Polling: Workers out with Covid
It’s election day in Quebec and polling stations are short of workers because a lot of them are out with Covid. The phrase “dropping like flies” was mentioned on CBC radio this morning.
Seems like maybe they should have hired vaccinated people willing to wear masks, after all.
Chris 10:14 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
Such people were never excluded.
Blork 10:37 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
They were defacto self-excluded if they didn’t want to work next to unvaccinated and unmasked people.
Kate 10:48 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
Ding. It’s why I’m not working on the election today.
steph 11:20 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
Is there a way to resolve a divided population? They may have had a shortage from the get-go if they excluded unvaccinated and unmasked workers. Saying ”I can’t hire you because you might call in sick” is a realistic slippery slope to stay away from.
steph 11:23 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
”Élection Québec autorise cette année les jeunes de 16 et 17 ans à travailler dans les bureaux de vote.” surprised me. Next the labor shortage will justify allowing minors to sell alcohol. le dos large du COVID 🙂
Kate 11:29 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
steph, we won’t know how many people declined to work for elections when told that masks wouldn’t be required. As I’ve said before – you’re working closely alongside people you don’t know, sometimes in not very well ventilated places, for somewhere between 12 and 14 hours straight, and dealing with members of the public. This is exactly a setting where people should still be wearing masks.
I miss it, by the way. Working on election day can be a grind, but it does give you a unique view of the people around you in the place you live, and how cooperative people can be when called on.
Ephraim 12:25 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
I think the last article I read on COVID suggested that it takes up to 20 minutes for the air to be “clear” after someone shedding was there and that is with proper ventilation. And let’s see, some of the polling places are schools, which couldn’t past the 800 mark, and so we upped it to 1000 mark, but still too many schools couldn’t pass, so we increased it to almost double the European standard at 1500 mark! I assure you, I’m voting with my KN95 mask on and staying as short at time in that building as necessary.
EmilyG 17:59 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
I voted today here in Pierrefonds. I didn’t see any of the workers wearing a mask. In the main voting room, there were about 25-30 people total while I was in it, and maybe three were wearing masks (including a kid who had gone along with his mother, so not technically a voter.)
Chris 20:31 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
I think the only people still wearing masks in Quebec are the regular commentators on this blog. 🙂
Kevin 21:00 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
People really don’t realize that Covid is leading to strokes and lots of long-term effects eh? Too bad for them.
DeWolf 21:30 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
Kevin, I certainly feel for anyone who has long Covid, but at this point 89 percent of Canadians have had Covid [1] and most of them seem to be doing fine. Hence the lax attitude towards masking and another other Covid precautions.
[1] https://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/covid_briefs/101_briefing_Canada.pdf
There also don’t seem to be many studies of the long-term effects of Covid on vaccinated people infected with Omicron. Everything I can find about increased risk of stroke dates to the first half of 2021 or earlier, which means the study subjects were primarily unvaccinated people dealing with previous variants. And of course the sample sizes were much smaller since relatively few people had been infected with Covid before the beginning of this year.
I won’t begrudge anyone for wearing a mask but I also understand why a vast majority of people in Montreal — seemingly everyone in many situations — have stopped wearing them.
jeather 23:32 on 2022-10-03 Permalink
I decided to work this year, and it was a shit show. I applied in early September, I think; they called me Tuesday. Same with the person I was at a table with.Maybe they would have had better results if they called people up less than a week before. I also was called Friday and asked to work in PSC, asked if it was confirmed for sure, they said yes. Showed up there, I wasn’t on the list, and then they called asking if I was en route to somewhere entirely different to work. Once it was all set up, it was fine, but yikes.
I wore a nice high quality mask. One or two other workers wore blue medical masks. Maybe 10% of voters wore any sort of masks. 10 dogs also came to the voting location, none in masks. I did take off my mask to eat or drink.
CE 00:37 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
Why would a dog be wearing a mask?
dwgs 06:37 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
Pretty sure that was a joke CE. At least I hope so.
Kate 08:38 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
jeather, did you even get any training? Pre-pandemic, people selected to work on elections were always given – and paid for – a training session a week or two in advance of the election, but it sounds like this time was more of a scramble.
Even if you’d worked in earlier elections, you had to do the training, because occasionally rules would change between elections, and of course procedures and rules aren’t identical between municipal, provincial and federal elections so it doesn’t hurt to be reminded.
EmilyG 09:07 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
Yeah, I worked at a provincial election some years ago, and we had a training session a week or two before.
Kate 13:17 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
Some years ago, yes. I was wondering whether it was all being done in more of a rush this time.
MarcG 13:33 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
@DeWolf: An article that’s perhaps of interest to you https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01453-0
MarcG 14:33 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
On reflection, I see that has the same shortcomings you mentioned in your comment, but it’s still too early for the study you’re looking for (Long Covid symptoms in vaccinated individuals infected with Omicron) and in my opinion, given the available research, erring on the side of caution is the wise move.
DeWolf 18:36 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
Yes, exactly. It’s too early to tell. The Nature article is very interesting but it refers to studies conducted in 2021. As the article notes, it was already challenging to get accurate data, hence the wildly different estimates of the incidence of long Covid. These days, doing similar studies is nearly impossible because it’s so hard to find a control group. Going forward, the only way we’ll be able to understand the long-term impacts of Covid is on population-wide studies.
It’s a big unknown, but there are many unknowns in life. For most people, Covid has stopped being an existential threat and is now just one of the many risky things in everyday life.
jeather 20:13 on 2022-10-04 Permalink
Training was done online. The training booklet was incredibly well done, and the online course — I skimmed it a bit — was quite good as well though a little video heavy. I’m not sure why it took them so long to call for workers; I think it had to do with the preference for candidates nominated by a party (the vast majority of people were nominated by a party). But on the ground it was a disaster (beyond the confusion about who is working where, a lot of the boxes were missing specific items). In D’Arcy McGee they were so short of employees that all the stations were doubled up, and it made things at my station look well oiled.