Updates from January, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 21:31 on 2021-01-09 Permalink | Reply  

    I suppose we all got the curfew alert at 6:30.

    I’m seeing on Twitter there’s a march, one guy mentioning them passing Saint-André and Laurier just now. Also seeing mentions of police helicopters.

    And now a tweet saying the march is over 20 minutes after it began.

    Update: La Presse reports on the first night of curfew. CTV reports that a couple of people were detained by police.

    Morning update: Global mentions 17 arrests after protests, and there are reports that homeless shelters were getting overcrowded.

     

    • GC 22:05 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      I heard what sounded like a helicopter, in the Plateau.

    • Bill Binns 00:09 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      I took a walk around 10 (with my dog so totally legal). There was a helicopter circling but no other activity.

      I did see about 30 cops and some ambulances outside the 4 star hotel the mayor gave to the homeless. I’m guessing stabbing. You heard it here first.

    • EmilyG 09:51 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      I think that for every nasty comment Bill says about homeless people, I’ll donate a dollar to an organization that helps them. Sounds like a good cause.

    • Bill Binns 10:07 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      I don’t know why you would consider that a “nasty” comment. It was just an observation. As for you donating your own money to the homeless, please do. It’s one less dollar that needs to be taken from me to give to them.

    • EmilyG 10:09 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      A winning situation.

    • Kate 12:18 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      Bill Binns, I see no reports Sunday morning of contretemps at the hotel.

    • MarcG 13:04 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      I think Bill is just making shit up at this point (e.g. A Christmas Story being censored).

    • CE 13:57 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      Haha or his Mad Max post-apocalyptic hellscape i.e. Sherbrooke street.

    • Bill Binns 15:24 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      I didn’t see anything either but at 10:20 pm there were 5 cop cars out front (including a dark blue supervisor car), 2 ambulances and all of the “guests” had been evacuated from the building and were standing in front of the entrance to Place Dubois. There were at least 20 cops in front of the hotel and in the lobby.. I walked by an ambulance where a man was on a gurney and speaking to a uniformed cop. Something happened in that place last night.

      Here a photo but thanks for calling me a liar
      https://www.flickr.com/gp/drpenfield/044Q6m

    • Kate 17:35 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      Bill Binns, thanks for the photo. I still haven’t seen a news story, but I will definitely post a link if I do.

      There are bound to be incidents in a hotel serving that purpose and media editors may feel that something like a scuffle between two of the residents isn’t worth the column inches.

    • Bill Binns 18:12 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      @Kate – Where do you go for overnight police blotter type stories? I was shocked by how little is left of the Gazette.

    • Kate 19:27 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      I look at the major media at least once a day, often twice, for the blog. In English, CTV, CBC and Global will have some of those stories. TVA’s Info Patrouille section is pretty good, but it’s incident stories from all over Quebec, not just Montreal. Lots of snowmobile accidents in St-Glinglin this time of year.

      La Presse and Radio-Canada, depending on the scale of the incident, may also cover them. Seriously breaking stuff it’s got to be Twitter, of course.

      In a sense, one reason I do the blog is because no single media platform, in either language, delivers everything that interests me. So I kind of scout around and summarize it.

    • Bill Binns 20:26 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      I thought most papers had a daily column of every police incident from the night before. I guess they disappeared with the classifieds. The Gazette has a “While you were sleeping” column but it’s just a bunch of stale random stories.

      “In a sense, one reason I do the blog is because no single media platform, in either language, delivers everything that interests me. So I kind of scout around and summarize it.”

      Yep, thats why I read the blog too. Especially useful when you don’t speak French.

    • Kate 22:08 on 2021-01-10 Permalink

      Bill Binns, it’s a long time since there’s been anything like that here. The closest I’ve seen was when I worked on the Westmount Examiner as a larva. They had listings of things like fire calls. But Westmount’s a small, circumscribed town and the owner was an old-fashioned guy.

    • david229 03:23 on 2021-01-12 Permalink

      The Journal probably has the best blotter these days.

      You know, Bill, if you’re not all that familiar with Montreal media, you seem like a born reader of The Suburban, which is actually pretty solid.

  • Kate 13:59 on 2021-01-09 Permalink | Reply  

    Quebec’s broken its record with 3,127 new Covid cases over the last 24 hours.

    I’m not one of them. I’d been feeling achy and shivery for a day or two, so I took myself off to the testing station on Crémazie on Friday afternoon, and got the negative result overnight. Nobody should hesitate if in doubt: the test is quick and not in the least uncomfortable.

    They asked why I was there, and I told them about feeling kind of crappy. They also asked where I thought I might’ve been exposed, which I couldn’t answer. Except for sorties to get groceries – which I’ve held down to once a week for the most part – I’ve seen nobody. But with something this contagious, who knows?

     

    • Bill Binns 14:25 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      Congrats on the negative result. You said it wasn’t unpleasant. I guess this was not the sort of test where they jam a Q-Tip 3 or 4 inches up your nose?

      I want to eventually get the antibody test. I strongly suspect I had Covid while on the road in Washington early last February. I was flat on my back in a crappy Best Western unable to work or travel for almost 2 weeks.

    • Kate 14:33 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      The nurse did one swab in my throat and a second in my nose. Remembering a clinic nurse who made me totally gag once with a strep throat swab, I kind of flinched for a second, but it was nothing. The nose thing was also totally nothing.

    • nau 15:54 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      Probably you don’t have it, but a friend of mine in England who just did tested negative the first time. Other people in his household had already had positive tests, so he was pretty sure he had it. When his symptoms got a bit worse, he then tested positive. So, keep an open mind if your symptoms don’t resolve quickly; false negatives can occur in the early stages.

      This is anecdotal of course, but he also said that lots of cautious people he knows have caught it recently with no obvious exposure possibilities beyond going to the grocery store. The thinking is that the new variant is so much more transmissible that the measures we have used up to now are less likely to stop transmission. Scientific proof of that isn’t there yet, but fwiw he works in medical genetics research, is scientifically literate and not given to hasty conclusions. If the more transmissible variants start to spread here, we should expect more stringent measures (socially and personally) will be needed to get R below 1 (and pretending the virus mostly spreads between 8:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. isn’t going to cut it).

    • david51 16:05 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      I think they have two tests now, a much less invasive one. When I was being tested back in March, they jammed a 10 inch long q-tip thing up both sides of your nose to what seemed like your brain, and swabbed around for like 30 seconds. For like hours afterward you feel a super unpleasant pressure that I could see causing nausea in some people.

    • DeWolf 17:47 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      I also got my first test earlier this week due to a possible Covid exposure. (I feel perfectly fine but wanted to be safe – test came back negative. I’m still isolating until two weeks after the exposure, just to be sure.) I was dreading the nose swab but it was not bad at all. And I was the only person in the testing facility, aside from the nurses and other workers. 10/10, would recommend for anyone feeling crappy or who is concerned about a possible exposure.

    • Kate 18:15 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      Bill Binns: I’d like to get the antibody test as well. Early in February I caught something that made me cough and knocked me out for 4-5 days. This was before anyone here thought they could catch the new virus, and there was no testing yet. It cleared up pretty fast and the cough didn’t hang around. I’ve no idea if it could’ve been the Rona.

      nau: thanks for the reminder. I am hardly going out at all anyway, but will be careful to mask up if anyone comes to the door with a delivery.

  • Kate 11:19 on 2021-01-09 Permalink | Reply  

    The STM will not be reducing its services because of the curfew. I can already hear kvetching from Ensemble, but this is the right decision: anyone who’s out is working, and working people have to get to and from work.

     

    • Bill Binns 11:40 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      Agreed. Turning public transit on and off to control behavior would be a huge mistake. People don’t forget that stuff.

      I would be in favor of credentialing essential workers and allowing cops to stop anybody after curfew to check for those credentials. The problem is that there are so many gigantic loopholes in this so called curfew that the credentialing would be almost as much work as the vaccine roll-out.

    • Uatu 11:53 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      I’m glad I’m not working evenings anymore. Every night heading home on the metro would probably be like a WW2 movie where I have to show my papers to the polizei

    • Kate 12:00 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      Bill Binns, you can download and print out a document from this page which your employer fills out, and which you carry to prove that you’re outside because of work.

    • Bill Binns 12:20 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      @kate I read that too. Not much of a credential though. More like the honor system. Are cops going to be making calls from the side of the road to confirm you work for a hospital or an essential florist? I haven’t seen anything saying people are even required to carry ID to match their home made essential worker form.

      I think the cops have been set up to fail by the province on this. The rules are ridiculously broad and open to interpretation. They are the ones who will be publicly crucified if it turns out that one demographic received 8% more fines than another.

    • Kate 12:29 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      Bill Binns, I think we can assume that the people the cops will be dealing with most are not the kind who will think ahead about downloading a Word file, faking up a business name and so on. Yes, cops will have a lot of leeway on this, but they already do on many things.

    • Ephraim 13:15 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      How many people are we talking taking mass transit after curfew? Could it be cheaper to subsidize taxis and let the institutions print out special forms for those out after 9PM?

    • Kate 14:37 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

      Ephraim, I don’t think anyone knows the answer to your first question yet. If after a month the Covid numbers are still bad and the curfew continues, I would hope the STM can assess whether there are any routes that are virtually unused after 8 pm, and maybe trim them back. They must already know where routes stay busy because of round-the-clock industrial installations.

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