COVID-19 (Coronavirus) - How are you coping with this?

[captaintrolley]

So the nursing home called to report my mom tested positive for Covid-19 this morning..

Up until now her nursing home has had relatively few cases, but the virus is picking up steam. Today they had seven residents test positive.

So far mom is feeling fine and has no symptoms.

The residents all had their first round of Moderna Vaccine a few weeks ago and are scheduled to receive their booster shots next week.

[GTAmissions1]

46 minutes ago, captaintrolley said:

So the nursing home called to report my mom tested positive for Covid-19 this morning..

Up until now her nursing home has had relatively few cases, but the virus is picking up steam. Today they had seven residents test positive.

So far mom is feeling fine and has no symptoms.

The residents all had their first round of Moderna Vaccine a few weeks ago and are scheduled to receive their booster shots next week.

Sorry to hear your mom tested positive for COVID-19 especially being in a nursing home. At least the vaccine booster shots are coming to assist. Especially I know one retirement home in my area that had 63 residents, 53 staff and 2 essential caregivers testing positive since January 8th.

The retirement home enlisting assistance from other agencies like the Canadian Red Cross along with local hospitals to take control of the current situation. Despite how some are calling for military intervention to better handle the situation. Which would free up the hospital resources to focus on handling the influx of cases.

A new hospital is opening in Vaughan (near Canada's Wonderland) next month which will be dedicated to COVID-19 cases along with overflow. Have to manage the existing resources and case load carefully. 

[Wayside Observer]

4 hours ago, captaintrolley said:

So the nursing home called to report my mom tested positive for Covid-19 this morning..

Up until now her nursing home has had relatively few cases, but the virus is picking up steam. Today they had seven residents test positive.

So far mom is feeling fine and has no symptoms.

The residents all had their first round of Moderna Vaccine a few weeks ago and are scheduled to receive their booster shots next week.

I hope your mother has a speedy and uneventful recovery, and avoids the worst of the symptoms.  The other possibility since she's been asymptomatic is that the test returned a false positive which the PCR tests are known to do, and if that's the case, she'd feel fine because she is fine.

Anyways, the Toronto Star published another article today about their COVID-19 polling.  This time the Toronto Star is claiming that 2/3 of Canadians support COVID-19 curfews (alternate link if you're out of free articles) which goes along with their other poll articles that they've come out with over the last 10-11 months saying huge majorities of Canadians support extremely draconian restrictions on everything from businesses staying open, gatherings, travel, any topic under the sun it seems a 66-80% portion of the population supports severely restricting it if you go by what the Toronto Star's been saying.

My question is:  Who is the Toronto Star polling?  This latest one made me text a bunch of friends and they all said the same thing again, that they're not in favour of it and they don't know anybody who is.  Where is the Toronto Star getting such wildly divergent results from everyone I've spoken to about it?  Every time I've asked around the results have been unanimous and nobody's come out on side of the results the Toronto Star's had every time they've done a poll.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Toronto Star, there's more documentation that the mental health situation is continuing to decline significantly.  The calls have turned dark (alternate link) - is anybody really surprised?  And that opened on Monday, closing on Friday vaccination clinic that I did that screenshot for yesterday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre didn't even make it through the end of Tuesday. (alternate link)  I mean, I know Pfizer's eating a dent in manufacturing capacity in Belgium temporarily in order to expand the plant and end up with more capacity in the end, but how did Canada manage to be all but cut off in the meantime?

And there's even more complaint articles in the Toronto Star about seniors who aren't getting vaccinated quickly enough etc. etc. etc.  It's plain and simple:  Supply is limited.  Demand is not.  The entire country, the entire world needs these vaccines.  Currently there are only two that are approved for use in Canada, one of which as mentioned above has run into severe supplier availability problems for the moment.  Honestly, the rampant entitlement's gotten old.  I, for one, have had enough of being marched out to work every day because I'm supposedly essential and yet been finger-pointed and blamed for rampant COVID-19 spread due to age group.  I swear, other than for dumping blame while demanding everyone go to work to keep the place running, nobody over the age of 70 gives a rat's ass about anybody under the age of 60.  Sure.  We're all in it together.  Sure.  Sure we are.  Even in spite of the evidence mounting by the day that we aren't.

 

[T3G]

43 minutes ago, Wayside Observer said:

I hope your mother has a speedy and uneventful recovery, and avoids the worst of the symptoms.  The other possibility since she's been asymptomatic is that the test returned a false positive which the PCR tests are known to do, and if that's the case, she'd feel fine because she is fine.

I haven't heard anything one way or the other about the frequency of PCR test returning false positives, so I'm not going to comment on that, but there's also this alternative possibility, which suggests that remnants of the virus RNA can stick around in your body months after you've cleared your infection, and which makes all these places requiring negative test results to be pretty exasperating. In any case, I too wish @captaintrolley's mother a safe and speedy recovery.

43 minutes ago, Wayside Observer said:

My question is:  Who is the Toronto Star polling?  This latest one made me text a bunch of friends and they all said the same thing again, that they're not in favour of it and they don't know anybody who is.  Where is the Toronto Star getting such wildly divergent results from everyone I've spoken to about it?  Every time I've asked around the results have been unanimous and nobody's come out on side of the results the Toronto Star's had every time they've done a poll.

I wouldn't be surprised if people were less than truthful about their opinions polled because of societal pressure. It's one thing to have your own thoughts and ideas that you keep to yourself, but quite another when you face the possibility of receiving a stern bollocking from someone in a public forum over it. In Slovakia, at the end of December, there was a news piece where journalists were shaming random people walking down the street by themselves for not wearing masks outdoors. Whether you agree with this being necessary or not, and I'm not here to debate that particular point, I can't imagine how publicly shaming someone on national television could be considered a remotely valuable service to society. So, when the alternative could possibly be some two-bit Buzzfeed-lite journalist playing judge, jury, and executioner, I can't say I blame these people for lying, either.

 

[Wayside Observer]

12 minutes ago, PCC Guy said:

I haven't heard anything one way or the other about the frequency of PCR test returning false positives, so I'm not going to comment on that, but there's also this alternative possibility, which suggests that remnants of the virus RNA can stick around in your body months after you've cleared your infection, and which makes all these places requiring negative test results to be pretty exasperating. In any case, I too wish @captaintrolley's mother a safe and speedy recovery.

I wouldn't be surprised if people were less than truthful about their opinions polled because of societal pressure. It's one thing to have your own thoughts and ideas that you keep to yourself, but quite another when you face the possibility of receiving a stern bollocking from someone in a public forum over it. In Slovakia, at the end of December, there was a news piece where journalists were shaming random people walking down the street by themselves for not wearing masks outdoors. Whether you agree with this being necessary or not, and I'm not here to debate that particular point, I can't imagine how publicly shaming someone on national television could be considered a remotely valuable service to society. So, when the alternative could possibly be some two-bit Buzzfeed-lite journalist shaming you for diverging from the social consensus, I can't say I blame these people for lying, either.

I would've been ambushed by some "journalist" reporting for one of those far right fringe blogs back in the summer if it weren't for the fact that I had an awful day at work.  It was a day shift, it was pretty horrible and I couldn't wait to get out of there and when it was finally over, I took off and stomped out the back door of the building and started pounding the pavement towards the parking lot I left my truck in mind completely checked out, totally oblivious to this guy shouting "Sir!  Sir!  Sir!  Sir!  Sir!" who I honestly thought was panhandling.

Turns out this clown had a phone rolling and was gotchaing everyone out on the street and in the damn building without a mask on even though it wasn't required yet.  Turns out I didn't make the cut since all I did was stomp away to go get the truck and drive home completely ignoring this clown since I was so singlemindedly focused on getting away from work as fast as possible.  Other people including one of the security guards weren't so lucky and had their 15 seconds of fame on some nutcase blog.

I'm not advocating doing this, but it used to be if someone started trespassing and shoving a camera uninvited into people's faces, you could have the satisfaction of ripping the film out of it and ruining the footage or pulling the tape out and walking off with hundreds of feet of it and tell them to have a nice day.  With little solid state memory cards or cellular data and live streams, all you can do is ignore and walk away without any engagement at all, which is what I inadvertently did.  It was only the next day when I got back to work and someone had emailed me the gotcha piece that I found out what I stamped past the previous afternoon, which apparently was worth editing out of the final cut that got put online.  So yeah, I totally get it, and yeah, journalists doing that sort of shaming business on TV or live to web are taking chances with crossing paths with the wrong person and having a bad "let me see that camera a minute" moment if not worse.

[T3G]

Today at work, I was helping a co-worker lift a temporary metal shelf into one of the big, fixed shelves we have in our aisles. In doing so we accidentally hit a light tube which is there to light up the display, and it came loose out of its fitting and toppled right toward me. Fortunately, the cable holding it was strong enough that it didn't fall to the ground, and double fortunately there was no mercury warning so even if it had broken the circumstances probably would've been more agreeable than they would've been if it was a fluorescent tube, but even so: if things were different, a whole ass light tube would have fallen on my head. A few weeks ago I was helping a customer load some type of fibreglass (?) board into his truck and bits of it were coming off in the wind and they flew right into my eye. I washed my eyes out and all was well again but there's another thing that threatened my physical well being in some way.

Between this; the lifting of heavy shit like drywall and bags of soil; the driving of forklift trucks; the handling of various products like paint, adhesives, sealants, drywall compound, cement, whose packages can end up breaking through accidents; the presence of a rusty nail sticking out of the wall in one of our storage rooms (which I almost impaled myself on back in the summer); it is a wonder to me that no one has chosen to concern themselves with the fact that there are a lot of opportunities in the store for things to go wrong and for employees to end up in the already over-burdened hospitals.

Meanwhile, if I wanted to go out with the express intention of taking photos, I'm not, strictly speaking, allowed to do this, even though I'm much less of a danger to myself off the clock than I am on the clock. I wish someone would explain to me why this makes sense. Sure, people need to work, and I'm not saying we should throw our store out of work - that would also be insane - but the cognitive dissonance at work here is nothing short of amazing.

[Wayside Observer]

15 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

Today at work, I was helping a co-worker lift a temporary metal shelf into one of the big, fixed shelves we have in our aisles. In doing so we accidentally hit a light tube which is there to light up the display, and it came loose out of its fitting and toppled right toward me. Fortunately, the cable holding it was strong enough that it didn't fall to the ground, and double fortunately there was no mercury warning so even if it had broken the circumstances probably would've been more agreeable than they would've been if it was a fluorescent tube, but even so: if things were different, a whole ass light tube would have fallen on my head. A few weeks ago I was helping a customer load some type of fibreglass (?) board into his truck and bits of it were coming off in the wind and they flew right into my eye. I washed my eyes out and all was well again but there's another thing that threatened my physical well being in some way.

Was this one of those things that looks like a fluorescent tube but really contains a strip of LEDs?  Either way, getting clocked on your head isn't a good day at work so I'm glad you managed to avoid that plus the possible mercury exposure had it been a fluro that had broken.  Flyind debris.  Yeah, not good.  I'm glad you got out of that without a scratched cornea or any other eye injury.

15 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

Between this; the lifting of heavy shit like drywall and bags of soil; the driving of forklift trucks; the handling of various products like paint, adhesives, sealants, drywall compound, cement, whose packages can end up breaking through accidents; the presence of a rusty nail sticking out of the wall in one of our storage rooms (which I almost impaled myself on back in the summer); it is a wonder to me that no one has chosen to concern themselves with the fact that there are a lot of opportunities in the store for things to go wrong and for employees to end up in the already over-burdened hospitals.

Now this is starting to get good.  Let's see how much fun we can have with all of that.  The COVID-19 panic idiots would love to get impaled on a rusty nail.  There's a vaccine for that too!  And unlike the COVID-19 vaccines, there's no shortage of tetanus shots. 

Hefting around the heavy stuff.  Excellent.  Even better than COVID-19.  There's no vaccine for blowing out your back and unlike COVID-19, the recovery rate on back injuries is ZERO.  Everyone I know who's gotten one has never fully recovered from it.  And sufficiently bad back/neck/spine injuries can lead to death or paralysis.

Paint, adhesives, sealants, cements, compounds etc.  They're not as bad as they used to be.  There's no lead in paint anymore and the VOC levels are way down, sealents, cements, various compounds don't have asbestos mixed into them anymore, PCBs don't show up in either anymore, but pull the MSDS sheets and while thery're nowhere near as acutely toxic as they used to be, they're still not nice to be chronically exposted to.  And broken drywall, yummy yummy.  The dust from that isn't COVID-19 so the idea of getting better after inhaling lungfuls of that is out the window.  Take a deep breath and suck it in.  Oh yeah, feel that silicosis taking hold?  It's a lot more similar asbestosis than COVID.  You want a real mask, one that seriously filters out the fine partices, one that fits snugly and has minimal to no leakage where it seals up around the perimiter when you're dealing with drywall dust especially if it's being sanded and prepped.  Not some bullshit feelgood COVID-19 non-medical-not-guaranteed-for-anything-YMMV-hope-for-the-best pandemic cross your fingers and hope it's doing something meaningful face crap for that.

Did you say, "forklift?"  Well, there's no shortage of fun you can have with those in a warehouse!  Just because the law says you have to be licensed to operate one of those doesn't mean you can't hop in the seat and have some fun.  My grandfather used to be a supervisor at Burns Security and two of his guards did exactly that at GE's lightbulb factory in the warehouse area in the early 1970s.  The forklift derby the two of them did was fun.  Explaining the $100,000ish, that's $100,000ish in early 1970s dollars, of smashed fluorescent tubes on the floor after they brought the warehouse racking down to my grandfather who then had to explain it to both Burns' and GE's managements was not fun.  The cleanup with the escaped mercury and phosphor can't have been fun.

15 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

Meanwhile, if I wanted to go out with the express intention of taking photos, I'm not, strictly speaking, allowed to do this, even though I'm much less of a danger to myself off the clock than I am on the clock. I wish someone would explain to me why this makes sense. Sure, people need to work, and I'm not saying we should throw our store out of work - that would also be insane - but the cognitive dissonance at work here is nothing short of amazing.

It's pretty staggering.  What blows my mind is that people accept it at face value.  I got an earful about something from a manager about some piece of equipment that got shared between people.  At about $80k per unit, I don't think they're planning on buying a test set for each person in the shop, we now know that COVID-19 isn't passed on surfaces anyways, and when I finally left to go home, I realized that the first most dangerous thing I did all day was get in the truck and drive to work on the open road and then the second most dagerous thing I was doing all day was get back in the truck and drive home.  Third would've been the climbing expedition and gymnastics contest I had getting to where I needed to hook the test set up while turning myself into a pretzel in the process, the test set itself was the least of my concerns.

And yet I'm not supposed to go take any pictures either.  And remember, we're all saving the world by not getting our hair cut once again.

[Benton Harper]

Sounds like it may be time to leave this employer

[captaintrolley]

4 hours ago, Wayside Observer said:

And remember, we're all saving the world by not getting our hair cut once again.

Our barbershops and personal services are open once again...  We are still saving the world by not sitting down on any benches. However, we can sit uncomfortable close to all manners of individuals on the bus. Go figure...

[T3G]

On 1/22/2021 at 3:25 PM, Wayside Observer said:

Was this one of those things that looks like a fluorescent tube but really contains a strip of LEDs? 

It's hard to say. This looks like no LED tube I've ever seen, but there was no mercury warning on the back of the case so... who knows?

On 1/22/2021 at 3:25 PM, Wayside Observer said:

The dust from that isn't COVID-19 so the idea of getting better after inhaling lungfuls of that is out the window.  Take a deep breath and suck it in.  Oh yeah, feel that silicosis taking hold?  It's a lot more similar asbestosis than COVID.  You want a real mask, one that seriously filters out the fine partices, one that fits snugly and has minimal to no leakage where it seals up around the perimiter when you're dealing with drywall dust especially if it's being sanded and prepped. 

We carry gypsum boards in our store, which according to a quick google search don't appear to cause any long term health issues, at least not in the doses that we are exposed to it at work. I certainly have no intention of staying there long term. Even so, that doesn't make it at all pleasant to inhale in any circumstance.

 

On 1/22/2021 at 7:17 PM, Benton Harper said:

Sounds like it may be time to leave this employer

I'm not sure if you are referring to me or Wayside Observer, but speaking for myself only, it is a lot more difficult to find new work in the worst economic crisis in recent history. I am probably more fortunate than a lot of people. I don't mind having to go to work with the dangers and all; it would be more than sufficient to me if we all realized that if it is safe to go to work, it must also be safe to go out and take photos.

[GTAmissions1]

This is pretty horrifying that out of all the residents in one long-term care home, only three residents have not contracted COVID-19. The other residents have tested positive for the virus. First link attached.

Especially since it is hinted that the reason for so many infections among the residents and staff is because of an employee who tested positive (second link attached).

It will still be a challenge noting with the limited supply of vaccines. Right now, it is pretty much find the cases and isolate along with other measures until the vaccine does become available. 

https://barrie.ctvnews.ca/only-3-residents-at-roberta-place-in-barrie-ont-not-infected-with-covid-19-as-death-toll-rises-1.5278481

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/new-variant-behind-massive-covid-19-outbreak-at-ontario-ltc-home-1.5277505

[Wayside Observer]

14 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

It's hard to say. This looks like no LED tube I've ever seen, but there was no mercury warning on the back of the case so... who knows?

We carry gypsum boards in our store, which according to a quick google search don't appear to cause any long term health issues, at least not in the doses that we are exposed to it at work. I certainly have no intention of staying there long term. Even so, that doesn't make it at all pleasant to inhale in any circumstance.

Do you? In our store, you don't need a driver's license to operate one, you are trained internally, as you only drive on store property.

I don't believe in being stupid around machinery but there are still things that could go wrong even if you are careful, though. I still don't feel quite confident in judging when my forks are centered on the load and it's not going to topple horribly. I'm not at all chuffed about having to replace the @#$%ing propane tanks, either.

I'm not sure if you are referring to me or Wayside Observer, but speaking for myself only, it is a lot more difficult to find new work in the worst economic crisis in recent history. I am probably more fortunate than a lot of people. I don't mind having to go to work with the dangers and all; it would be more than sufficient to me if we all realized that if it is safe to go to work, it must also be safe to go out and take photos.

Yeah, it's hard to tell about the light.  I was mistaken about forklift licenses being mandatory.  It turns out a lot of places required them and either send you out to get trained and certified or bring in a training company to run a class in house.  My place has alternated between the two and it's been taken so seriously everywhere I've worked that's had them, I thought there was a ministry of labour requirement for forklift licenses.  I heard that story about the night shift guards in the warehouse at GE's factory so many times from my grandfather too, it was believable that some kind of licensing requirement would've been put in place if there'd been enough bad accidents.

X2 on it being a nightmare to find work due to the pandemic.  I would hate to be unemployed and looking for work right now.  It reminds me of the advice and a story that one of my friends at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum told me.  The advice was to never quit a job before you have another one, and the reason for that advice was because he quit SEPTA (I think he was hired on in the dying days of PTC) because he wanted to move to Red Arrow except the Taylor family had just agreed to sell the Philadelphia Suburban Transportation Company to SEPTA and a hiring freeze had gone into effect while all that took place, and he was already out of SEPTA but couldn't get into Red Arrow, so he ended up getting hired by one of the mainline railway companies after a period of unemployment.  I was on the fence until some general policy changes for the worse happened and that settled the stay or move on debate for me, but then the pandemic happened and it's turned it into stuck until further notice.  At least I'm employed but yeah, the resentment of being marched out to work every day because that's somehow safe while everyting else is cancelled because it's not just dangerous, it's insurmountably dangerous is growing because this has worn mighty thin.

16 hours ago, captaintrolley said:

Our barbershops and personal services are open once again...  We are still saving the world by not sitting down on any benches. However, we can sit uncomfortable close to all manners of individuals on the bus. Go figure...

Another example of cognitive disonnance again, right there.  How is your mother doing by the way?

[captaintrolley]

2 hours ago, Wayside Observer said:

How is your mother doing by the way?

Thanks for your concern.  No news is good news, especially where nursing homes are concerned. So I am thinking there is no change in her condition (feeling well and no symptoms).

[Wayside Observer]

This was sent to me by one of my American friends:

Surge of Student Suicides Pushes Las Vegas Schools to Reopen

My heart breaks.  It just goes to show there's truly no limit to the mental health damage the politicians are willing to inflict on people, especially the young.

[captaintrolley]

On 1/23/2021 at 10:35 AM, Wayside Observer said:

How is your mother doing by the way?

Update.

Mom refused food and liquid today and has been placed on a 24 hour three day clysis (intramuscular administration of fluid & nutrients).

She also was complaining of not feeling well. Her respiration rate was up, but her blood oxygen saturation was good.

Mom also has some rale in her upper lungs and is being given dexamethasone for this.

[Wayside Observer]

19 hours ago, captaintrolley said:

Update.

Mom refused food and liquid today and has been placed on a 24 hour three day clysis (intramuscular administration of fluid & nutrients).

She also was complaining of not feeling well. Her respiration rate was up, but her blood oxygen saturation was good.

Mom also has some rale in her upper lungs and is being given dexamethasone for this.

I hope your mother pulls through ok and shakes off the COVID-19 soon.

Anyways, I was just in the kitchen having a coffee and some cookies and watching some finches at the bird feeder near the house.  So I took a look down the yard to the other feeder at the end near the back fence and there weren't any birds on it, but that's normal when the neighbour's kids are playing in the back yard on the other side of the fence.  Then I realized the kids were wearing godforsaken masks in their own back yard with nobody else over.

This has really been taken too far.

[captaintrolley]

1 hour ago, Wayside Observer said:

Then I realized the kids were wearing godforsaken masks in their own back yard with nobody else over.

This has really been taken too far.

Totally agreed.

[pccstreetcar4549]

1 hour ago, Wayside Observer said:

I hope your mother pulls through ok and shakes off the COVID-19 soon.

Anyways, I was just in the kitchen having a coffee and some cookies and watching some finches at the bird feeder near the house.  So I took a look down the yard to the other feeder at the end near the back fence and there weren't any birds on it, but that's normal when the neighbour's kids are playing in the back yard on the other side of the fence.  Then I realized the kids were wearing godforsaken masks in their own back yard with nobody else over.

This has really been taken too far.

Yeah That’s crazy..... when I had a buddy over in the summer we kept our distance in the backyard    and didn’t wear masks except going to get food 

 

All things considered going on in my life , not bad, it’s still hard some days  though 

[T3G]

Arghhhhhhhhhhh... the health minister of Slovakia said today that it would be optimal to get to a point where people are getting tested for COVID every 5 days before they can ease restrictions.

Beautiful circular logic, isn't it?

There's not enough tests being done, we can't reopen!

We can't reopen, there's too many cases!

[Wayside Observer]

7 hours ago, captaintrolley said:

Totally agreed.

 

7 hours ago, pccstreetcar4549 said:

Yeah That’s crazy..... when I had a buddy over in the summer we kept our distance in the backyard    and didn’t wear masks except going to get food 

 

All things considered going on in my life , not bad, it’s still hard some days  though 

I honestly did a double take when I saw that.  There I was standing with a cup of coffee looking out the kitchen window staring to make sure I wasn't mistaking scarfs for masks and no, no mistake, these two kids playing in their back yard really were wearing masks.  What's the point?  It's not like don't live together in the same house with the rest of their family, as they've done their whole lives.

7 hours ago, PCC Guy said:

Arghhhhhhhhhhh... the health minister of Slovakia said today that it would be optimal to get to a point where people are getting tested for COVID every 5 days before they can ease restrictions.

Beautiful circular logic, isn't it?

There's not enough tests being done, we can't reopen!

We can't reopen, there's too many cases!

Testing's great.  So fine resolution testing, every five days, great.  It doesn't change anything unless there's a plan to take the test results and do something productive with them in order to do a managed safe restart like we've been talking about since the spring.  So absent any plan to use the results from the testing to do something productive, what's the point?  It's like the Canadian government pissing a ton of money away to buy tons of rapid test kits and then piss more money away to warehouse them because they're not being used.  What's the point?  If you're not going to use the tests to get results to be able to get moving in a fairly safe way, what's the point of buying all this stuff only to pooh pooh it because it's less than perfect and decide to fly completely blind and not use the rapid tests at all, so they sit on the shelves gathering dust and moving towards the chemical reagant expiration dates at which point they're no good anymore.

[Wayside Observer]

I swear every time Trudeau gets in front of the cameras and runs his mouth, I want to barf.

More travel restrictions?  Excuse me, I don't think anybody voted to be held hostage like we live in North Korea.  And more restrictions is all he's got?

• We need an exit strategy.  The situation we're in can't go on forever, vaccination's underway and pretty much every reputable organization says that's the beginning of the end of the pandemic, so we need an exit strategy for the wind down and resumption of normal life even if it isn't carved in stone.  There has been no evidence of any such plan being developed.
• In the meantime, we need a mitigation strategy.  More and more restrictions is not the answer while millions of rapid tests sit on the shelves inching a day closer to their experation dates every 24 hours that goes by.  Colour coded COVID crap with politically moved goal posts is not the answer any more than the colour coded terror crap after 9/11 was which mysteriously always moved up whenever a bad poll for George W. Bush came out.  There has been no evidence of any meaningful mitigation strategy while the rapid tests that might be part of it go unused and age towards being stale dated garbage.
• We need a serious conversation about domestic manufacturing followed by action.  With the PPE debacle back in the spring, getting kneecaped by Pfizer manufacturing reductions, and the European Union now talking about export controls on vaccines, we need to re-evaluate the idea of being able to make things in house.  Maybe being 100% dependent on others is fine under normal circumstances, which I don't agree with personally, but clearly if things get hairy, being 100% dependent on imports is a terrible situation to be stuck in.  Other than Doug Ford making noise about this at press conferences back in the spring when the PPE mess was in full swing, there's been nothing and there never was anything out of the federal government.
• We need a serious framework to support people going forward.  The mental health damage being inflicted right now is going to cast a long shadow.  There is no meaningful plan to deal with either the immediate or long term consequences that are only escalating as this gets dragged on.
• Physical health is a major concern as well.  Cancelled and delayed surgeries and diagnostic appointments are already showing up as increased late stage cancer diagnoses.  This is only going to snowball as the backlog for procedures grows and diagnostic medicine is cancelled or delayed until things that could've been nipped in the bud but weren't turn into emergency room visits down the road.  Combined with everyone getting fat, dumb and happy after being locked up at home on the couch for close to a year now, there's going to be one hell of a mess to clean up.  There is no evidence of a cleanup plan being prepared.

That's just a short list.  There are a lot of things we need out of our federal government right now that we're not getting and covering it up with more poorly thought out restrictions to play to the "DO SOMETHING!" crowd is a pretty thin veil over the glaring absence of substance.

I'm sorry,  Donald Trump's left the building and he's gone down to Florida to play golf like every other rich old fogey out there so pointing south and saying it could be worse, would you rather have Trump never was a viable excuse in my mind and it's no excuse now that he's gone.  I know politicians think "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste" but escalating popularity due to COVID-19 and dragging it out in a way that's worse and worse and worse every time a government policy is announced until whenever the next election is held so that "re-election of a Justin Trudeau majority government" is the exit plan, is not a plan.

[Benton Harper]

Expect a spring election, don't expect a change in power though...

[captaintrolley]

Mom's doing a bit better, she ate her cream of wheat porridge for breakfast, and had most of her soup and sandwich at lunch. She was smiling and chatty today, according to the OT. She is still on the clysis for hydration, and inhaler for her congestion. Today she is exactly one month shy of turning 102 y/o.

[T3G]

Just got word that my grandfather has an appointment for the beginning of February to receive his first dose of the vaccine. Slovakia right now is doing 28 days between doses so this is an encouraging piece of news.

He also told me that they have around ~500 vacancies on the day of because of low vaccine uptake. I wonder if this would mean that my grandmother, who is younger and therefore not yet eligible, might also end up getting her foot in the door and getting her shots too. Not exactly an encouraging prospect for the society-wide easing of restrictions, but from a personal perspective this is great.

[Wayside Observer]

17 hours ago, Benton Harper said:

Expect a spring election, don't expect a change in power though...

I was thinking the same thing, but if running a campaign with mass vaccination rolling out as the centrepiece, it might have to be pushed from spring to summer or maybe early fall given how vaccine availability has stalled.  I think you're right about the results though.  Trudeau's popularity keeps increasing which I can't fathom because it isn't exactly hard to pick apart the serious mistakes and omissions with what they've been doing.  Provincially, there has been some rumbling out on the street that Doug Ford was thinking about an early election to cash in on his massive popularity gain over early handling of the pandemic after he cratered it to Kathleen Wynne levels in as many months as it took the Liberals in years.  That talk has fallen off quite a bit recently as Ford's popularity has dropped quite a bit over mishandling the second wave even though it remains well above where it was before the pandemic started

16 hours ago, captaintrolley said:

Mom's doing a bit better, she ate her cream of wheat porridge for breakfast, and had most of her soup and sandwich at lunch. She was smiling and chatty today, according to the OT. She is still on the clysis for hydration, and inhaler for her congestion. Today she is exactly one month shy of turning 102 y/o.

I'm glad she's starting to pull through and is eating again, and she's probably feeling better than she was if she's smiling and chatting again.

 

So I was thinking about that bulletpoint list I made and there's a big one I totally forgot to put on:

• Address workplace transmission of COVID-19 in a meaningful way. 

What prompted that thought was talking with someone last night about how Canada Post delays are going to get even worse due to the mass outbreak at the sorting plant in Mississauga.  Then in this morning's paper there was an article about how the UFCW local head at a beef plant in Alberta wants the staff there to be vaccinated quickly (Union boss wants meat-plant workers on early COVID-19 vaccine list or alternate link) because COVID-19's really an occupational disease in that kind of setting settled the issue for me.  In any kind of plant environment where people are packed in pretty close due to necessity, I agree, it's an occupational disease because of the way it spreads in the occupational setting.

All of which brings me back to the whole Trudeau even more travel restrictions nonsense.  The overwhelming, vast majority by a long shot of COVID-19 cases here are domestically produced.  That is, local community and workplace transmission and not travel related.  And that means that ratcheting up the travel restrictions even more is so far down the margin of diminishing returns that it's a waste of time.

Frankly, if there's any real desire to make a meaningful change to COVID-19 numbers here, Trudeau needs to get a handle on the goddamn post office.  The huge outbreak on one shift at the plant in Mississauga alone dwarfs the travel related figures and worse, Canada Post employees aren't required to get tested every time the leave work and go into quarantine once their shift's over unlike incoming travellers which means an outbreak there has serious chances of turning into community spread.  More travel restrictions on what's already a minimally carried out activity that's already tied up in testing and quarantining isn't going to do a whole lot while this mess continues unchecked in Mississauga and that one lands directly under Trudeau's area of responsibility since Canada Post is a federal crown corporation.

If our government's going to worry and pile even more restrictions on the handful of incoming travellers who are already subject to testing and quarantine requirements while letting massive industrial setting COVID-19 factories feeding into the wider community at large continue unabated, then they're going about this completely ass backwards and ineffectively because we could have zero people at all entering the country and it wouldn't matter since we already do an excellent job of producing and transmitting COVID-19 internally anyways.  We need to get meaningful changes done to large scale COVID-19 production and transmission in our own back yard that'll have a large impact before worrying about the small potatoes handful of people coming in that are already addressed by testing and quarantine requirements anyways.  Anything else is seeding a re-election campaign and ass backwards.