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You keep talking out of your posterior about many a thing you know nothing about, I'll be in the corner shaking my head wondering how people like you are allowed to vote, let alone get a Subway Club card.
Yes I'M the one talking out of my butt when YOU'RE the one that declared 'only wealthy people can afford to eat healthy' and that its an impossible task for anyone else even the poor to do. 😂

In the end, I'll go back to my original statement. You should just leave. Your self-centredness, arrogance and ignorance aren't particularly welcome.

Are you sure you're not talking about yourself? I'm just having a discussion, but you don't seem to like different opinions and think that anyone who isn't 100% for fighting the virus at all costs is wrong/ignorant etc. GOD FORBID we should have more than one way to solve a problem than taking a near scorched earth approach.
 
This isn't about a 'dislike of lockdowns' this is discussing the insane overreaction to a virus that largely doesn't affect the general population and even the most vulnerable population. 5,300 covid deaths to date OUT OF A POPULATION OF NEARLY 15 MILLION in the province. In the same timeframe that we reached those 5,300 virus deaths these past 10 months or so, about 80-90,000 people in Ontario have died by other causes and those deaths occurred in much larger numbers in other age demographics than just the oldest and sickest.
It's like you think that number's going to remain static at 5,300 if we let the virus run it's course. You lack the foresight to see that those numbers get *quite worse* if we aren’t taking precautions. Those death numbers are including all of the things we've been doing to date. Without them, it means thousands of non-seniors dead. It means nearly a million young and previously healthy people over the age of 20 with long term or permanent disabilities (long covid). Would you like to permanently require weekly dialysis or a pacemaker, let alone less life-changing things like having erectile dysfunction or never getting your sense of smell back? Because that is happening in all age groups. Brain damage, heart/vascular damage, kidney damage.10% of people infected covid are showing permanent or long term disability.

That you fail to see that is astounding, even having these things pointed out to you repeatedly. And its why your "opinions" are just biased screeds you feel you're entitled to have people agree with.

We do so many things to prevent the other deaths you say "will happen anyway", so don't act like they just happen without interventions of their own. Doctors around the world recommend and have successfully used lockdowns in cases of severe outbreaks. Epidemiologists; Doctors of Public Health; The Medical and Scientific community who've spent their careers plus a decade in school working on this.

Why do you, Joe Schmoe on a forum, believe you know enough to say they're wrong?
Why do you, Joe Schmoe on a forum, think that all these "common sense" ideas you have were never considered by that community?
Why do you, Joe Schmoe on a forum, believe you're *smarter* than these people?

Yes I'M the one talking out of my butt when YOU'RE the one that declared 'only wealthy people can afford to eat healthy' and that its an impossible task for anyone else even the poor to do. 😂
Did I say only wealthy people can afford to eat healthy? No.
Did I say that healthy eating is a privilege of wealth? Yes.

I didn’t actually “declare” it either as though it were some kind of debatable opinion. I provided you links to studies from three universities and a food security organization saying exactly that; that if you’re poor, it’s harder to eat healthy. When you have little money the choice of eating healthy becomes moot as you need to spend as little as possible per calorie or you will be hungry. It's easy to get a lot of calories for cheap, but a lot of nutritious calories on the other hand, not so much. At this point, I'm not expecting you to grok this though, as I've also seen enough of your posts on city-data.com to know you aren't exactly a friend to minorities and the poor.

Really, Harvard should've asked you for your opinion instead of a study by that crackpot professor of epidemiology/cardiologist with an MD and Doctorate in Public Health, who's now the Dean of Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, am I right?

Are you sure you're not talking about yourself? I'm just having a discussion, but you don't seem to like different opinions and think that anyone who isn't 100% for fighting the virus at all costs is wrong/ignorant etc. GOD FORBID we should have more than one way to solve a problem than taking a near scorched earth approach.
You ignore every bit of data to continue repeating a fallacious argument. “Japan’s got less of a problem because they eat healthy”. I don't know how many times you need to be shown there are a multitude of other, bigger factors to understand you're wrong on this; that your opinion doesn't hold water, period. Frankly, you seem to know very little about Japanese culture, but also somehow believe you know that their culture *isn't* the reason why they're suffering less than we are. It makes the irony in your choice of screen names about as subtle as a high school band at the homecoming parade.

That much intention on having your opinion trump facts, figures and knowledge is not actually discussion, it's trolling. And claiming "I'm just having a discussion" is a pretty common trait amongst trolls.

Trolls are never welcome.
 
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Seriously, why are the rest of us hunkered down when discretionary international travel is allowed to continue:
Hmmm.....probably the same reason why I'm allowed to go do a dangerous job but can't go up north in case I get hurt and take up hospital space or whatever.

I think the two discrepancies in logic might be related. ;)
 

I wouldn't worry about this......they're slowing down so as to be able to expand capacity which will lead to increases in production after the brief slowdown.

It's a good thing.

Anyway, bun dem.....I'm waiting for a single dose vaccine and hoping I can get one in me when it's my turn in March/April. These multi-dose antiviral vaccines are killing me.

I'm currently saving up ~800$ for the combined 5 or 6 shots I'll need for HPV and HZV.....months apart. One reason why I'm hoping to go back to school to study pharmacology. Come up with something better and cheaper.
 
....I'm waiting for a single dose vaccine and hoping I can get one in me when it's my turn in March/April. These multi-dose antiviral vaccines are killing me.

I'm currently saving up ~800$ for the combined 5 or 6 shots I'll need for HPV and HZV.....months apart. One reason why I'm hoping to go back to school to study pharmacology. Come up with something better and cheaper.

Astra Zeneca's effort with Oxford is about 1/6 of the cost of Pfizer/Moderna

The price is sometimes a function of a poorly developed drug; but more often, its greed.

Drug patents have become a complete burden on society; I'm not suggesting scrapping them, but we need to roll them back to where they were when more useful medications were coming out at higher rates decades back.

Variable, based on justification, max. 10 years.

None of this automatic 20 years business.
 
None of this automatic 20 years business.
...but we need the 20 years in this country to get vaccine production capacity built again. ;)

Yeah, I'd love to know why the HPV and HZV vaccines cost so much. The HPV vaccine alone is around 600$ for the course of 3 doses.

At least the plague vaccine is not out-of-pocket.

HPV vaccines should be covered as well....cancer is no joke.
 
Story on LTCs and Covid; its a bit disjointed, loosely working around a theme that Taiwan and Denmark both of which lower Covid outbreaks in LTCs have fewer residents per room, 2 and 1 respectively.


What's missing is that Ontario knows this already, literally, Ontario has had policy since 1998 to shift all LTCs to a maximum of 2 residents per room.

We were supposed to get there by 2024.

We were way behind schedule; and the timeline was on the generous side.

Still, worth repeating, 2 or fewer residents per room, makes a material different in reducing spread of all contagion.

1 is really best.

But as with all the other things that should change, there's a need to invest $$$ to make it happen; that means a mix of higher taxes and better prioritization of the one's we have.

It also means fixing the inordinate number of ultra-low-wage workers through both higher minimum wages, but also a shift towards full-time employment and tighter labour supply.

This is critical because it generates additional taxes without higher rates; and because it reduces the number of people who require assistance thus allowing a higher level of assistance to those in need.

A virtuous circle.
 
But as with all the other things that should change, there's a need to invest $$$ to make it happen; that means a mix of higher taxes and better prioritization of the one's we have.

It also means fixing the inordinate number of ultra-low-wage workers through both higher minimum wages, but also a shift towards full-time employment and tighter labour supply.

This is critical because it generates additional taxes without higher rates; and because it reduces the number of people who require assistance thus allowing a higher level of assistance to those in need.

A virtuous circle.
Who knew treating people (LTC residents, PSWs, and human beings in general) with dignity and respect, had social and public health benefits? ;)
 
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From, of all places, the Toronto Sun. See link.

LILLEY: LTC companies put shareholders over frontline workers


So what’s more important, paying shareholders or paying frontline workers in long term care homes their wage top-up? For both Extendicare and Chartwell, two of the biggest companies in the long term care sector, the answer is paying shareholders.

Dr. Merilee Fullerton, Ontario’s minister for long term care, wrote letters to the CEOs Extendicare and Chartwell asking why they hadn’t passed on the money the government provided for the wage top up. The money was sent to the companies on December 10 but as of Fullerton’s January 14 letter, hadn’t been sent out.
In closing her letter to both companies, Fullerton said they need to, “prioritize this on the same level it would paying its shareholders.”
That has to sting considering that Extedicare has paid out at least $29 million in dividends over the last years while Chartwell has paid out $98 million. I’m sure there was no delay in getting the pay out the door to their investors.

In the spring both the province and the federal government joined forces to offer a $4 per hour pandemic pay top up to frontline workers like those in long term care homes. That program ended in August.
In October the province announced its own pandemic top up for personal support workers of $3 per hour.

I’m sure like most people the PSWs would have liked the wage top-up, including the back pay just in time for Christmas but for workers in 217 homes, including many owned or operated by Extendicare or Chartwell, it didn’t happen, thus Fullerton’s letter. In response to the chastising from the minister, Extendicare says all workers now have the pay and back pay, Chartwell says all workers will have it by January 25.

That’s pretty weak sauce and on this, as on so many fronts, the companies should have done better.

I’m not one of the people who bash private sector long term care facilities. In fact, there is a solid argument that we need the private sector building more homes, albeit with better standards, but not paying your workers when the government gave you the money is a bad look.

Now there is some good news on the long term care front, Toronto and Ottawa have joined York Region and Windsor-Essex in vaccinating all residents of long term care facilities with their first shot. Peel Region will be complete by Monday according to comments Premier Doug Ford made in a radio interview with TSN 1050 on Saturday, meaning all LTC residents and staff in hot zones will have received their first shot.
The Trudeau government announced on Friday that due to production issues at Pfizer’s manufacturing facility in Europe, Canada’s shipments would be cut in half for the next month. While provinces haven’t been given new numbers on how many doses to expect, they have had to rethink their plans.

After reviewing the situation, Dr. David Williams, the province’s chief medical officer said that the province will give priority to LTC.

“Long-term care and high-risk retirement home residents and their essential caregivers, who have received their first dose of the Pfizer- BioNtech vaccine, will receive their second dose in 21 to 27 days,” Williams said.

Health Canada guidelines say the second dose should be given 21 days after the first but that in extenuating circumstances the second dose can be given up to 42 days later.

Due to a lack of supply, the province will now have to extend the time for the second dose for others up to that 42 day limit.
The irony is that the CEO of Chartwell, is former Premier Mike Harris, who is expected to get the Order of Ontario from his pal, Doug Ford.
 
The irony is that the CEO of Chartwell, is former Premier Mike Harris, who is expected to get the Order of Ontario from his pal, Doug Ford.
Just a guess that Lilley’s need to pounce on popular topics, combined with his regular lack of due diligence, meant for once he missed an opportunity to blindly defend conservative royalty.
I’m sure it won’t happen again.
 
Just a guess that Lilley’s need to pounce on popular topics, combined with his regular lack of due diligence, meant for once he missed an opportunity to blindly defend conservative royalty.
I’m sure it won’t happen again.

Well, glad to know he cares - so will he call for the law protecting LTC homes from lawsuits be removed? No? Then it's just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

AoD
 
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Well, glad to know he cares - so will he call for the law protecting LTC homes from legal protection be removed? No? Then it's just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

AoD
Isn't that half of what The Sun prints these days? They hedged their bets on opinion columnists over journalists, so every other article is about feeding a reader's rage addiction, rather than being informative.
 
Isn't that half of what The Sun prints these days? They hedged their bets on opinion columnists over journalists, so every other article is about feeding a reader's rage addiction, rather than being informative.

I made it a point not to support that pub through clicks, much less purchasing their paper.

AoD
 

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