transmissibility. We can only hope that no mutation will increase its lethality (and hope in the works vaccines will still confer immunity)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/health/coronavirus-korber-mutation.html
Kevin 22:32 on 2020-08-18 Permalink
People are complacent.
Only half of us are maintaining distance, washing hands, and wearing masks when distancing is not possible.
http://angusreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020.08.16_COVID-Compliance-Index.pdf
Looking at Italy is partially why Quebec did so poorly at handling the outbreak—they failed to take different family structures into account.
Daniel 07:23 on 2020-08-19 Permalink
Thanks for linking to that, Kevin. That looks very interesting.
DeWolf 10:23 on 2020-08-19 Permalink
That’s super interesting, Kevin, thanks. A few points:
1. 48% of people in Quebec are very serious about hygiene measures, and another 35% are inconsistent in the precautions they take, but they still take precautions. That’s 83%. If this same survey had been done in March, that number would have been zero. Nobody wore a mask, nobody kept their distance, nobody limited their travel and I’m sure many people weren’t very strict about hand-washing. We didn’t those things because we simply weren’t aware the virus was already circulating amongst us. In retrospect, we were all cynical spreaders. Now less than 18% of people take no precautions whatever, which is a lot less than the 100% back in March.
2. The survey doesn’t take into the account mask laws. A number of the people in the “inconsistent” group say that weren’t wearing masks indoors; now they don’t have a choice. Even most of the “cynical spreaders” are wearing masks indoors, given reports of 90%+ compliance with the indoor mask mandate.
3. Mandatory indoor masks seems to have had a big impact as the number of new cases and the positive testing rate have plummeted since the law came into effect. That’s a weapon we didn’t have back in March.
My point isn’t that there will not be a second wave. With this virus it seems inevitable that there will be multiple waves. What I’m saying is that it is unlikely we will see the same devastation as in March/April because we have the tools and information it takes to keep the number of serious cases and deaths at bay.
GC 22:38 on 2020-08-19 Permalink
DeWolf, I’m 100% behind the mask laws and think we probably should have had them even earlier. However, didn’t we go from 100-200 new cases per day to under 100 cases per day? Is it really reasonable to say the rates “plummeted”? (Unless you are basing it on something else…)
Kevin 23:10 on 2020-08-19 Permalink
There are MANY exceptions to people wearing masks indoors: the tens of thousands of children about to return to class and their teachers; people who work in an office; people in restaurants and bars.
If we had everybody (especially students!) doing daily health checks before they left home I’d be optimistic, but instead we are turning everyone into cynical spreaders
DeWolf 10:01 on 2020-08-20 Permalink
@GC: The week the mask law came into effect we hit a high of 189 new cases. This week we hit a low of 42 new cases. If we’re playing semantics, I would argue that a 77% reduction in daily new cases in three weeks can indeed be described as “plummeting.” I know correlation does not equal causation but that seems like strong evidence to me that masks are having a big impact.
@Kevin: Masks work in conjunction with other measures. Office workers are required to maintain a 2m distance. You don’t need a mask while you’re eating or drinking because tables are meant to be spaced out far enough from each other that the risk of transmission between them is low. Classes operate as bubbles and students/teachers are required to wear masks when they aren’t in the classroom.
I’m not defending these particular measures, but you make it sound like a free-for-all and that isn’t the case at all. I know it’s human nature to always expect the worst, but there’s no reward for being unduly pessimistic.
Kevin 11:27 on 2020-08-20 Permalink
DeWolf
My wife (MD, PhD, extensive career in biochemistry/virology/vaccine development before shifting into medicine) is evaluating the Covid-19 measures proposed by several schools and lemme just say — I think my cynicism is warranted.
There are a lot of authorities who just do not understand what is going on, who think you can cut corners and still be okay.
It’s human nature to be complacent about this type of unseen, microscopic threat. The only way we’re going to defeat it is through discipline and enforcement — and it takes time and encouragement to develop positive habits.
Meanwhile it only takes one person being irresponsible to expose thousands.
Kate 13:23 on 2020-08-20 Permalink
Kevin, I’ve seen people theorize that if Covid caused more obviously unpleasant or gross symptoms, measures against it would be more respected. But as it is, a lot of folks must be thinking they’re giving up a lot to stop something that’s not so terrible if you’re young and healthy to start with.
GC 22:06 on 2020-08-20 Permalink
Dewolf, yes, there is reason to suggest they are having an impact. Cases were starting to climb around the time the law was introduced, so it’s possible that they would have even continued to grow without the law. Masks are not the only factor, obviously, but it’s possible. To me it seems more like a gradual decline, but there’s we’re not going to get much more mileage out of a debate over the semantics of “plummeted”. I think we both agree that masks are a positive step and that most people are more careful about their hygiene habits these days.
There are always news stories about being breaking the rules, and I’m sure we’ve all witnessed some of that, but the fact is a lot of people are also following them and that’s going to help with the second wave.