Social distancing, class, and hypocrisy

Sweden abandons its coronavirus model

Sweden has banned gatherings of more than 8 people as a second wave of coronavirus continues to grow. "Don't go to gyms, don't go to libraries, don't host dinners. Cancel," Swedish Prime Minister Lofven said.

I guess that is because it wasn't actually a lock down. When Wuhan came out of its lock down the virus did not come back because it only lives for so long and if everyone stays at home it doesn't spread and disappears from the population.

Really A2, "hundreds of millions of people possibly starving to death in the developing world."

Many US states have no restrictions and I am sure it has made no difference in the number of deaths due to hunger in the global south. Anyway, it seems that if COVID-19 doesn't kill you if you're a resident in a long-term care facility, malnourishment and dehydration certainly will. That is something we can take some control over and demand change from our provincial and federal governments.

Buy a computer or the business should supply one like my kids school and my office did for those that needed it

I have been saying since day one of this pandemic that the man camps in the fracking fields need to be shut down. Here is a report with the latest evidence and the cries for more restrictions from the people in the North, especially the indigenous communities.

Bowering isn’t alone in his calls to shut down work camps.

The open letter from frontline health workers calls for Henry to take “immediate action” and shut down work camps.  

“As health professionals, we have a responsibility to uphold the current and future health of these communities, which are now under threat from the continuing of Coastal GasLink (LNG) work and man camps,” the letter says. 

Camp 9A in Wet’suwet’en territory near Houston, B.C. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal

The frontline health workers’ letter is in support of concerns raised by more than 20 Wet’suwet’en matriarchs, or Ts’ako ze’, in an open letter to Henry dated Nov. 30. In that letter, the matriarchs asked the public health officer to reconsider the essential designation given to the oil and gas industry and close work camps, which have also been shown to increase violence against Indigenous women and children and bring a host of social ills. 

“Not only have we witnessed an increase in drugs, alcohol and gang-related violence in our communities, we are now faced with a disease that could kill any one of us,” the matriarchs wrote. “In addition to the risk man camps have on our Indigenous women and girls, we are now facing the loss of some of our most sacred elders and chiefs.”

At the time of publication, the Ts’ako ze’ said they had not received a response from the public health officer.

https://thenarwhal.ca/lng-canada-covid-bc-work-camps/?fbclid=IwAR2uFRqFL...

A2, you bring up problems as though lifting the lockdown and overloading hospitals so more people die in Canada is a solution. 

The solution on this board if I am reading the consensus properly is minimum basic income. 

In Canada the only person that can sign a DNR is the patient not some nurse. I am more concerned about allowing mental health issues as acceptable reasons for assisted suicide. That is not needed in order to allow advance directives for people with fatal degenerative diseases such as ALS. 

Concerning the plight of impoverished countries. The solution is to stop making war on them through unfair trade deals not Canadians dying for them. 

We all agree that there are negative outcomes on the neediest people in Canada and the world. That is always the case. Overloading hospitals would not help them.  If everything opened up eventually too many people would be sick to keep everything open. Covid-19 doesn't respond to political arguments. There is not a single place in the entire world that has been able to remain fully open without first taking drastic measures to prevent it from arriving in the community/province/state/country. 

https://nationalpost.com/pmn/health-pmn/belarus-citing-covid-19-fears-to...

MOSCOW — Belarus will close its land borders to its own citizens later this month to try to combat COVID-19, the government said late on Wednesday, a move the country’s opposition leader likened to imprisoning the population in a Stalin-era prison camp.

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3543

The relatively low death rate is thought to be thanks to Belarus’s large hospital capacity which allowed the country to isolate people early on, says Andrei Vitushka, a healthcare policy expert at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies in Vilnius, Lithuania.

With 11 hospital beds per 1000 people, Belarus outnumbers nations like Germany (8) or the UK (2.5).1 “It’s usually a problem because it takes a lot of money to maintain them, but it turned into our advantage in this situation,” says Vitushka, who is also an intensive care physician in Belarus.

“Belarus, like most of the post-Soviet states, has a focus on “sanitary epidemiological problems” meaning large scale health scares like a pandemic,” says Rasmus Nilsson, a teaching fellow at University College London’s school of Slavonic and east European studies.

This may be one reason Belarus also outperformed most of Europe in terms of mass testing during the first four months of the pandemic. While many countries were reluctant to carry out extensive testing, according to the state owned news agency BelTA, testing in Belarus started as early as 23 January. Most kits were donated or purchased from China and Russia2 using government funds and donations from companies3 and ordinary citizens.4 The country stepped up testing in early April,5 developing its own rapid testing kits6 and switching to the use of domestically produced reagents for polymerase chain reaction testing in May.7 According to government information, there are now 32 laboratories processing samples across the country and testing is widespread in hospitals as well as from GPs.

Again, we need look no farther than our own borders. We don't need a shred of evidence from the rest of the world. We have 9 months of experience therefore our own numbers.

We know what our hospital capacity is. We know how long the delay is between diagnosis and hospital admissions and deaths. It is a three to four week lead time.  That is enough for health care professionals to predict when they will run out of beds and staff.  They tell the government in X weeks we will have to turn away patients. Health care professionals have nothing to gain from shutdowns. They aren't bucking for more money. They are quitting. Statistics showing health care professionals are at greater risk than the general population are not fake. 

During the first wave surgeries had to be cancelled. Cancer treatments had to be cancelled. Hip surgeries had to be cancelled. 

Explain to me why you think our health care professionals at every level, from nurses right up to hospital administrations are warning the government they can't handle the flow of patients. 

Health care workers, like delivery workers and grocery workers etc. don't get to stay home. Explain to me why you think it is fine to force medical personnel to quit or risk their lives on behalf of others when it is unnecessary?

That some workers can't work from home or have essential jobs is reality. That one person must take risks does not mean the fair thing to do is to make everyone else also take risks. If the risk could be split that would make sense but making office workers keep working outside the home would not reduce the risk for essential workers. It would increase the risk to essential workers by forcing them to mingle with more people. Keeping grocery stores free of crowding isn't just for the benefit of shoppers. It benefits the workers that have to be there as well. 

No one here thinks it is okay that drug addicts and people with mental health issues are suffering even more because of the restrictions but Covid didn't create these problems it only made them more visible and more acute. We definitely should be doing more. Risking the lives of everyone else would not solve the problem it would make it worse. Even more addicts and mentally ill people would be dying as they are always last in line. It would be no different when beds and respirators are being rationed. 

No one here thinks it is acceptable for drug addicts to die at any time regardless of Covid. The response to covid didn't create the crisis. Addicts didn't just start dying recently. I think everyone on this board supports full access to medical grade drugs for addicts. We all see it as a medical problem not a law enforcement issue. 

Belaris is an excellent example. We should have more beds per capita. It is not something we can have tomorrow. It takes years to train medical professionals and build hospitals. I have been saying for months that it is outrageous that we don't have widespread testing by now so we could limit restrictions. It is outrageous that we don't have enough PPEs even now. It is outrageous that corporations are benefiting from Covid while people suffer. I could list a lot more outrages.

What is not an outrage is restrictions aimed at slowing the spread enough to prevent our health care systems from collapsing. That would be catastrophic. It already has been catastrophic in nursing homes which did collapse under the pressure leaving people to die of dehydration and starvation due to lack of staff. Did you volunteer to do that kind of work because I didn't. I'm not willing to work in a care home or hospital. The least we can do for people who are doing that work is to stay out of their way by remaining at home. 

The workers can fend for themselves, right?  Giving out money to people who were unemployed was a bad idea?

I agree. When it comes to pandemics primarily I trust immunologists, nurses, doctors, scientists, and other medical and health care professionals. Nurses and doctors are making very significant sacrifices, sometimes even with their lives.