In the years preceding World War II, France, fearful of the rising and aggressive German military power built a massive line of fortifications along the German/French border, with a secondary and weaker defensive line along the Belgium border. The formidable concrete bunkers with its large protected cannons were seen as the ultimate deterrent to the German invasion. The Maginot Line was seen in France as a model of good planning and strategy, its massive cost justified if the wall could keep France safe.The Germans simply went around the line, exploiting a weakness through the Ardennes forest in Belgium, completely outflanking the French, leading to a lightning-quick German victory.
And so it seems that the Quebec government's thorough and seemingly well-thought preparations in the face of the coming Wuhan coronavirus suffered from the same faulty logic employed by the French which is and was essentially barring the front door effectively, but leaving the back door open.
Perhaps it's understandable that with the lessons of the disastrous Italian response to the virus, where hospitals were suddenly overloaded, leading to massive numbers of deaths, Quebec decided to empty its hospitals by postponing elective surgeries and sending any long term senior patients to government-run nursing homes.
When the virus struck the government ordered everybody to shelter in place but failed utterly to seal off the nursing homes, with personnel transferring between institutions and snowbirds, fresh from Florida and family just off school break, where many travelled to Europe bringing the virus into the nursing homes with deadly effect.
And so our hospitals were ready and indeed are performing well, but the virus, like the German army, struck through the back door in these nursing facilities with deadly consequence, an attack the Quebec government never contemplated or even fathomed.
So much for the experts.
And so it seems that all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put our nursing homes together again!
Such is the result of a massive catastrophic planning failure.
I hate to say I told you so, but this lowly and lonely blogger warned of just this catastrophe in a post entitled The Government is Handling Covid-19 All Wrong...
How big is the disaster?
70% of all virus-related deaths in Quebec have occurred in the nursing homes, where the virus ripped through the vulnerable at an astonishing rate.
In fact, those healthy citizens under 60 years old who do catch the virus have a 99.%+ chance of recovering, while those over 60 years with health problems who get infected have an alarming fatality rate of between 20% and who knows what.
The government's policy of locking down the young and healthy seems overkill and is not necessary.
All the government had to do was tell seniors to lock down and to force senior residences to lock-down completely
But the virus has already spread to many of these homes and where it has, the consequences are and will be deadly.
Underpaid staff have also been struck by the illness, with other employees abandoning ship in the face of the onslaught. The remaining $15 an hour employees are expected to work 90 hours a week with no protective equipment. The current policy that those possibly exposed to the virus be self-isolated has to be thrown out the windows for these unfortunate workers. They are forced to work despite being exposed because their services are deemed crucial considering that there's nobody to replace them.
I am reminded of those emergency workers sent into the fray after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, deliberately exposed to deadly radiation because there was no other option. Those who fought the disaster without protection had their lives consciously sacrificed by the government.
Sound familiar?
One nursing home in Verdun actually locked the doors (twice) so that staff could not escape after their shift.
Premier Legault, channelling Donald Trump, complained that the nursing home situation is so bad because the previous government was to blame for the chronic under-funding.
At any rate, Quebec's disastrous nursing home situation is exacerbated by the high numbers of seniors populating these homes.
The dirty little secret is that Quebecers institutionalize the elderly at a rate three times that of Ontario. It seems that in Quebec bothersome mothers and fathers are shuffled off to be warehoused in these homes at an alarming rate.
It is a shameful dereliction of filial responsibility, a practice incited because of Quebec's cradle to grave government welfare state, where responsibility is shifted away from the individual.
It seems that her mother who lives alone in an apartment has cancer and is being treated on an outpatient basis. Because of the pandemic, those treatments have been postponed and worse, a government social worker who visits her and provides in-home care, several times a week has not been coming recently for reasons you can imagine.
The woman was distraught that her mother wasn't receiving the care she was due and that she and her five sisters are deathly afraid that mom will die alone in her lonely apartment.
REALLY????
Does anyone out there see a problem where six sisters cannot provide a modicum of care and support?
Not one in six or all six combined are prepared to financially support a private care worker to provide extra care.
Not one in six or all six combined are prepared to take her in or visit daily?
All this dereliction of family responsibility while haranguing the government for failing their mom. It's nothing short of disgusting.
Is this the Quebec reality that seniors are consigned to the trash heap by a society that abdicates all personal responsibility in favour of a government that is too incompetent to do the job anyway?
After the virus lays waste and empties our senior homes, perhaps we should consider what is right before filling them up again.
Phil, you wrote:
ReplyDelete"I hate to say I told you so..." so let me finish
[Sing the following with arms going left right left right...
"♫I told you so
I told you so
I told you told you told you so♫"...
Serves Quebec, THE LOSER STATE right.
Tony and complicated, your wishes are coming t-r-r-r-r-r-u-u-u-u-u-e! In Quebec anyway, your plan to make the old farts the sacrificial lambs are going EXACTLY as planned. Put on your happy faces and smile smile smile! You must think the Quebec Loser State Government is right on the money!
The only thing there that really bothers me is how that Herron home in Dorval has been run. They got a slew of scathing reports going back to 2017, and at last count, I heard 31 people alone died there. This is a facility where residents pay $5000-10,000 PER MONTH for their care, or relatives pay those plentiful sums for what should be top-notch care, yet after three years, they're not getting it.
Workers are paid peanuts, and I heard recently they're being locked in and forced to work ridiculous hours. I hope that among them, someone has enough chutzpah to get a sledgehammer, axe or whatever and breaks down doors and windows to escape. That's forcible confinement, and that's against the law! This, in a loser state where generous labour laws frequently side with labourers. Even outside Quebec, there are laws that allow workers to refuse work if it's detrimental to their health, especially if proper protective equipment is not available. I hope in the end whoever is implementing that confinement policy is sued for every last cent they've got!
When it comes to the francophone institutions, I don't give a rat's ass. This is THEIR government that they love to take care of THEM! I'm not surprised that Herron, the English language institution is one in huge trouble. I saw a spokeswoman on TV addressing the issues there in French. Smile, Tony Kondaks! Smile comp! Your sacrificial lambs, as instructed, are going to the slaughter.
Phil writes: "...Quebecers institutionalize the elderly at a rate three times that of Ontario..." and..."It is a shameful dereliction of filial responsibility, a practice incited because of the Quebec's cradle to grave government welfare state,where responsibility is shifted away from the individual.
Sing the following to the melody of a 1958 song called Lollipop by the Chordettes: ♫Loser state, loser state...loser loser loser loser...loser state loser state...♫
This has been the Quebec that started in late 1976 when the slimy separatist party tried to enact "Affirmative Action" to give its loser population a jump on the far more competent minority that makes up 20% of the population and 40% of the tax base...not to mention Jewish billionaires in Quebec proportionately outnumber francophone billionaires 53.33 to 1.
Between the foregoing and the French language reporters who ask Trudope in the daily 11 AM addresses about helping, Quebec, only Quebec and nobody but Quebec, I think it's high time all of Canada holds a referendum to decide whether to keep or throw Quebec out of Confederation. Trudope won't have the guts to do this because he KNOWS how this would pan out...and it wouldn't be in his favour to be sure.
"The dirty little secret is that Quebecers institutionalize the elderly at a rate three times that of Ontario. It seems that in Quebec bothersome mothers and fathers are shuffled off to be warehoused in these homes at an alarming rate. It is a shameful dereliction of filial responsibility, a practice incited because of the Quebec's cradle to grave government welfare state,where responsibility is shifted away from the individual."
ReplyDeleteCouldn't it also be related to an extremely liberalized and hedonistic way of life where responsibility is mostly externalized (mainly onto les nouveaux arrivants)? Sometimes I even think we are expected to save their language.
I don't know of any other "nationalist" party in the world, which like PQ or CAQ, would support things like abortion (offing their own future generations - I believe les Quebecoises lead the statistics in this within Canada), women careerism which breaks families up (les Quebecoises again), open border policy bringing thousands of immigrants in every year, support for globalist institutions like NAFTA for example, or "alternative" family concepts and lifestyles not conducive to procreation or openly preventing it (the 5 letter acronym to which they keep adding letters every month it feels)...The PQ is in favor of all these things.
adski, I can't state you're all wrong about this shuffling off the elderly, but I think it is in part because hospitals in Quebec are heavily underfunded and so they need to push the elderly with chronic maladies somewhere, so they're pawned off into these homes for the aged.
DeleteI don't exactly know what your problem with abortion is, but perhaps it's because I'm pro choice. I'm not suggesting I like abortion in any way, shape or form, but since male participation usually ends after a few encounters, why should women therefore be forced to carry to term if they don't want? Too, many women have emotional dilemmas making the decision to abort, or worse yet the emotional aftermath that often follows abortion. Yes, for some women, the decision to abort is easy, but I don't see that as the majority.
Actually, its really a paradox that this once très Catholique jurisdiction has societally gone soft on abortions. Dr. Henry Morgentaler, the trailblazer for therapeutic abortions in Quebec, suffered a lot of grief and persecution at the hands of the PLQ and their antiquated Catholic beliefs. Same as well when he opened abortion clinics outside Quebec. The power of the Roman Catholic Church deteriorated with the Quiet Revolution, and Québécois for the most part have abandoned the Church. After 200 years of being led astray and duped by said Church, can you blame them? The corruption, false doctrines and especially the perversion we've learned about in only the last 30 years or so has shown the world what an evil incarnate the Roman Catholic Church can be.
Oh boy Mr.Sauga you are really bonkers sometimes. You are the type that believes what they want to believe so there is no hope in you understanding what I was trying to say.
ReplyDeleteBut back to the story I agree with you Philip. I find the western world in general tends to shove their elders in these homes far too often..maybe Quebec is worse but its like that all across North America and Europe. I had the privilege of looking after my mother for a few years at home but there was a point when it was just too much work and both my wife and I work full time so we had to put her in a private home a couple years ago. Fortunately its a very small one and its been totally locked down and the lady looking after her is great.
But your general idea of the entitlement society is so true. People here expect the government to do everythign for them but even the rest of Canada is getting there too. There is hardly a blink of the eye with respect to the 200 billion dollar deficit we are going to have this year. Its an absolute grotesque amount of money which is absolutely not needed..they could have kept much of the economy running and just shut in the older people hence with perhaps only a 40-50 billion dollar deficit required. Schools would remain open and anyone under 60 who is healthy continues to work but takes some precautions.
Instead they panicked and also freaked out society as a whole..now most Canadians think they are all going to die without bothering to look at the actual numbers showing how benign this flu is for 90 percent of the population. It blows my mind how quickly people can become sheep and give away their basic civil liberties on the basis of a grossly overblown virus.
comp, that you call me bonkers is your opinion, and I'll try to be open minded insofar it was Tony K's remarks that are the more belligerent between the two of you.
DeleteHaving gone back to the March 30th editorial, you are right we're not doing enough testing in Canada. Premier Doug Ford is dissatisfied with the lack of testing being done even though there are enough tests to do more, but still not enough to test the number who really need to be tested.
Recent research is showing one is at their most contagious a few days before the symptoms show. I therefore implies the asymptomatic too may be spreading the virus and so we all have to stay away. I'm not one to easily give up my civil liberties (too many street and other spy cameras now), but because asymptomatic carriers of the virus are more dangerous due to not knowing they have and may be spreading the virus implies we all have to self-isolate.
It's true the lion's share of the virus is most detrimental to people over 60, but a 19-year-old strapping athletic fellow almost died of the virus. Admittedly, he did not know at the time (I imagine) he also had mononucleosis so that underlying maladie added fuel to the fire. If left unchecked, how many other young/middle-aged people may have underlying maladies they aren't even aware of may die? There are a lot of unknowns, so one can't be too careful and complacent considering this virus is apparently far more contagious than the flu.
There have been more and more reports coming out that many cases are asymptomatic the entire period..hence many people dont even know they have the virus. Some experts say as many as 50 percent of all cases are asymptomatic hence that implies the supposed death rate of 1 percent is far far too high and its quite likely the real death rate is no different than any other flu.
ReplyDeleteThere are always younger people dying of the flu..in fact COVID has fewer deaths in the younger population than the regular flu and about the same for middle aged people..its the above 70 and especially 80 when the rate is higher. So, again, lockdown anyone over 65 or so and anyone who has serious health issues but keep everything open including the schools so we can build up herd immunity as quickly as possible so we dont have a worse wave next winter and we dont completely destroy the economy which ultimately will kill more people of all ages.
Below is a death that happened from another flu (not COVID) in early January. There was also a 17 year old who died from the flu around that same time.
https://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/manitoba-woman-24-dead-days-after-getting-sick-with-the-flu-husband-1.4768440
The media of course tells the world everytime someone young dies as if kills as many young as old which is patently false. There are a tiny number of deaths in the younger population and no different and likelyt less than the regular flu.
On an anecdotal basis, I know a nurse who works in western canada for 34 years in one of the largest hospitals in that province. He has never seen the hospital so quiet in his 34 years. There are nights where there are zero patients in an icu area designed for 40. Meanwhile he gets free drinks everytime he goes to Starbucks and other places because he is a health care worker. How many important surgeries have been cancelled because of the COVID panic which will ultimately kill other people. People dont just die of COVID..there are cancer patients waiting to be treated.
Here in Quebec..the worst hit area..we have 1000 people in the hospital with 7700 hospital beds. Meanwhile the seniors home are a disaster..we didnt put the focus in the right area as Philip was saying all along. We knew from day one seniors were the most vulnerable and residences were going to be very problematic and yet the government did nothing for these innstitutions but the hospitals are empty.
comp: You wrote "The media of course tells the world everytime someone young dies as if kills as many young as old which is patently false. There are a tiny number of deaths in the younger population and no different and likely less than the regular flu."
DeleteI'm not disputing that. Unfortunately however, I believe the point to all this the fact the asymptomatic are contagious. It is absolutely true those aging people over 60 especially with underlying conditions are the most vulnerable, but because I have heard this virus is about 30x easier to catch than most flu viruses. Is it true? I really don't know, but apparently this is the premise of this whole inconvenience, economically and emotionally.
Will the economy rebound well? I don't think so. I think it has been stated that today's deficits are tomorrow's taxes. A lot of businesses will never re-open so that is going to leave many people without work. The economy will recover, but it may take a long, long time. I like to think the knowledge body of economics has grown rapidly in the last 90 years going back to the Great Depression, and hopefully there will be means to properly stimulate the economy to assure it's not as bad as the 1930s, but it still may end up the same, maybe worse. I'm hopeful though with the information gathered since we moved into the Information Age and higher technology will be able to soften the blow, but of course nobody knows for sure.
Those born in the 1930s are too young to remember the Depression, and were too young to be drafted for World War II (except those unlucky Americans who were drafted and forced to serve in Korea and Vietnam, both of which had disappointing results) so Canadians especially went through a long, unscathed period of sociopolitical/economic turmoil. At last, we've gotten roped into such turmoil, and inevitably there will be more in the future, but hopefully not within our lifetimes. My father was born in the 1910s and endured both the Depression and WWII, the former forcing him to quit school to help support his family and the latter costing him six years of his life and postponing trying to build himself economically and have a family. My mother, born in the mid 1920s lost her father in 1933, an annus horribilis, one of several for most people in the 30s. She had a brother who at 21 took over his enterprises with every asset pledged to the hilt with debt, managed to turn things around so the rest of the family's economic woes had their blows softened somewhat, but the stress cut his life by a good 20-30 years.
Our good fortune has caught up to us...at last. Oh, yes comp...perhaps I have gone a little bonkers, but confinement does that to people. Many are having trouble being good sports about this awful pandemic, but I hope many still realize there are worse things that go on in the world. Ask those trapped in dictatorships or third world countries...
I dont believe its 30 times more contagious although nobody really knows as we don't have enough data. One thing I keep hearing from the experts is that we should be testing random samples of the population to see how many people have antibodies. There have been some interesting results so far in some random samples such as this one in Chelsea, Massachusetts where 30 percent were found to have antibodies meaning they had or have the virus but many with no symptoms.
Deletehttps://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/17/business/nearly-third-200-blood-samples-taken-chelsea-show-exposure-coronavirus/
This actually would be good news as it means the virus spread will slow down as many more people than originally though already got it hence our herd immunity may be higher than we think. I hope this is true actually as it will slow the virus down more than anything else other than a vaccine which could be a year or so away.
https://www.wsoctv.com/news/trending/coronavirus-cdc-reviewing-stunning-universal-testing-results-boston-homeless-shelter/ZADQ45HCAZEVJAZA3OTCUR7M6M/
Or this which suggests cases in a country in California were 50 to 80 times previous reported numbers. I have heard the number 50 times on several occasions as how much people are/were actually infected compared to official numbers from testing. Remember anybody with no symptoms or few symptoms is being tested. Hence the reported death rate is likely 1/50 to 1/100 the reported death rate which ends up about the same as the swine flu or other "regular" flus.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1
If we look at the R0 number calculated from actual new cases it does not show values more than 2.5 to start out with in the USA and it has now dropped to 1..which means that at first one infected person would transmit it to 2.5 and now its close to 1.5. This number was already going down before the lockdown. The number in Sweden are not any different and they have a lockdown.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=238914
Look Mr.Sauga this whole situation has put an incredible amount of stress on all of us. Its the first time in any of our lives we are dealing with something like this..even people quite old have never seen anything like this or at least the reaction to the virus..the lockdowns and so on. I worry greatly about the longer term impact this will have on the entire western world..we already in debt up to our eyeballs and beyond and now we have literally upped the ante by orders of magnitude higher which is going to cause all sorts of damage to the economy..our health care system.
I believe Peter Schiff has it right when he says the coronavirus is just the pin that popped a huge financial bubble and the powers that be are desperately trying to inflate it again with all their money printing and other games..but its going to backfire at some point in the next year or two or three.
comp, I won't say you're wrong. Inevitably there will be some kind of adverse reaction economically. We can only hope the Information Age, A.I., etc. and our cumulative body of economic knowledge will somehow soften the blow unlike when the Great Depression took place, but we'll only find out for sure once we fully come out on the other side of the Pandemic.
DeleteThere are conspiracy theorists who think the small elite of wealthy people will take advantage and we'll devolve into one currency much like Bitcoin. I hope they're wrong else we'll devolve back into the Dark Ages, or at least some sort of feudalism. With too few people having too much wealth, I think we're too close to that now. The rich, if they don't get richer, will at least still have the resources to rebuild, while those living paycheque-to-paycheque prior to when this all started will be the serfs or serflike. Look at the Orange Turd. Those who primarily support him already have the lack of intelligence of serfs, and those who have credentials are hoping their master will make them the underlords.
can you make Sunday's post a weekly occurrence?
ReplyDeleteMikef, I'll save Phil B. a job. This is his blog. He doesn't owe us anything, it's done at his will and courtesy. He has had a few hiatuses, and again, it's at his choosing. We just take what we can get.
Delete