Partial lockdown starts now
Here we all are in another partial lockdown as news comes of a more transmissible form of Covid spreading around the globe and possibly already among us. But we won’t get any new Covid numbers till Sunday and no police reports on busted parties till Monday or later.
Boxing Day sales and museum exhibits have gone online.
Why has CTV illustrated their list of the definition of essential services remaining open with a photo of the Apple store on Ste-Catherine, when computer and electronics stores are not on the list? Update: They changed the picture! And have also reported, unsurprisingly, that stores are empty on Boxing Day.
Later note: I wonder why florists are considered essential.
dhomas 12:17 on 2020-12-26 Permalink
Re: no new numbers. I guess the guy who operates the fax machine got Christmas and Boxing Day off.
Michael Black 14:53 on 2020-12-26 Permalink
Do they still use physical fax machines?
Yes, I know they send faxes, but I’m picturing a Rube Goldberg situation where they use scanners, computers, and printers to send faxes. A roundabout method to stay traditional but easier to do with computers.
All of the doctors I’ve seen in the past two years know how to use computers.I get email from the nurse about my every six month IV. And the researcher collecting data on kidneys sent me email thanking me for joining the study.
Kate 14:56 on 2020-12-26 Permalink
dhomas: Nora Loreto just tweeted “There is no excuse for a day off.”
dhomas 16:25 on 2020-12-26 Permalink
@Michael I was referring to the stories that came out earlier this year about how faxes made public health officials miss hundreds of deaths. Ex: https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2020/06/04/200-morts-de-la-covid-19-oublies-par-telecopieur
@Kate: my comment was meant to be tongue in cheek, based on those same stories.
Kate 16:35 on 2020-12-26 Permalink
dhomas, I took it at face value and I still think you’re almost certainly correct about this.
Michael Black, yes, the medical world still uses faxes. We discussed that recently in this thread.
Chris 12:52 on 2020-12-27 Permalink
>how faxes made public health officials miss hundreds of deaths
Faxes “made” them miss? Your link says “… CHSLD n’ont tout simplement pas envoyé les télécopies des bulletins de décès”. Seems just as easy for a human to fail to use a fax machine as to fail to fill in a database entry.
dhomas 13:56 on 2020-12-27 Permalink
The problem is more than just fax machines. It’s manual intervention due to systems that don’t communicate with each other. Here’s another example article: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1741416/fax-sante-publique-laboratoires-covid-quebec
Whenever you have manual procedures, you have the opportunity for human error. That article seems to indicate that there is manual intervention several times per data set.
I work in IT automation. My customers automate stuff like this all the time. (Even fax machines can be automated, though the results cannot necessarily interpreted. Virtual fax machines can send to virtual fax inboxes, but OCR technology is not quite where it needs to be to extract data from those faxes.)
In any case, if you remove fax machines from the equation, I’m quite certain everything else can be automated, because I’ve seen it done.