[TomB16]

Here is some more conversation fuel... we are heading to Asia for 4 months after returning from Europe. The belly of the beast!

At some point, we are sure to be served COVID tainted egg roll and succumb to the disease while wearing cone shaped hats.

 

[londoncalling]

I have a friend who is currently on a British Isles cruise. When he returns I will quiz him just to see what it was like. I believe this is his 2nd or perhaps 3rd cruise since travel restrictions were lifted.

 

[damian13ster]

Federal privacy commissioner investigating controversial ArriveCAN app - National | Globalnews.ca

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating a complaint about the ArriveCAN app and how it collects and uses personal data.

globalnews.ca

 

[Beaver101]

Quite a few of them can and have gotten it right by studying the data and using the scientific method.


It might make sense for some of the COVIDphobes to get tested to see if their body has a strong immune response to COVID. In the UK, something like 99.7% of people have a level of protection from either an infection or vaccine. I expect Canada to be similar.

For those of us with some protection, the 1% death rate days are long over. COVID is a cold now. Like other colds, a handful of people will catch it and die but the odds of death are very, very, very low for those with immunity.

We have booked a cruise for this fall. We aren't 100% that we will go but I would say 60%. If we get COVID, it will be like a cold. The worst aspect will be having to pay for a quarantine hotel and meals at ridiculous rates. There is no fear of dying.

I have gotten a cold on most of our extended vacations. It's a reality of air travel but I've picked up colds outside of aircraft, as well. We aren't gambling with our lives.

On a positive note, if I don't make it through this fall vacation AltaRed can start a thread explaining that active management, balancing, and diversification are the path to the highest returns with no push back.

... have fun and good luck with your trip(s)! So we're expecting this thread to go quiet at least for 2 months or whatever duration of your trip(s), correct?

 

[Beaver101]

Here is some more conversation fuel... we are heading to Asia for 4 months after returning from Europe. The belly of the beast!

At some point, we are sure to be served COVID tainted egg roll and succumb to the disease while wearing cone shaped hats.

...oh btw, if you're really in Asia, don't expect an "egg" roll, tainted or not. That's a North American invention as with chop suey and fortune cookie. You've to be more adventurous than that o/w it's so boooring. Try the deep-fried bat (with lots of meat) or some exotic animal's offals instead.

 

[Beaver101]

Federal privacy commissioner investigating controversial ArriveCAN app - National | Globalnews.ca

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating a complaint about the ArriveCAN app and how it collects and uses personal data.

globalnews.ca

... haven't read the newspiece but that's a good idea. I'm sure ARRIVECAN can be extended/used to track terrorists and fugitives at the same time.

 

[Beaver101]

Number of Ontario hospital staff off work due to COVID nearly doubled since May

By Megan Ogilvie, Toronto Star, Sat., July 30, 2022

The number of Ontario hospital staff off work due to COVID-19 has nearly doubled since May, the first month the province started to track such absences during the pandemic.

Almost 4,800 hospital staff were off sick with the virus or had been recently exposed during the week of July 16 to 22, according to data provided to the Star from Ontario Health.

That’s up from 2,630 COVID absences during the week of May 21 to 27, an increase of 82 per cent.
The swell of hospital workers off sick with COVID this summer has placed further stress on a health-care system that for months has struggled to maintain adequate staffing levels in many departments, including in ERs and intensive care units.

In recent weeks, a critical lack of staff has forced some hospitals to scale back services, relocate patients and temporarily close departments.

As of Friday, 10 emergency departments have had to temporarily close at some point due to a shortage of nurses, according to data from Ontario Health released exclusively to the Star. July is the first time the province has tracked ER closures due to nursing shortages, a spokesperson for Ontario Health said.

On Thursday, Lakeridge Health announced it had to close its Bowmanville Hospital intensive-care unit, moving critically ill patients to ICUs at its Ajax-Pickering and Oshawa sites. The statement from the Durham Region hospital system cited a “significant staff shortage” as the reason for the ICU closure.

Earlier this month, Halton Healthcare in the GTA notified residents it had to temporarily scale back treatment areas in its ERs because it could not safely staff the entire departments. In a statement to the Star at the time, a spokesperson for the three-hospital network said it was experiencing “a higher rate of staff and physician absences due to isolation requirements following COVID-19 exposure, along with higher than usual vacancy rates.”
As well, an ER in Perth, southwest of Ottawa, closed for almost three weeks in July. Michael Cohen, president and CEO of the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital, at the time told the Star that staff calling in sick with COVID worsened an existing shortage, especially among nurses.

“That just tipped us over,” Cohen told the Star. “We were already in a very fragile staffing situation.”
Ontario Health started to collect data on staff absences due to COVID at the end of May to track the impact on hospitals. In June, absences plateaued around 2,500 per week, then started to spike the first week of July. Some 4,787 staff were off work due to COVID the week of July 16 to 22.

Toronto’s University Health Network, which includes three large teaching hospitals, had 487 job postings in June, said Gillian Howard, vice-president of public affairs and communications, in a statement. She noted some of those postings were from May and that the hospital network hired 420 staff in June, adding that July numbers were not yet available.

On Thursday, 152 UHN staff members were off work due to COVID; of those, 122 tested positive, Howard said. During the previous week, more than 200 people were off work each day due to COVID “with the number of positives each day more than those returning,” she said, adding “we have seen that it is a bit better, but it is still difficult.”

Earlier this month, UHN’s Toronto Western Hospital needed to bring in staff, including medical residents and nursing students, from other departments to adequately staff ER weekend shifts.
Howard said Friday that staffing is a day-by-day watch” but staff numbers for the August long weekend in UHN’s emergency departments so far “looked manageable.”

“COVID-19 affects the ability to staff in all hospitals, every day,” she said this week, adding that other factors are at play, including the need for hospital staff to take vacations after working for more than two years through the pandemic.

... so what happens to those patients in the areas impacted by the closure of their ERs? Are they sent home to writ in pain and/or go die? If so, then I hope the Ford government has enough funds for those upcoming lawsuits.

 

[andrewf]

Quite a few of them can and have gotten it right by studying the data and using the scientific method.


It might make sense for some of the COVIDphobes to get tested to see if their body has a strong immune response to COVID. In the UK, something like 99.7% of people have a level of protection from either an infection or vaccine. I expect Canada to be similar.

For those of us with some protection, the 1% death rate days are long over. COVID is a cold now. Like other colds, a handful of people will catch it and die but the odds of death are very, very, very low for those with immunity.

We have booked a cruise for this fall. We aren't 100% that we will go but I would say 60%. If we get COVID, it will be like a cold. The worst aspect will be having to pay for a quarantine hotel and meals at ridiculous rates. There is no fear of dying.

I have gotten a cold on most of our extended vacations. It's a reality of air travel but I've picked up colds outside of aircraft, as well. We aren't gambling with our lives.

On a positive note, if I don't make it through this fall vacation AltaRed can start a thread explaining that active management, balancing, and diversification are the path to the highest returns with no push back.

It's more manageable now but to call it merely a cold is not accurate either. People get much sicker from COVID than they tend to from a cold, and COVID fills our hospitals, even off-season for respiratory illness, in a way the cold does not.

 

[TomB16]

It's more manageable now but to call it merely a cold is not accurate either. People get much sicker from COVID than they tend to from a cold, and COVID fills our hospitals, even off-season for respiratory illness, in a way the cold does not.

Those people are corner cases. They are about a thousand individuals in a sea of millions of infections.

I've had a runny nose twice in the last five months. There is a chance it was COVID, although I did not test so this is speculation. The difference between those runny nose conditions and a cold is I had to blow my nose once a day for two days. My wife has had the same symptoms and infections, whatever they were.

In January of this year, we had Omicron. It was the lightest dry cough I've ever experienced. If it was any more mild, it would have been asymptomatic. Everybody in the Mexican resort we were staying had the same symptoms. Three coughs per day.

So I would say not equivalent to a cold in that secondary COVID infections have been less severe than a cold for everyone I know.

 

[TomB16]

BTW, a UK study has determined that a large percentage of the population is urinating more frequently than normal. This is not a joke.

I too am urinating more than normal, although it is just occasional. There have been three or four evenings when I have had to whiz perhaps 6 times. I'm a male in my 50s but that's a lot, even for me.

There is no data connecting the urination to COVID. I mention it because of a potential connection.

Zoe data indicates the most common symptom of COVID is a sore throat.

 

[kcowan]

Friends were on an AMA Waterways cruise from Budapest to Amsterdam. Fellow travellers tested positive before boarding and ended up quarantined in a Budapest Hotel for 5 days missing the cruise. So Covid is having its impacts.

 

[Birder]

My friends (a couple in their 60s who are triple jabbed) just returned from a cruise from Amsterdam to Switzerland. They said they started coughing a lot while on the cruise and kept checking their temperatures but had no fever. Nevertheless, they got on the plane (masked of course) and when they got home, used their rapid tests and confirmed that they did in fact have covid. They were not asked to quarantine or get off the cruise. So they flew on a plane with covid, possibly exposing others, despite being vaccinated and using Arrivecan. Others who are not vaccinated and are NOT sick, cannot do so. No way is vaccination stopping any type of spread of covid - I don't buy it anymore.

 

[andrewf]

Those people are corner cases. They are about a thousand individuals in a sea of millions of infections.

I've had a runny nose twice in the last five months. There is a chance it was COVID, although I did not test so this is speculation. The difference between those runny nose conditions and a cold is I had to blow my nose once a day for two days. My wife has had the same symptoms and infections, whatever they were.

In January of this year, we had Omicron. It was the lightest dry cough I've ever experienced. If it was any more mild, it would have been asymptomatic. Everybody in the Mexican resort we were staying had the same symptoms. Three coughs per day.

So I would say not equivalent to a cold in that secondary COVID infections have been less severe than a cold for everyone I know.

It may be that the traditional cold-like symptoms are not as severe (my case a few months ago backs this up) but there are many people presenting with long COVID still, which is not something we see with historical colds. The plural of anecdote is not anecdata.

 

[TomB16]

It may be that the traditional cold-like symptoms are not as severe (my case a few months ago backs this up) but there are many people presenting with long COVID still, which is not something we see with historical colds. The plural of anecdote is n

This is possible but it is more likely we had COVID. In fact, many people who had "colds" are more likely to have had COVID.

There was a time, in 2021, colds were extremely rare. In April of this year when colds made a bit of return, data showed there was still twice as much COVID as there were colds. Because of this, when someone was sniffling in April, there was a 2:1 chance they had COVID.

Because of this, the most likely scenario is that we have had COVID a few times. Your scenario is also possible, but less likely.

Justifying a narrative through corner cases is a decidedly subjective pursuit.

 

[andrewf]

I think you misread what I wrote. I did not suggest you had a mundane cold, just that COVID often does not present with severe cold like symptoms. That doesn't make it benign.

Only 30% of people infected died of smallpox. Does that make it a corner case if you die?

 

[sags]

As of July 29, 2022.........Canada has lost 42.681 people to covid.

COVID-19 epidemiology update - Canada.ca

This summary of COVID-19 cases across Canada contains detailed data about the spread of the virus over time and in different regions of the country. Includes breakdowns by age and sex or gender. Provides an overview of testing, variants of concern, cases following vaccination and severe illness...

health-infobase.canada.ca

 

[Beaver101]

^ The freeDumbers and those screaming about infringement of "their me, myself, and I " rights along with the "illegal" "lockdowns" and choke-them-to-death restrictions DON'T give a fvck. According to them, it's what pandemic? Better yet, what's a pandemic?

 

[Beaver101]

Ontario hospital shutdowns lead to mounting calls for premier, minister of health to address

I guess she has to wait until father Ford comes back from his fishing trip at cottage country (whenever) before she can display her competency by saying something.

And where's the Moore-head in the meantime?

 

[damian13ster]

Not a surprise, but other than destroying children's livers, lockdowns had other detrimental effect:

Hate crime reports in Canada surged during COVID-19 pandemic: StatCan - National | Globalnews.ca

New data released by Statistics Canada on Tuesday showed that 3,360 hate crimes were reported by police last year, representing a 72 per cent jump over the last two years.

globalnews.ca

 

[sags]

More likely caused by the seepimg infiltration of alt right ideology into Canada.