Why? 3M makes shitloads of masks in China and we’ll get some. There’s no way some retrofitting of some factory in Ontario is going to produce enough for anything other than bullshit political points.
There’s no way to expect every single country in the world to have a pandemic sized backup supply. We have to, as worldwide community, move resources where they are needed in a situation like this.
Ontario has come out and said that they expect 3,000-15,000 deaths, 1500 or more of which will be in April. Currently it’s under 100, so this is not an optimistic guess. They figure it WOULD HAVE been 4000-5000 in April had nothing been done.
So far nothing super concrete in terms of enhanced measures has been said. It’s a “we’ll come up with something else” message.
Some of the news stories that I am reading are saying that the US claims to have the authority to order 3M to redirect the orders from its subsidiaries. Other countries may well retaliate with similar measures, and I am not confident that Canada is not going to be caught in the crossfire and find themselves with very few places willing to export masks to anywhere in North America.
That’s pretty worst case. Canada has played ball with China on resource sharing. Trump seems to have been corralled pretty good on previous covid response idiocy lately. And we can directly accept shipments from China easier than Latin America.
Trump will change his mind by dinner. He’s a nitwit, and has no plan for good or bad.
I would never in my wildest dreams have thought the Doug Ford government would ever do anything well, but I tip my cap; they are handling this with a calm, determined professionalism. No one is playing politics, no one is bullshitting. Indeed, so far as I am aware, every government in the country is working together and sticking to the plain facts and trying to just solve the problem. The feds didn’t act soon enough; they will end up being correctly criticized by posterity for being too worried about appearances and less about people getting sick for awhile, but when push cam to shove they have not been screwing around.
The situation in the USA is… umm, different.
I don’t think it is clear that Trump has actually used the law to force 3M to stop shipping masks to Canada. As RickJay said, probably just Trump blowing smoke and making headlines.
3M currently makes 1.1 billion masks per year, is that enough supply for the current demand? I don’t know.
Companies and governments will be rethinking their supply chains. Cheapest may not always be as important as making sure supplies are available.
BTW, I just got denied for Alberta emergency isolation aid. It is $1,200 or so to tie Albertans over till federal aid arrives. As far as I can see I qualify. Applying was a huge pita and took hours. System crashes and asking for huge amounts of information. I will try again.
Here is a link from Google showing how much people are doing leisure activities, staying home and going to work to the end of March. They have compiled it by using GPS information on people’s phones. The amount of shopping information they have must be stunning. They would know where every person by name goes to restaurants, shopping and leisure.
Here is the link for Canada, with the provinces broken out too. https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-03-29_CA_Mobility_Report_en.pdf
It seems the data is very similar from different provinces, meaning they are all taking isolation seriously.
My brother in law’s salary is down to $125 a week, but he qualifies for no aid of any kind. It’s not a perfect system, that’s for sure.
Agreed completely. All levels of government have been doing their best. Although Alberta’s latest decisions to lay off educational assistants while simultaneously given 7.5 billion to a pipeline for $4 bitumen is a head scratcher.
And Trump has thanked us by banning exports of supplies to Canada. So far, Trudeau has not said anything about retaliation.
I think the many returning snowbirds might explain why Quebec has so many. But we have been in isolation for about three weeks now. I couldn’t stand Premier Legault, him of the intolerance act, but it seems to me he is doing a good job with this. So is Doug Ford, whom I assumed was a clown like his brother.
Trudeau HAS said something about retaliation; he’s said he won’t do it. That’s the correct strategy. Trump is stupid and easily distracted; if you try to fight with him he’ll just try to hurt more people out of spite, including his own people. Buttering him up, going around him, and finding loopholes in whatever rule he’s imposing is much smarter.
There is a lag time between actions taken and noticeable results. This can cause all sorts of, I told you so, arguments after the fact. Isolation slows the progress of communicable disease. It is practically in the description of the disease. In East coast speak, sociable disease. Be antisocial for a bit.
We need to take back the production of our more vital supplies. Make ourselves more secure and create jobs and economic activity in our own country. I am not xenophobic. But if you want an economy to be under control of your own country, you cannot import everything. You also cannot depend on exports to support your economy. Proper trade is balanced. You import only what you absolutely cannot reasonably create in country. You export only what is not of major consequence. You do not sell out all your industry and jobs to the lowest overseas bidder, to enrich a tiny number of the already very wealthy. And our “Friends” have their own responsibilities to their voters. Not ours.
NM
Part of the problem with this is, it doesn’t maximize profits, which has been the be-all and end-all of business planning for far too many people for far too long. I’ve seen people argue that it’s not just illegal, but immoral for corporations not to do everything they can to maximize the profits for their investors.
If you want these critical products to be made in Canada, then someone, somewhere has to take the hit on paying more for them. We’ve seen that businesses simply won’t take this hit, otherwise we never would have gotten into this situation. So, it will have to be the government that takes the hit. That will, of course, require government spending, which means we either raise taxes, or cut spending on something else.
And there’s currently far too many people opposed to one or both of those options.
So, as a country, we need to fix that first. We need to get a solid majority to stand behind spending the money we need to spend to secure these supplies, now and in the future.
The “Now” part will probably be easy, since people are currently panicking. The “later” part will be harder, when people start looking at their annual tax bills.
I read that as “a street of strip bars and restaurants” at first glance, and thought “Go Elgin!”
Well, no. This doesn’t really make any sense; if this was a policy you’d be dooming Canadians to a drop in their standard of living equivalent to what this pandemic is going to do to us. Forever. We are still importing an enormous number of things, even with the pandemic, with relatively little disruption. National borders aren’t the solution to these problems. They are PART of the problem.
Erecting trade barriers between Canada and other countries is exactly as illogical as, say, erecting trade barriers between different municipalities in Canada. I am sure you would consider that idiotic, but it’s the same thing.
The problem here isn’t that we import things like N95 masks and respirators. ** It’s that we had no reserve supply.**The government could have had a stockpile - it wouldn’t have mattered if they were made in Manitoba or Malaysia, it’s best to have an emergency stockpile for this scenario and to have a plan for their distribution.
Incidentally, as to this, bear in mind SARS-CoV-2 percolates in a person for awhile before exploding into the disease.
There are three basic measures; infected people, sick people, and dead people, and they do not all happen at the same time. A person is first an infected person. some days later - and it can be a week - they MAY become a sick person. Some days after that - and a person can fight this disease for a long time - if they are very unlucky, they become a dead person. So the pandemic will have three distinct statistical peaks; infected first, sick second, dead last.
All our numbers are a bit fuzzy - contrary to what people think, even the number of dead is not a settled or clear matter - but it’s clear that things really exploded in terms of sick people on the week of March 23.
Those people were infected prior to that, though, probably in the previous two weeks. (Again, it takes awhile for symptoms to appear, and a person who gets sick may wait quite a long time before going to a hospital.) Cases were up, as you can see in that chart, a bit more last week, but the rate of infection appears to be slowing, albeit not as quickly as we might hope. April 2 was a really bad day.
(A note of caution here; the manner in which cases are classified and reported is still a little inconsistent and not always reliable. The sheer number is bringing some reliability to the trends, but you never know.)
However, even if we plateau in infections and sick people now, the last statistic is deaths; that peak will come after the peak in illnesses. We also will not really know the true death toll for some time, when statisticians can do an analysis of increased mortality rates.
Not so sure about that. They’ve got crazy “confirmed cases” numbers but still lower than Ontario in deaths and ICU numbers.
There’s also the problem that the people who were supposed to be in charge and on top of things like this (Trump, China et al.) dropped the ball so badly. Canada, and in fact most the rest of the world, doesn’t have the resources needed to track every possible pandemic. We rely on accurate reporting from other countries, to alert us to potential problems. We didn’t get that.
If we’d starting ramping up production for all the equipment we need now back in January, when Trump got several warnings that he ignored, we’d be in much better shape right now.
When this is all over and the history gets written, that lost two months will stand out as the biggest screw up of this whole event.
Part of the issue with sorting out these numbers, and what they mean for how the disease is progressing, is that Quebec changed how it counts its numbers in the middle of it all. Originally, they were only counting infections that were confirmed by testing, but now they’re apparently counting anything that fits the symptoms, which most other places counts as “presumptive” cases, not “confirmed”. That means there was a one-time jump in the numbers, and that after this, the total numbers will always be higher than they would have been under the previous counting system.