Legault to hold presser at 5 p.m.
I see tweets saying François Legault will be holding a presser at 5 p.m. Wednesday about new anti-Covid measures. There were already recommendations that people should wear a mask at all times in the workplace, and students unwilling to return to school en présentiel.
Better stock up on toilet paper, mes petits.
Clément 10:09 on 2021-03-31 Permalink
Paul Journet (La Presse) made an interesting observation the other day.
He said the 1 p.m. press conferences were for the journalists and were used to make “business as usual” announcements.
5 p.m. conferences were intended for the general public and usually meant significant changes (good or bad) were coming.
In other words, the 5 p.m. press conferences are the ones we should be paying attention to.
DeWolf 11:54 on 2021-03-31 Permalink
It sounds like the new restrictions will apply mainly to the problematic orange zones (ie, putting them back in red). It would be great if they rescinded the gym openings in Montreal, given what happened in Quebec City, but I doubt it.
The one thing I’ll be watching for is whether the magic curfew will be brought back to 8pm…
DeWolf 12:07 on 2021-03-31 Permalink
Another thing: maybe it’s time Quebec fine-tuned its vaccination strategy. There is growing evidence that the vaccines stop nearly all transmission. The director of the CDC gave an interview to this effect yesterday: “Our data from the CDC today suggest that vaccinated people do not carry the virus.”
We’ve already given a majority of 70+ people their first shot, which has had a clear impact on the death rate. Now instead of descending through the age groups in a linear fashion, we should open up vaccination to the people who are most likely to spread the virus. That means anybody who spends their days in public: teachers, retail employees, warehouse workers, adult students, bus drivers, kitchen staff, etc. It seems wise to have vaccine coverage run through a wide swath of society instead of being concentrated in just a couple of groups.
Joey 15:19 on 2021-03-31 Permalink
@DeWolf a very good idea in theory but implemeting it would be tricky; you don’t want to turn your vaccine site operators into reference-checkers or CV-scanners. Age is easy to demonstrate. Postal code is easy to demonstrate. It might make more sense to focus on targeted geographies (similar to the parents of schoolchildren in the west end) rather than categories of workers. Though I suppose you could go a long way by, say, vaccinating everyone who works at a school, or a distribution centre, etc. My sense is that with less than two months until all adults are supposed to have received a first dose, it’s unlikely the government would be able to implement a targeted approach quickly enough to be really game-changing.
jeather 15:34 on 2021-03-31 Permalink
They managed to put together a targeted approach for parents at some schools in a few days, I am sure they could do a not too terrible similar one (employees get letters with a specific url to sign in, you need to appear with ID and a specific letter from your employer) to target a reasonable number of employees. They could even check this against payroll info they have.
And of course, they could have done a reasonable enough system at any time, this was always going to be a known problem.
DeWolf 17:36 on 2021-03-31 Permalink
Exactly. The west end school vaccination seems like it was pretty successful. That’s what I mean – identify communities or groups of people that are at higher risk of infection and use employers or community groups to make vaccines available to them right away. Even though we will supposedly all be able to get our first shots in June, the situation is super volatile. If we can find a way to strategically use vaccines to avoid what is happening in Ontario, we should do it.
Chris 18:00 on 2021-03-31 Permalink
It’s super easy to forge a letter from an employer though. And there are zillions of employers, how is anyone looking at such letters to know if that’s really Acme Co’s letterhead? Demand is still higher than supply, so you can bet people will be looking to jump the queue. By geography indeed may be a better idea. Prioritize those that live in densely populated areas perhaps, with the idea being to reduce spread instead of reducing death.
jeather 18:04 on 2021-03-31 Permalink
I don’t think they should just show up with a letter. I think employers could have been given — possibly using payroll info — letters with individualized urls for each company (like the west end school project), then the name on the appt would be verified against the employee names, or they would come with a pay stub and a photo ID. There were lots of possible solutions had they wanted to do this, it’s clear that they did not want to do any kind of prioritization of essential workers.
John B 18:17 on 2021-03-31 Permalink
I’m pretty sure that many US jurisdictions prioritized “essential workers” for the vaccine, including people like teachers. They seemed to find a good-enough way to get it done.
Ephraim 20:50 on 2021-03-31 Permalink
And in spite of the vaccinations in the US, they are still dying at 3X to 5X per capita than Canada. They are looking at the vaccinations to be some sort of miracle and not doing anything to actually lower infection rates.