The planned move of the Palais des congrès vaccination site to some other downtown spot has been delayed indefinitely.
Updates from December, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Two weather records were broken on Thursday. We’ve had 221
consecutivedays this year where the temperature has reached 10° (I didn’t even know this was a recorded benchmark) and Thursday’s high was 15.5°, a record for that date.Spi
221 days in the year that we’ve had temperatures above 10, non-consecutive. 221 consecutive would be pretty impossible, well let’s see what climate change has for us.
Kate
Oh right. Heh. Thanks.
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Kate
We’ve hit a peak of 3,768 new cases of Covid in the last 24 hours.
Since the start of the pandemic, there have been those who’ve insisted that it’s just another flu. It’s not. In Quebec, the mortality rate has been twelve times that of the flu.
Patrick Lagacé says c’est pas le temps de lâcher.
Adding later: A two-month-old baby with no known health conditions died of Covid this week at Ste‑Justine.
Raymond Lutz
ça serait peut-être aussi le temps de lâcher l’argument débile qu’un IP waiver pour les manufactures de vaccins des pays émergents (e.g. l’Inde) nuiraient à l’innovation.
Blork
Over the past few years I’ve known very few people who caught the viddy, but just today I’ve heard about at least six people in my orbit who have tested positive.
Chris
That 12x figure is since the beginning of the pandemic, including when we had no vaccines and no specific treatments. The article also shows that average daily deaths in the 4th wave were an order of magnitude lower than in 2020. So covid *was* no flu, but going forward, it hopefully will be in the same ballpark.
Tim S.
Any hard evidence for your hope, Chris?
(I hope so, too, I just haven’t seen any convincing evidence).
jeather
In the long run I think Chris will be right, but that’s a lot of death and long term disability to get past first.
Mark Côté
Back-of-the-envelope math:
One estimate of the number of flu deaths in Canada is about 3500 per year. (This is done via computer models because we don’t accurately track flu deaths, but it’s the best guess we have.) That translates to about 735 deaths in Quebec (~21% of Canada’s population), which in turn is 2 deaths per day on average. The 7-day average of Covid deaths in Quebec has been between 2-4 since September and 0 during the summer. It was around 30 per day in November 2020 and around 50 in January 2021.
DeWolf
Chris is correct, it’s right there in the La Presse article: Covid’s death rate since July 2021 is 2.3 per 100k, compared to 2.9 for the 2018 flu and 1.5 for the flu over three years. Thanks to vaccinations, Covid went from being 12 times deadlier than the flu to being roughly similar.
But that was before Omicron. Who knows what will happen now.
jeather
Bear in mind that Covid is more dangerous because a LOT more people are getting covid than the flu. BASE jumping is way riskier than driving, but more people die due to driving. Covid will end up like a seasonal flu once it’s significantly less infectiious (vaccines, immunity because we all got it already, random mutations, etc).
Tim S.
I just finished reading Plagues Upon the Earth by Kyle Harper, and he’s pretty convincing that diseases become less dangerous because of human action, not because the diseases themselves evolve to be less dangerous. Vaccines and better treatments are part of that, but so are measures to reduce our exposure. I think we’ll all have to invest in better ventilation, to start, and it’s possible we’ll never get back to 2019 levels of indoor mixing. Keep in mind that the reduced death rates mentioned above are only possible because of health measures that have almost wiped out the flu.
(Harper’s excerpts from Pepys diaries about accepted practices in 17thC London are particularly fascinating. Maybe future generations will have the same disgust for crowded bars and restaurants that we have for people sitting on a chamber pot in the middle of the living room)
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Kate
Two teenagers are dead after a police chase on Decarie around 2 a.m. led to their car flying off an overpass. The BEI stays busy.
qatzelok
I propose raising the driving age to 21, and making the metro 24 hour.
As a daily cyclist, I don’t feel comfortable “sharing the road” with teen drivers with no transit options.
Ephraim
Recklessness is often seen in the age group from their teens until the age of about 26 or so, when the brain fully develops. So regardless of their usage of cars, bicycles or even walking, they are going to do stupid things. Maybe what we should do is require a vehicle licence of everyone, equally, regardless if it’s a car, bicycle or even motoschooter, to drive on the roads as well as a written test, so we have the commonality of all knowing the rules of the road, both at the expense of the person requiring the permit.
As for running the metro 24 hours, since qatzelok has suggested it… I’m assuming that qatz is also offering to pay for the costs of running the metro 24 hours a day, rather than the current less costly buses that run at night. I don’t see the point, we already have 24 hour buses.
Dominic
What about the millions of Quebeckers who live off island or nowhere near mass transit?
qatzelok
Ephraim: I will gladly pay the costs of the metro if you pay the cost of lives being lost to drivers.
Dominic: And if you live nowhere near transit, you bought that kind of lifestyle and the needless deaths (and lack of stimulation) that comes with it.
Ephraim
That’s the point, there is nothing you can do about the fact that people from their teens through to about 26 years old will do stupid risky things. The metro running all night will do absolutely NOTHING to change that. So, if you want to run it, you pay for it. It has 0 real effect. I’m not an insurance company.
dhomas
Not saying I agree with all qatzelok says, but telling someone to pay the additional costs for a public service is a poor argument in such a debate. Public transit, universal healthcare, education, waste disposal, etc.: these are things that are social benefits and shouldn’t be required to be directly profitable. They benefit society in other ways.
PO
qatzelok is here legitimately saying that all people who live outside of the bounds of where public transit is useful or economically feasible apparently “bought that kind of lifestyle”.
dhomas
Weeeellll… Maybe not all. I suppose people born where there is no public transit didn’t buy that lifestyle. But I know loads of people who used to live on island and who moved to, for example, Laval (which IS served by public transit) because they could get much more house and pay less taxes. Then, they complain about how bad the traffic is to get to their job in downtown Montreal (pre-COVID) and how bad the roads are in Montreal. This is infrastructure which they have contributed virtually nothing to because they moved to Laval to avoid the higher taxes in Montreal yet they use it despite this fact and have the gall to complain about it, too. In these situations, it does sound like these people DID indeed buy this lifestyle.
I bought a house on island. I did this knowing I could have gotten a bigger house off island, without tenants, too. But I factored in the TCO of my property on island, near transit as compared to living off island. The time I didn’t spend in a car commuting, the many years I lived without spending much on gas or cars, the fact that I can bike or walk to buy groceries, these are all things that factored into my decision. Many people are seduced by the big house in Laval and don’t consider the hidden expenses.
Uatu
A lot of my coworkers live in the suburbs and they aren’t exactly rolling in dough. The burbs are now where most working class people live because they’ve been priced out of downtown. A lot of them live with extended family so need the extra space. These are the people you see at 5:30am waiting in the cold at the brossard terminal for the 1st bus into town
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Kate
Laval bus drivers will be on strike this weekend.
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Kate
For the first time since the later Tremblay era, city hall opposition has been excluded from the financial audit committee and Ensemble is grumbling about a loss of transparency. Looking into my parallel history crystal ball, I don’t see Ensemble inviting any Projet people onto the committee.
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