Well, I’m lucky in that I just started a diet that eliminates restaurant and pub visits for at least 3 months, so I was going to be staying in anyways.
Making good decisions is challenging and government has probably done well to follow medical advice. But I would have hoped after all this that they were at a stage where they could fine-tune things - so that they are not taking overly bold steps that make little positive difference but have significant downsides. I hope things look brighter in three weeks.
Doug Ford and the Ontario PC party is ticking me off to no end but I guess it boils down to 3 things.
- What the hell happened to vaccination passports? The whole fucking point was the get enough people vaccinated that a next wave event would be minimized and we could more or less go about our business if we had done our civic duty Not vaccinated? Fine we’ve a spot for you on a ventilator but I’m going to the gym.
- Capacity - holy fucking hell 20 months should be enough time to expand ICU/hospital capacity not only through equipment & beds but effectively “field promoting” immigrant doctors on probation, final year nursing students and medial residents. As far as I can see it’s not even a thought.
- Why didn’t we move off of case counts and focus on ICU/Hospitalization in the communication strategy months ago? We’ve had the projections about massive ramps in cases and no one thought if cases soar we’re going to be unable to keep up and the metric will become useless? Ultimately the whole “flatten the curve” is about ICU/hospitalization numbers. It’s a messaging failure from politicians and the public health people.
This is the part that really annoys me. It’s the one thing the government could pretty much do by fiat, and Ford hasn’t done it. And it’s not just a short-term pandemic thing, either. We all know that healthcare has been shorted for years. The pandemic just made that undeniably clear.
Everything else we’ve tried relied on buy-in from the population at large, and we’ve never had anywhere close to 100% on that, and it’s getting worse because even the reasonable people are getting burnt out and pissed off. That was never going to be as successful as letting the health professionals build a system that could handle the extra burden.
ICU beds have always been difficult to access, even before Covid. The government does not want to pay to staff them. Now staffing them is difficult for many reasons.
Time will tell, but I suspect the system will hold once again in Ontario.
The sadder thing in my view is old age homes. They’ve had many significant issues for decades. They have only been addressed to some degree, and only quite recently.
I’m personally particularly rejecting of government telling me how many people I may have in my house. No, actually; fuck you. It’s my home, and the government needs a MOUNTAIN of justification for that. Close casinos? Sure. Restaurants? Well, if there is science behind that. Schools? Maybe. But this is my house. As of today Ontario has 266 people in ICU with COVID-19. That is nowhere near the Ontario high water mark for the pandemic, and is far less than 10% of capacity. Things might get way worse but they might not. If you are going to tell me I cannot have my sister and her family over for dinner you had better come up with an overwhelming, immediate, catastrophic danger reason that no one could reasonably doubt at all. Freedom fucking matters too; it is valuable.
Here in Alberta, we can go to pubs and bars, but playing pool or darts while there is forbidden. The pool tables and dartboards remain, but there are no pool cues, and the dartboards are shuttered; due to covid, you know. Meanwhile, VLTs in such places may be played.
I’d like to know the science behind the reason for those decisions.
Scientifically speaking, the VLTs contribute to government coffers and thus exude anti-viral properties. Darts and billiards don’t.
Interestingly, the Quebec government has floated the idea of requiring a vaccine passport to enter alcohol and cannabis shops, despite their being considered essential services in the previous waves, and definitely contributing to government coffers. This very much seems to be a measure that isn’t based on preventing infections, but rather on nudging the unvaccinated towards getting the vaccine, and also to give back some privileges to the vaccinated, given that with the new restrictions our vaccine passport is now rather useless.
That’s been the case in Saskatchewan since October. Need to show your vax status on your phone or a paper print-out to go in.
IMHO, this is an inherent part of our problem (not you btw, but the feeling). Things probably will look brighter in three weeks, and we’ll coast for a few months, and then another wave with a variant will emerge from somewhere, and then everybody will act shocked/hurt/betrayed and the powers-that-be will go into panic stations and we’ll keep doing the same bloody thing over and over and over again until the whole world is vaxxed and/or otherwise immune, or the unvaxxed die off.
A minimum number (based on some critically thought-out analysis) of vax centres should be kept open regardless of the wave/variant status. Test kits should be stockpiled and made available - their manufacturers should be encouraged to over-produce and the same thing should be done with masks and other relevant PPE.
I think what we have to do is act as though this is the longer-term emergency that it is. I’m sick of hearing about how “tired” everyone is of this. The only people who are actually suffering are covid victims themselves and their loved ones; and people who are losing incomes. For those of us who don’t fall into those categories (and there are probably a few other categories that I haven’t thought of), my inability to go to my favourite coffee shop, or someone else’s inability to go dancing on Friday night, or to get a haircut, or go to the gym, is not a stressful hardship - at all. The employees of those establishments are definitely suffering.
If governments and municipalities decided that this current new-normal will probably be the status-quo for a few more years, then they could implement policies and various fiscal incentives and bylaw amendments that would help mitigate some of the hardships.
Here too… but if most things requiring it are closed, what’s the point in having it? I don’t need to show it to go into an essential service, I need to show it to go into the places they don’t let anyone into. So that was a waste of time.
There is absolutely no evidence we are better or worse off here than in other jurisdictions that didn’t panic and lock everything down. There is very little evidence this lockdown will help, actually, unless you can be like a small island country and literally lock the world out.
I know a company twenty minutes from my house that can produce 150,000 masks a day. They have made this known to the provincial government. The province has placed not a single order. I assure you the MOH isn’t the slightest bit serious about this.
Have you done a study on the mental health effects of being separate from family and friends? Do tell what your findings were.
No I haven’t. However, perhaps I worded my thoughts badly and I’ll simply say and clarify that my statements are my opinions and I’ll leave it at that. My apologies.
I think with the testing being completely overwhelmed, (at least where I am), we don’t actually have the foggiest idea of the case numbers. If we see a peak in numbers, that just reflects the maximum number of daily tests we are giving. The test positivity rate is huge.
We’re actually being told not to bother getting tested if we have mild symptoms. Just isolate and hunker down.
This shit latest wave has to finish up sometime, and I just hope the relatively small increase in hospitalizations holds.
Yeah. Personally, NYE was one of the worst days of my life.
Of course these numbers all connect. Since they don’t have enough testing capability, they are telling people not to get tested unless they have a really good reason, the main one being if you have symptoms. If you are telling people to not get tested unless they are symptomatic, then of course the positivity rate will be higher, because symptomatic people are likelier to be positive. The lack of tests means we do not know how many cases there really are, and yet might also be getting a positivity rate that is higher than it would be.
It is unfortunate that this is the first wave of COVID we have ever seen. If this had been going on for a couple of years, why, we might be prepared.
No kidding. At least I have not heard any of the powers that be try the old “nobody could have expected that…” I think my head would explode.
Covid has inflicted very real consequences on many people, from business income, stress, depression, interference with education, delays in in-person medical treatment and surgeries, curfews, lack of vacations and repose, huge economic after effects, increased divorces, urban intolerance, supply chain dysfunction, international and interprovincial relations, effects on the legal system, political repercussions include extremism, crime and social isolation. Darn right I am tired of Covid. Any sensible person is.
Ontario has ten million folks. If 10,000+ tests are done daily, this means that if your vague Covid symptoms are bad enough you consider testing, the chance of it being Covid is proportional to the reported positive test count. (This many tests gives a high level of confidence and low rate of error that the sample size reflects the population). The positive test rate is currently about 30% in Ontario. This assumes the lag in symptoms matches the lag in test reporting. Not exact, but probably not so far off.
It is neither sustainable nor wise to expect continued boosters for the foreseeable future. Especially on a global basis. If the circuit breakers are justified by stopping everyone from getting Covid at the same time than previous management has not been ideal. Emphasis should be placed on vaccinating almost all. Boosters are mainly of use in preventing serious cases and especially future variants. Government decisions should focus more on actions that make the biggest difference - not closing gyms but at long last mandating vaccinations. Using passports instead of proscriptions.