Essential workers hold protest
A group of essential workers – health care workers, teachers and others – held a demonstration Sunday in Jarry Park for better pay and more respect.
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Meezly 09:49 on 2021-03-15 Permalink
They deserve everything they are demanding.
jeather 10:08 on 2021-03-15 Permalink
It would be nice if all these essential workers could get vaccinated also instead of waiting for their very low place in the ordering.
Chris 15:55 on 2021-03-15 Permalink
jeather, yes, it would. But it’s rather complicated logistically. Currently the workers at the vaccine centres just check your id, which has your birth year, to make sure you’re not jumping the queue. Easy. How would they know someone showing up is really, say, a grocery store employee? Pretty easy to fake a Provigo letterhead. Instead of wasting time with that, more time can actually be dedicated to jabbing arms.
jeather 16:22 on 2021-03-15 Permalink
You could, for instance, set up a vaccine clinic at the store/school/school board/etc. They know who their employees are.
Blork 17:27 on 2021-03-15 Permalink
That would require a mobile vaccination unit (which is not a bad idea). It would have to go to each store at least three times in order to get all the employees (shiftwork). Schools would be easier. But of course that would require a bunch of people to sit down and get a list of all stores, schools, etc. and to coordinate scheduling the visits. Sounds easy, but I suspect that is a gargantuan task and would take weeks to pull off. In the meantime people would complain that they’re putting all this effort into making schedules instead of putting needles in arms. #yacantwin
jeather 18:12 on 2021-03-15 Permalink
I’m not saying it would be effortless, but I think that protecting essential workers is probably worth the work. (Stores I assume would be not that impossible for the chains, it’s the small stores that would be hard to get to function. Perhaps there could be an individual code given and an online form made? That happens in the US in some places.) Also, the people making the schedules and plans etc are not actually the people who are giving the vaccines, those can continue to go on while this is planned.
mare 18:12 on 2021-03-15 Permalink
I had a Covid test today.
So A few hours ago I was standing in a slowly advancing line for 25 minutes, in a maze of stairs and barely ventilated basement corridors of a CIUSSS building (vaccinations were done on the ground floor). I felt the HVAC grille on the ceiling less than a feet above me, and no air was sucked in or blown out. Meanwhile there were more than 50 people in the same corridor, of whom statically at least one would test Covid positive (2% is our current test positivity rate). Not too big of a risk for me, we were all masked and only two of them were coughing. But there were also four guards from a private security firm who were directing people to the inscription windows, telling them to advance and stand on the footstep-stickers, and making sure everyone was behaving. They were in that corridor for their full shifts, maybe 40 hrs week. I couldn’t resist asking one of them if they had been vaccinated. Nope, none of them was vaccinated yet, because they’re not front-line healthcare workers. They were, of course, all visible minorities, and the people doing the intake and testing were all white. Sigh…
I don’t think that any of them have been fallen ill so far, otherwise the health authorities would (hopefully) have changed their setup. But still, I’d say these people have priority getting vaccinated over people who are safely working from home and are extremely unlikely to ever encounter anyone who has Covid.
If I was the boss of the world… or just of Quebec…
jeather 18:49 on 2021-03-15 Permalink
I will also say that the plan for getting essential workers who work with the public should have been planned out from the time we saw that vaccines were coming, not just suddenly created now in March. It’s probably too late now, but there was more than enough time to make a plan for them, had anyone in power cared to.