Updates from January, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 22:47 on 2021-01-05 Permalink | Reply  

    Quebec’s manufacturing and construction associations are complaining that a stronger lockdown will be bad for business and airlines are complaining that they don’t wanna have to test returning Canadians for Covid.

    This pandemic has brought the human race up smack against incontrovertible facts that can’t be negotiated with, and yet, being stupid primates, people keep trying to make deals. Maybe Donald Trump with his constant jiggling to make a deal really is the shining pinnacle of human nature after all.

     

    • Kevin 23:30 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      We are descended from the Golgafrinchams, so if only a third of us keep trying to make deals with entities that don’t bargain, we’ve come a long way.

    • Kate 00:08 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      Excuse me while I sanitize my phone.

    • Ephraim 10:09 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      Other countries have this COVID policy at airports. The airlines aren’t responsible, you are. Some of the airports actually have someone selling the service as well.

    • jeather 10:36 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      I was sympathetic to people caught away in March. This was unexpected etc etc. But now you need to expect that the rules might change and your flights might be cancelled and you might be unable to get home, and I’m sorry if you are going for a reason you consider essential, but that is the risk you are choosing to take, and I’m not sympathetic to people who get stuck.

    • GC 13:10 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      I feel the same way about those (politicians or otherwise) taking trips in the past couple of months and then apologizing for it. You might have gone away last March/April because you underestimated the scope of this. If you went away in November/December, however, you knew what you were doing. Maybe there was a good reason for the trip, but you still knew. Saying you made a “mistake” is just silly. You didn’t accidentally board a plane.

  • Kate 22:31 on 2021-01-05 Permalink | Reply  

    Every time I glance at the news sites, more politicians have gone on a trip. So Maxime Bernier went to Florida. Of course he did.

     

    • Bill Binns 22:59 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      This witch hunt has been so entertaining. Couldn’t have come at a better time, I had just about run Netflix dry.
      The National Post compared the level of planning and sophistication of Rod Phillips St Barts vacation to that of the D-Day invasion.

    • Uatu 11:03 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      I was thinking more along the lines of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

  • Kate 21:13 on 2021-01-05 Permalink | Reply  

    The Journal reports that some Orthodox Jewish schools are still holding classes despite the government lockdown.

     

    • Ephraim 21:43 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      The government needs to walk in and remove their authorization.

      Even if the kids don’t have computers at home, they have copy machines, paper and pencils.

    • Kate 22:34 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Are those kids allowed any TV? I was reading just now that in the UK, the BBC will be putting out several hours of educational programming in the mornings while they’re locked down, so that kids without internet can still get some instruction. No idea whether that’s being contemplated here.

    • Ephraim 10:12 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      Most of them don’t have TV. But that’s not really an excuse in those households. They have plenty of books, there are often multiple children. They can read, do exercises on paper. You don’t need to pass around COVID because you don’t want to listen to the central authority… and the central authority doesn’t have to pay for the teachers if you aren’t doing what they say. Quebec can withdraw funding.

    • jeather 10:28 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      Are they actually funded by the government?

      But as Ephraim said, no, these kids generally don’t have tv or internet. I have no idea what the laws said about schooling for students who can’t learn online, and now we see the problem of basing your school closing laws around one religion, because the private (unsubsidised?) schools that run different calendars based on their religions are extra in trouble.

      This is not to say that I support these schools being open, because I don’t, but “actually these kids have no internet access and are losing more than 1 week of school because we choose to close on alternate days” is an actual problem that the government elected to ignore in favour of leaving all the retail stores open until Christmas.

    • Ephraim 11:11 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      Jeather, I think every school, as long as authorized, receives money from the Ministry of Education. But then again, those of Tosh are embroiled in litigation with the government. And I would bet that Satmar is saying that the kids are being “home schooled” even though they are being indoctrinated.

      We need to set up a set of minimum requirements and testing for those who are home schooling, like matriculations and see that they are in fact able to follow the TAPS (or if you prefer to call it by the common name, the curriculum)

      We have an act respecting what private education does. http://legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/showDoc/cs/E-9.1 it may need to be tightened up. These kids need to know how to speak/write English and French, they need to know how to do math and arithmetic, at a minimum, enough to communicate with medical professionals, the state and how to function within society with money. They need a way out, in case they ever need or want to get out.

    • jeather 11:21 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      They are, in theory, fairly strict re homeschooling. (As of this year, you can’t use an English school board as your related board services unless you have eligibility: this is a new rule.) I don’t know how closely they follow up, of course, but the rules are there. (I know one person who is homeschooling, though I don’t know her well, and one person who researched it just in case it might become necessary during this year.)

      https://www.aqed.qc.ca/en/homeschooling-quebec/legal-aspects-what-you-should-know

    • Ephraim 11:27 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      There is a 5 person limit to home schooling, so many of the Tosh families wouldn’t be allowed, unless they stopped at 5 children…

    • jeather 11:32 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      I didn’t know there was a limit! But the problem is really that there is insufficient followup for some students, not that the laws are too weak.

    • Ephraim 15:21 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      Essentially, we need standardized matriculation for home-schooled students, that has to be administered elsewhere (like by the school board), so their parents don’t feed them the answers. And make the TAPS available online. We can even make the parents pay for that matriculation, as part of the costs of opting out of school. And it doesn’t have to be separate exams, it could be comprehensive. It wouldn’t be that hard to construct or to have available. A set of exam questions for each part of the exam loaded via GRICS that allows a schoolboard to push a button and output a randomized exam. You have several hundred questions that randomly come out. You put the answers, other than essay answers into a centralized computer and you have a baseline for everyone who’s finishing that grade and a way to send a list to the parents of deficiencies. At the next grade, you can push out an exam that tests the current grade plus the deficiencies from the last grade. If they are still below where they should be, it allows the system to intervene.

    • Michael Black 15:54 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      When John Holt started talking about home learning, it wasn’t putting school in homes, it was student based learning. It was a valid point, any gifted child knew they could learn by themselves, and schools used up a lot of time simply by being school.

      But somewhere that morphed into religious groups (not just Jewish) wanting control over carriculum.. That helped to legitimize home schooling, but resulted in school at home, with all the rules and structure.

      It kills the radical notion that kids can learn by themselves, and reinforces a dependency on schools. And homeschooling scares adults under a lockdown, “I don’t know how to teach”, even though they’d been doing it since their child was born.I

      I could question lots of things in school, but that can’t happen without knowing a broader world.

      Surely the five child limit that Ephraim mentions is so someone isn’t setting up a real school in their home. I can’t believe it’s about large families.

  • Kate 12:23 on 2021-01-05 Permalink | Reply  

    I know, it’s all Covid all the time today.

    Both Rima Elkouri and this well cited open letter from 363 experts speak about the importance of better ventilation as a weapon against the transmission of Covid indoors.

     

    • walkerp 12:28 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      And if this government had any actual vision, they would fast track school ventilation renos right now during this lockdown.

    • Bert 14:03 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      But understand that the supply and installation constraints are far out of the control of the government.

      That said, pharmaceuticals say that there are two doses needed ad the government is talking about only providing one to better spread an initial dose.

      So they have no vision for ventilation but they know better than the experts.

    • Jack 14:48 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I think the best take away from a really well written column is the last paragraph.

      “Elle a vu des collègues sans antécédents médicaux connus être très gravement malades après avoir contracté la COVID-19 dans des CHSLD mal ventilés où on ne leur a pas permis de porter un masque N95.

      « Tant que l’importance des aérosols dans la propagation de la COVID-19 ne sera pas reconnue, on va justifier de ne pas donner la protection adéquate au personnel. »

      Que répond le ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux aux experts du collectif COVID-STOP ? « Le MSSS s’intéresse à la transmission par aérosols et attend justement un rapport des scientifiques de l’INSPQ et un rapport du groupe d’experts sur la ventilation et la COVID-19 au cours des prochains jours. Nous prendrons les décisions nécessaires sur la base des connaissances scientifiques et des recommandations des experts », me dit-on par courriel.

      Traduction libre de la Dre Bellon ?

      « Du niaisage. »

      MSSS is waiting on L’INSPQ……

  • Kate 12:09 on 2021-01-05 Permalink | Reply  

    Dezeen admires a “luminous” white triplex in what it calls “Rosemont‑La Petite‑Patrie, an up‑and‑coming neighbourhood in Montreal” (up and coming to what?). The windows in this thing remind me of Douglas Adams’ description of Arthur Dent’s house having “four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye.”

     

    • Blork 12:21 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      That’s. Just. Weird. At first I thought it was a re-skinning of an existing building, but no; it was “built on the site of an old garage, which was torn down and replaced with the four-storey building.” So that weird and random selection of windows was a deliberate choice? Whaaaat?

      There are some nice areas inside, and I like when architects put emphasis on light and “luminosity,” but it looks like a cheap do-over of a haphazardly build pile of boxes.

      More: it looks like a place that was designed from the inside-out, with no consideration for what it would look like from the outside.

    • Kate 12:25 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I have a feeling that architects are trained to feel that classical proportions and symmetry are weak bourgeois impulses, and that it’s better to embrace deliberate ugliness as signifying a more honest and down-to-earth intention.

    • Blork 12:30 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Another tragedy of our current age.

    • Kevin 12:43 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      The lamppost designed to cast a shadow on the second floor window is bizarre.

    • azrhey 12:51 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      here’s 3 words I don’t want to see together ever again : golden aluminium frames

    • Bill Binns 13:25 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      It’s ugly for sure but it’s ugly in a very Montreal way. It does indeed look like an old plex that has been through dozens of renos over the years. That bright white brick has been a staple of Montreal architecture since the 50s or so (also a brave choice considering the rampant graffiti in that neighborhood).

      They lost me with the internal steel staircase. I just know that whole thing rings like a bell when anyone steps on it.

    • Tee Owe 13:43 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Best reason I ever heard for living in an ugly building was that you don’t have to look at it out the window.

    • DeWolf 13:50 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I don’t mind the architecture at all. It’s weird and but Montreal is weird. I wouldn’t want it to become one of those prim and proper cities whose building codes requires everything to look like an Ethan Allen catalogue, like Boston.

    • Kate 13:55 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I could somewhat forgive this thing if it had ended up that way because it was rebuilt over an older core, but it was built on purpose like that. DeWolf, you can do graceful modern architecture that isn’t faux colonial. This is not it.

    • js 14:09 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      It’ll be a ghetto’d out graffiti canvas before the contractors finish putting in the plumbing and electricity.

    • su 14:14 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      The question I have is , how and who aporoved the permit for the construction of something that so fails to fit in with surrounding patrimoinical style.

    • Kate 15:16 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      su, at a guess, the lot was exempt because it had been the site of a garage, not residential.

    • JoeNotCharles 16:03 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Perhaps the previous garage looked like that and they were required to keep the look when replacing it?

    • Kate 16:11 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      JoeNotCharles, a garage wasn’t likely to be 3 storeys high. I had a quick shufti for the address to see what Streetview saw there previously, but can’t find it.

    • su 17:11 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Even it’s height makes it totally incongruent with what appear to be surrounding plexuses. Or perhaps incongruence is a new trend in residential urban development these days.

    • Kate 20:37 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Congruence is so bourgeois.

    • CE 20:51 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I’ve seen this building, it looks worse in person. I feel bad for the neighbours.

    • Max 02:38 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      I’m kinda digging it. It’s not like you see golden aluminium window frames every day.

  • Kate 11:27 on 2021-01-05 Permalink | Reply  

    Does it concern anyone else that Quebec is already chopping and changing plans for the vaccine rollout?

     

    • Chris 11:51 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Not me. They’re making the right decision changing course here.

      A single dose gives something like 50% protection. Many people in long term care, and many health staff haven’t had even a *single* shot yet. A friend of mine works in the covid hot clinic with covid positive patients and hasn’t had a first shot. It is less just/equitable that some people would go from 50% to 90% protection when so many others are at 0%. It would be a different story if the first shot was useless without the second, but that’s not the case.

    • jeather 11:53 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Ontario is doing the reverse, so we will see a natural experiment soon. (I have said already that I am inclined to think that just hoping a second shot eventually will confer immunity is a bad idea; I am now fairly relieved I am lower on the priority list and there will probably be sufficient supply by then.)

    • Meezly 11:57 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      The priority of the government is to lower the number of cases for the province and break the 2nd wave, not ensure that the individuals who received the first dose will be fully protected.

      In an ideal situation, people would be getting their 2nd booster within the recommended period, but this is our sad reality.

      It would have been helpful for the article to find a study that proves the efficacy rate of the first dose is 90%, not a flawed one that shows ~50%. One that used a controlled group who properly isolated for 14 days in order to not mess with the efficacy of the first and most important dose?

      I’m in the last group to get the vaccine, so about a year from now I can only hope that by then there are enough for the general population to get their booster within the right time!

    • Kate 12:18 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      OK, true enough. But are we spread that thin?

    • jeather 12:37 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I had to go to the ER at the MUHC Saturday night, and it was absolutely dead. Never seen a hospital so empty. I’m told that few people came in on Jan 1, so they had a brief chance to catch up, but it was incredibly weird. (I am not sick.)

    • Chris 12:37 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Yes, we we are currently spread that thin. Like I said, many staff that work with infectious, known-positive patients (doing things like intubations) haven’t even had a first dose.

    • jeather 12:43 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I am not suggesting hospital workers are lying, btw, just because the ER was fairly empty for an hour one Saturday evening.

    • Kevin 12:57 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Nobody knows if waiting to deliver a second shot will actually provide immunity to people: it hasn’t been tested, and it’s not recommended by the people who developed the Pfizer-BioNTech or the Moderna vaccines.

      This is a political decision because the government couldn’t figure out how to schedule people to get vaccinations.

    • Michael Black 13:03 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      We’ve received so few doses so far that they might as well do the second dose. Taper it off later if supply is slow, they’ve deemed the early recipients as “most vulnerable” (even thiugh that’s in oawrt based on dependency on others). There seems to be snags beyond available doses, which had better be worked out fast.

      Hospitals have changed a lot in a year. Twice a doctor’s appointment was cancelled. I needed a blood test in late May, just walk in to the regular clinic that does its own blood tests. But by August, it was done in a blood test clinic, and by November that switched to appointments only.So the five times I’ve been to the hospital in 2020, it’s been quite empty. But none of that was emergency. But it’s impacting on “regular” matters.

      I would point out that a 35 year old Nunavut woman died this week from the Virus, after going to Winnipeg to give birth.

    • Tim S. 13:04 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I nothing about the science involved, but just as an observer of events I’m a little worried that governments are playing around with the one thing that seems to have gone well in the past year. I would rather go through restrictions for X amount of time, knowing that at some point there’s sort of an end, than messing this up and everybody ending up with some but not really enough immunity.

    • jeather 13:13 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      When I was in the ICU in May, it seemed like a normal level of busy, albeit without visitors. Can’t really believe two family members died in a pandemic, neither of the pandemic.

    • DeWolf 13:57 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Unless I’m mistaken, the government isn’t saying the second dose will be eliminated, or that people will have to wait many months, right? They are just using the doses they have on hand on the expectation that there will be a steady stream of vaccines coming in this month.

      And there is no news about vaccine shipments being delayed… right?

    • Chris 14:03 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      DeWolf: exactly. I have a feeling some people think that the entire population will get a first dose before anyone gets a second dose. That’s not it. Right now, there are vaccines sitting in freezers doing fuck all. We should put them to use immediately.

    • Faiz imam 14:19 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Ontario just announced they will get 80,000 doses à week for the next 3 weeks.

      They are setting a goal of 12,000 a day to give those shots effectively.

      We have not gotten Québec numbers , but cut the above by a third and it shouldbe about right

    • Joey 14:57 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I think DeWolf is right. This is a good explainer with some pondering of the implications (and makes clear there’s no easy answer): https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/01/04/variants-and-vaccines Highly recommend previous posts if you’re curious about the COVID-19 vaccines.

    • DeWolf 16:27 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Apparently Quebec has only administered 1/3 of the doses it has on hand. That means it still has too many extra doses sitting around even if it were to give everyone their second shot according to the recommended 3-4 week timeline.

      The federal government is distributing the vaccines according to each province’s population, so if Ontario is receiving 80,000 doses a week this month, Quebec should be getting 46,000 doses a week. Doesn’t seem like there’s any reason to panic.

    • Kevin 22:57 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      There are vaccines sitting in freezers *while people are having their second appointments cancelled*.

      This is just government winging it because it is, once again, demonstrating incompetence at logistics.

    • Carol 05:54 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      We need to stick with 2 doses. Not happy about this. I do not want half a treatment. I would rather not get it then. Give me 2 or none at all.

    • j2 09:44 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      Re: hospitals ER being empty, if you have no capacity to handle past the ER, the state of the ER is irrelevant but you want it empty.

      I’ve read a tweet from a “virologist” (nobody knows you’re a dog etc) raising the concern that single doses will lead to vaccine resistant strains.

      Also that if B117 and/or the SA virus is R>1 even with these lockdowns then these illness and death rates are the new norm.

      (I literally can’t do anything more than I’ve been doing so I’ve stopped reading.)

  • Kate 10:18 on 2021-01-05 Permalink | Reply  

    Early Monday I saw a few items saying François Legault would be giving a press conference Tuesday afternoon, then it was rescheduled for Wednesday. Articles in various media are warning us that Covid numbers are rising and hospital ICUs are already overwhelmed, so it’s likely we’re facing more lockdown measures.

     

    • Daniel 11:04 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I am asking from a position of genuine ignorance and asking to be kindly educated:

      Where is is that people are going now after 8pm? Aside from a curfew, is the difference of a stricter confinement that people wouldn’t be going to offices/schools/manufacturing jobs? I read most of the links and didn’t really see this addressed.

      I admit being detached from (some people’s) reality! I have lost track of the meaning of various levels of confinement because we have no children and have always worked from home. (In this pandemic, that represents a privilege in many senses, I know.)

    • walkerp 11:22 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      It looks like it is going to be the curfew that everybody is talking about. I am guessing that it will give the cops much more leeway in breaking up gatherings. But if people are outside anyways, isn`t that a low-risk activity?

    • Kate 11:22 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Honestly? I think if they do a curfew they’re emulating France. I’ve learned over the years that whenever any Quebec government does something a bit odd, look and see what France is doing. Bill 21? France. Curfew? Also France.

      They won’t announce it, but France is often a clue to where they got an idea. Or an ideal.

    • Mark 11:44 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I would suspect that a curfew is aimed at stopping all indoor private nighttime gatherings, which by all accounts are still going on. It’s much easier for police to pull people over on the roads than to enter houses to break up parties (ie. that video of the cops entering the home in Gatineau went around the world and I’m sure the police unions are behind this decision as well).

      Whether or not the schools close again is the big unknown here, but it’s clear that at the provincial level, they are running out of options in the areas they can control. I would love to see the Feds step in and stop air travel for the next month.

    • jeather 11:57 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      I think it just makes life easier in catching people who are breaking the rules. I wonder if there will also be a restriction in how far from your home you can go, something which was fairly common in Europe.

    • walkerp 12:28 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      Also seeing that the government is deliberately floating rumours to test the waters and that support for a curfew is divided in the CAQ. So more likely they will ‘recommend’ that people don’t go out after a certain hour with the threat of a potential curfew if necessary.

    • DeWolf 14:04 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      There were articles in Le Devoir and Radio-Canada yesterday that both interviewed the same public health experts, one of whom recommended that “all businesses” be shut down, without specifying exactly what that meant. I’m not sure what is left to close? Restaurant takeout?

    • Bill Binns 15:06 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      @DeWolf – You’re not sure what is left to close? Have you been outside? What exactly is closed?
      Canadian Tire is open. Home Depot is open. All SAQ’s and SQDC outlets are open. Best Buy is open. For some unfathomable reason Quebec handed an exemption to all florists. Florists! Flowers are ESSENTIAL when we are supposedly in a bare fisted fight with Death himself.

      It is becoming increasingly difficult to take these rules and the people who dream them up seriously.

    • JP 01:15 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      To be fair, if florists do remain open, how crowded could their shops possibly get? I feel like it’s probably easy to have only a client at a time. People can also easily order flowers online for pickup or via phone or the flowers can safely be delivered. It’s not the same as eating at a restaurant or crowding into a Costco….

    • Tim S. 11:53 on 2021-01-06 Permalink

      About florists – if you can’t go to a funeral (or a wedding, or see a new baby, but mostly funerals these days) it’s nice to at least be able to send flowers. Not sure where that ranks priority-wise “in the bare fisted fight with Death himself” but it is a socially useful function.

  • Kate 10:10 on 2021-01-05 Permalink | Reply  

    Researchers have found that lockdown has made us eat better in Quebec. I’m not surprised – people grab a lot of junk food on the run to and from work. It’s maybe not what they’d prefer but it’s right there and it’s cheap. Working from home, you have those extra minutes from your non-commute to make yourself something tastier and better for you.

     

    • Ephraim 13:29 on 2021-01-05 Permalink

      And do you really want your last meal to be supposedly chicken from Subway?

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