Vaccination sites in town have been empty as the doses initially meant for Montreal have been sent to other regions.
Updates from April, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The city is collaborating with homeless shelters to fix up two projects to provide 50 units meant not as temporary shelters but as permanent homes for homeless people.
They’ll have to move quickly. Also Friday comes news that Brandon Shiller is renovicting the residents of 90 apartments in a Plateau tower overlooking Lafontaine Park. Some of the residents sound like they’re in quite precarious living situations and will need affordable places to live soon.
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Kate
A CBC documentary is looking at the stresses on front-line workers in the pandemic – retail workers who are sometimes expected to enforce rules on people over whom they have no real authority.
Ephraim
It’s really not great. Maybe the businesses should have put up a note stating that they will not tolerate verbal abuse of their employees. By law, in Quebec, employers are supposed to protect employees from verbal abuse. And they are supposed to have clear rules about it. If that means that they banish clients, then so be it.
See https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/psychological-harassment-in-the-workplace/
steph
no shirt no service. no shoes no service. no mask no service. “you need to leave the premises now or I’ll have to call the police”. Either the boss handles it or I will. “Mr. police, I’d like to press charges against that person for trespassing”. AND YOU FILE A REPORT instead of letting the cops talk you out of it.
Ephraim
I actually wish that Costco would put up a big sign that says “If found not wearing your mask properly, your membership will be revoked on the spot.” And then carry through a few times, until it goes viral. And see after that, how many people want to push that envelope.
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Kate
A meme circulating about UFOs seen at Trudeau is a hoax, and comes from animation graphics produced at the École polytechnique.
Individual
Can you please elaborate? Any source of this claim?
Kate
There’s the article I linked and there’s this from the airport.
dmdiem
Of course it’s a hoax. The real aliens aren’t showing up until July.
jk. Nothing’s going to happen.
Or will it…. dun dun DUNNNN
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Kate
Some notes on driving difficulties for Easter weekend, and more notes on what’s open and closed.
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Kate
Ensemble Montréal is more than $424,000 in debt, mostly left over from the 2017 election, as Denis Coderre rejoins them as supreme leader. In contrast, Projet has half a million smackers in its war chest.
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Kate
Two Montreal hospitals are planning to hire unskilled workers to act as operating room nurses. It’s hard to see how this could end well.
Uatu
This is just an accident waiting to happen. Would the managers that suggest this want these unskilled techs in the OR during their operations? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
steph
better than no staff.
dhomas
@steph I’m not so sure. Untrained staff, in nursing or other fields, can often do more harm than good. I work in IT and my management has at times hired warm bodies just to fill in headcount (often for budgetary reasons), and I can say from experience that we would have been better off without some of the incompetence. Not only did I need to do my work and the work of the new person who didn’t know what they were doing, but I would have to clean up their messes to boot.
I can only imagine how dire the consequences might be when it’s literally life or death on the line.Uatu
The people who do device processing (cleaning and sterilization of OR tools) need a DEC. These new hires will just have a high school diploma and some hours of training. Maybe it will be okay, but I don’t know. I’ve seen half assed cost cutting backfire. Like cutting house keeping and then having to deal with MRSA outbreaks later
Björk
Leftists will defend this and claim it’s racist not to hire unskilled workers.
Blork
I don’t know if it’s a good idea or a bad idea, but I’m pretty sure both good and bad things will result.
Good: more surgeries will take place, probably less burnout among nurses.
Bad: there will most certainly be incidents (sterilization errors, etc.).
The ratio of those good to bad things remains to be seen. If the incidents are all minor, and if this is specified as a short-term solution and not a permanent one, then we’ll look back on this as a good decision. But if there are some catastrophic incidents then it will be seen as a mistake. It’s a gamble!
JaneyB
Ridiculous. They should just fast-track some of the foreign-trained nurses whose credentials are not yet recognized by the government. Is anyone thinking at those hospitals/the Ministry?
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Kate
Doctors are saying Montreal needs a full new lockdown to stop Covid variants from spreading.
Daniel
It might have been politically difficult to look at the low-ish case numbers a couple of weeks ago and impose stricter measures here. But now everywhere we look we see variants becoming more dangerous and more transmissible.
Are we supposed to believe that Montreal has a force field around it that will prevent that same thing from happening here? Could we maybe be proactive instead of reactive?
Kevin
A year into this we know how to stop it in 4 weeks.
We can do it wholescale or small scale, and all it costs is money, and probably less money than we’ve been spending.
We take a person who tests positive and isolate them. If they cannot do that at home, stick them alone in a hotel room. Make sure the rest of their family is cared for and isolated (yeah, more hotel rooms). Enforce it. Pay them so they don’t lose their home etc. Order companies to make sure those affected have their same job when they return.
dmdiem
I feel like people have forgotten that Montreal is an island. If we did what New Zealand did, with a few tweaks, we could be 100% open and covid free right now.
Tee Owe
dmdiem – Montreal may be an island but it’s an island within a province/country/continent. New Zealand is on its own in a very large ocean – bit different. And they continue to have (mini-) outbreaks.
dmdiem
Bridges are the only difference in terms of points of access. So we would have had to have had heavily restricted movement there. At any rate, I think that opportunity is long since passed. We’ve got all our eggs in the vaccination basket now.
Ephraim
I unfortunately ended up in a Dollarama today. People are back to treating shopping as entertainment… we are definitely going back to a lock down. Seriously… can’t people find something else to do? Go for a drive? Go for a walk? Go for a hike? Drive by a friend’s house and wave from the car? Anything but shopping with all the kids!
JaneyB
Where did rapid-testing go? Some rapid tests get results back in one hour. This should be being widely used until vaccination is done. For a year, we’ve been waiting, isolating, and hoping instead. Better than nothing but not as good as rapid testing has been for some countries.
Kevin
Some Big companies are taking part in a pilot project tO use those millions of rapid testing kits that are sitting around. Twice a week, if you get a positive review they do a swab for a PCR and you go home until you get that result.
From what I’ve seen there is not much buy-in from employees.
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Kate
A man was stabbed on the de Maisonneuve bike path Thursday afternoon. There’s little evidence, even though it happened in daylight at the corner of St-Marc.
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