Coronavirus

[bustaheims]

Does anyone personally know anybody that has it/had it?

My father's best man passed away because of it. He had a number of other health issues - he contracted it while in hospital prepping for heart surgery in the early days of the pandemic. He lived in England, so I didn't know him well, but I had met him on a number of occasions.

 

[Bill_Berg]

A guy at work thinks he did, but he didn't get tested so he can't be sure. He just stayed home through it, but he had been at a concert just prior to getting the symptoms. It was in the early days. He also had SARS and said it was eerily familiar.

 

[Highlander]

Does anyone personally know anybody that has it/had it?

My 97 year old Mom died in an Ontario nursing home in February from Covid like symptoms, so we are speculating on whether or not this was the cause. 
Two weeks after we got home from Vegas I came down with a sore throat and fever of 104F for about 12 hours.  When I spoke to my cardiologist two weeks ago, I mentioned this to him and asked if I could be tested for antibodies.  No way he said, don't have enough tests to go around.
So did I or didn't I?  Outside of this, just heard about several people where my sister lives in Oshawa who died of it.  As mentioned only one person in Vernon has died of it and this fellow traveled back from Turkey, fell ill and died, was about 60 I think.  We were told there are only 4 cases in the Interior. 
Just had a Telus installer to me house to switch out service with Shaw, he was not allowed into the house. So how can an installer, install?

 

[louisstamos]

Does anyone personally know anybody that has it/had it?

My old neighbour's great grandmother.  102 years old, she was in one of the nursing homes that got hit.  Very sad.

 

[Bender]

Does anyone personally know anybody that has it/had it?

A guy in his 50s in a different office from me had it, pulled through.

At more arm's length my uncle has a bunch of friends in New York City (a few I'm familiar with through Facebook) where a surprisingly large number had got it. I don't know the details to their experience, but they seem ok now.

Another of his friends passed away on a ventilator in Florida. Mid-60s, overweight with diabetes.

On a side note I wish we had a better handle on underlying conditions and also moved away from the stigma that underlying conditions are always the fault of the patient. I was born with some bizarro cough variant asthma type of thing where I almost automatically get bronchitis if I don't take an inhaler when I get sick, but I'm otherwise 100% normal and have a generally healthy active lifestyle. If I take an inhaler I'm usually fine, but there have been certain illnesses where the inhaler doesn't do much, and things can get a bit hairy.  I worry that I'm at risk even though I'm in my 30s because of a bad dice roll.

 

[Kin]

You know, over in the thread about the NHL's return someone made the case that no reasonable person could ever be surprised by people who were primarily driven by a profit-motive caring more for that profit than for health and safety.

So, you know, it is a bit strange to see so many headlines in the newspaper about just how shocked, shocked, our Premier is that people running care homes for the elderly in the interest of making money cut corners and jeopardized safety in the interest of their own profitability.

It's almost like the market-based economy doesn't handle important social dynamics well. Whoda thunk it?

 

[herman]

You know, over in the thread about the NHL's return someone made the case that no reasonable person could ever be surprised by people who were primarily driven by a profit-motive caring more for that profit than for health and safety.

So, you know, it is a bit strange to see so many headlines in the newspaper about just how shocked, shocked, our Premier is that people running care homes for the elderly in the interest of making money cut corners and jeopardized safety in the interest of their own profitability.

It's almost like the market-based economy doesn't handle important social dynamics well. Whoda thunk it?

You mean the same premier who cut funding to LTC inspections and public health and education and support for children with special needs?

 

[L K]

As long as the hospitals don't get swamped with new admissions I think they will just ride it out.

This is one of the things that is getting left out of the discussion too much.  Shutting things down wasn't about preventing COVID cases.  It was from preventing overrun ICUs.  Having an uptick in cases if they are primarily mild isn't going to be the limiting factor on whether things get shut back down.  Besides we are still on the early wave of seeing if opening things back up causes a problem.  It's going to be next weekend and the week after that that will be a much better indicator of whether we are heading for another problem. 

 

[L K]

You know, over in the thread about the NHL's return someone made the case that no reasonable person could ever be surprised by people who were primarily driven by a profit-motive caring more for that profit than for health and safety.

So, you know, it is a bit strange to see so many headlines in the newspaper about just how shocked, shocked, our Premier is that people running care homes for the elderly in the interest of making money cut corners and jeopardized safety in the interest of their own profitability.

It's almost like the market-based economy doesn't handle important social dynamics well. Whoda thunk it?

I'm not surprised because this is generally what society does but this isn't a new problem with our nursing homes.  Some of them are absolutely great.  Others are abysmal.  From my limited experience doing some coverage work for them, more often seeing their patients on ER visits, we all know the ones that are good and which ones are garbage.  Skills have been downgraded.  Far too many buildings are going to fail accessibility and code standards come 2024.  Every year when dozens of residents die from the flu or a norovirus outbreak noone bats an eye. 

Big changes need to happen to our nursing home system.  The problem is that requires a considerably infrastructure investment and that will come at the cost of other health care expenses unless society as a whole embraces big tax increases.

 

[L K]

You know, over in the thread about the NHL's return someone made the case that no reasonable person could ever be surprised by people who were primarily driven by a profit-motive caring more for that profit than for health and safety.

So, you know, it is a bit strange to see so many headlines in the newspaper about just how shocked, shocked, our Premier is that people running care homes for the elderly in the interest of making money cut corners and jeopardized safety in the interest of their own profitability.

It's almost like the market-based economy doesn't handle important social dynamics well. Whoda thunk it?

You mean the same premier who cut funding to LTC inspections and public health and education and support for children with special needs?

Unfortunately our last premier/health minister was doing the same thing.  The Liberals pledged to increases inspections back in 2013 and three years later backed away from it because they didn't have enough inspectors to keep up with that pace.  The deterioration of our LTC facilities is something that is decades in the making.

 

[Kin]

Big changes need to happen to our nursing home system.  The problem is that requires a considerably infrastructure investment and that will come at the cost of other health care expenses unless society as a whole embraces big tax increases.

I don't think there's a real choice there. Because realistically the public has three options:

1) Leave things as they are
2) Embrace some sort of spending increase to fund a public system
3) Maintain a private system but have enough enforceable regulations so as to raise standards to acceptable levels

I guess a fourth would be to divert money away from other aspects of the health care system as you suggest but I think that's a non-starter. Assuming #1 isn't really an option, #3 would almost certainly mean much higher costs at the point of use because higher standards cost money(as does enforcement). So people would be paying for increases regardless, the question is just whether or not you want to socialize those costs and I think our health care system generally tells us it's better to do that than not. At least with the right sort of tax increases, a higher chunk of the burden can fall on the wealthy and corporate profits.

 

[Peter D.]

Does anyone personally know anybody that has it/had it?

Not personally, thankfully. *knock on wood*

But starting to hear about people we know who have had someone pass away from it -- a former co-worker's mom, and a close family friend's cousin's dad.

 

[TML fan]

I had all the symptoms but never got tested, so I can't say for sure if I had it but I'm pretty sure I had it.

My cousin has it.

 

[PCB]

My 23 year old son tested positive. Symptoms were headache, nauseous, loss of appetite, fatigue. Nothing really jumped out at us as being worth following up on until he started complaining about his feet being sore, when his toes started to turn a purple/blue colour we called the dr. The dr dismissed the notion of covid toes but we followed up with the health unit who immediately recommended testing.
After the results came back positive the 4 of us were placed in quarantine for 2 weeks.
The irony here is that he was the most insulated from people in our family.
In retrospect my other son who was still working at an essential service probably contracted covid and brought it home. He and I can now point to symptoms that at the time seemed too vague to worry us but i am convinced we were all infected.
Testing for us produced negative results but I'll bet we are now carrying the antibodies.

 

[Kin]

Good numbers in Ontario today with another sub-300 day of new cases. And New Zealand looks to have more or less locked things down with no patients in hospital and 5 days of no new cases.

 

[CarltonTheBear]

Good numbers in Ontario today with another sub-300 day of new cases.

Nice. Although based on the mother's day timeline we probably shouldn't get too excited until we see what the numbers are next week.

And New Zealand looks to have more or less locked things down with no patients in hospital and 5 days of no new cases.

It's going to be really interesting to see what measures a place like New Zealand keeps in place for the foreseeable future while we still wait for a vaccine.

 

[L K]

Big changes need to happen to our nursing home system.  The problem is that requires a considerably infrastructure investment and that will come at the cost of other health care expenses unless society as a whole embraces big tax increases.

I don't think there's a real choice there. Because realistically the public has three options:

1) Leave things as they are
2) Embrace some sort of spending increase to fund a public system
3) Maintain a private system but have enough enforceable regulations so as to raise standards to acceptable levels

I guess a fourth would be to divert money away from other aspects of the health care system as you suggest but I think that's a non-starter. Assuming #1 isn't really an option, #3 would almost certainly mean much higher costs at the point of use because higher standards cost money(as does enforcement). So people would be paying for increases regardless, the question is just whether or not you want to socialize those costs and I think our health care system generally tells us it's better to do that than not. At least with the right sort of tax increases, a higher chunk of the burden can fall on the wealthy and corporate profits.

Number three is precisely why we are here right now.  Before Ford the Liberals weren't willing to hire more regulators to do inspections.  The Ford government just cut them back further.  We have chronically underpaid HCW in the nursing homes so they don't want to work there and can easily get a job elsewhere because the environment is pretty toxic for employees.

 

[Kin]

Nice. Although based on the mother's day timeline we probably shouldn't get too excited until we see what the numbers are next week.

Not to worry. I am resolute in my determination to stay depressed and fearful.

 

[Highlander]

Quote of the day from a friend of mine "Fear is high, Covid is low".  I seem to remember someone else saying "We have only one thing to fear, and that's fear itself". 

Strange but in the Interior,  I would say that only 1% of people are wearing Face Masks whilst out. I wear mine out of respect for others, not for self protection.

 

[Kin]

A very good podcast with an interview with Dr. David Fisman, who I think Herman mentioned earlier, about why Ontario isn't handling the crisis very well:

https://thebigstorypodcast.ca/2020/05/27/what-is-ontario-doing-wrong-on-covid-19/