The COVID-19 pandemic

[ac3r]

What parts of society exactly are unvaxxed people barred from? There are a handful of workplaces, and restaurants, bars, and gyms (which are now closed to everyone) where unvaxxed people were barred from.

That isn't "most" of society by any measure.

Exactly that. Bars, restaurants, nightclubs and music venues, sex and strip clubs, gyms, casinos/gaming venues, sports venues, indoor recreation venues such as waterparks, meeting venues, trains, planes, long term care homes, many post secondary education facilities (I think this is still up to each school, but most have banned them), many workplaces and so on.

There's a lot of places they can't access that the rest of us can and do (since we want to live our lives), which means there's far fewer interactions they have with the rest of society which is why I might speculate that we vaccinated people have greater chances for exposure. About the only places I'm going to run into these people are going to be on the LRT/bus/GO train/TTC subway and shopping establishments. As a result, there's a greater chance an infected individual might interact with me while in, say, the subway, a Toronto nightclub or restaurant (all of which I have been regularly going to), but most of us in there will be safe even if we caught it which is what the goal has been. We want to get to a point where it doesn't matter if you contract the virus, as long as you don't land yourself in the hospital and use precious health resources.

Of course, many of the above are now closed, but that's going to be temporary. The unvaccinated are likely going to be banned from all of these places until the pandemic finally winds down and we lift restrictions so it isn't too surprising if one reason we statistically get infected more is because we're allowed to do more.

[ijmorlan]

1) Native Canadians -- they don't trust the government, especially Trudeau, as his father and their party had a huge part in the residential schools.  Not to mention their slow action when dealing with compensation.

What does Trudeau (even Sr.) have to do with it?

I looked through the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_I...ool_system

According to it, mandatory school attendance ended in 1947, and it says the government closed most of the schools in the 1960s. Trudeau Sr. was first elected to Parliament in 1965. The remaining schools closed as late as 1997; except for the ones that didn’t close at all because their management was transferred to a First Nations group. I actually wonder how bad that last school really was in 1997; there is no fundamental reason why a federally-funded residential school has to be a bad thing for the children and their communities.

So Trudeau had precisely zero to do with setting up the system; I’m unclear on how much he did to improve/replace it; I’m sure he could be criticized for not doing enough fast enough. But the idea that First Nations people can’t figure out the difference between a slow response by modern governments to the residential schools legacy and our vaccination effort is insulting to First Nations.

Similarly, the idea that Black people are mistrustful of the vaccine “because Tuskegee” is insulting to Black people. Black people are perfectly capable of understanding the difference between unethical studies that took way too long to shut down (but which even at that, ended 50 years ago — it has been longer since the Tuskegee experiment ended than its entire duration) and a vaccine which is not being tested specifically on Black people but which instead has been administered to hundreds of millions of people of all ethnic backgrounds worldwide with no significant safety problems.

[JoeKW]

You really can't make any insights from that data without controlling for confounding factors.
An example is that those over 80 have a much higher vaccination rate than those younger than them but have a higher risk of hospitalization even when vaccinated. So they are over represented in the vaccinated group and can potentially skew the data.

[jeffster]

Current 7-day Covid-19 cases per 100k

• Lambton Public Health 891.1
• Eastern Ontario Health Unit 854.3
• Peel Public Health 717.1
• City of Hamilton Public Health Services 710.8
• Halton Region Public Health 705.7

• Region of Waterloo Public Health and Emergency Services 689.3

• York Region Public Health 676.3
• Windsor-Essex County Health Unit 675.8
• Durham Region Health Department 669.1
• Middlesex-London Health Unit 664.2
• Toronto Public Health 615.9
• Niagara Region Public Health 599.4
• Brant County Health Unit 579.2
• Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health 570.4
• Northwestern Health Unit 568.0
• Ottawa Public Health 551.5
• Chatham-Kent Public Health 546.5
• Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit 538.5
• Haldimand-Norfolk Health Unit 532.1
• Hastings Prince Edward Public Health 527.6
• Southwestern Public Health 524.8
• Huron Perth Public Health 493.7
• Porcupine Health Unit 487.8
• Peterborough Public Health 481.2
• Grey Bruce Health Unit 466.2
• Renfrew County and District Health Unit 465.8
• Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit 464.2
• Public Health Sudbury & Districts 461.8
• Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington Public Health 453.7
• Thunder Bay District Health Unit 395.4
• Leeds, Grenville & Lanark District Health Unit 389.8
• Algoma Public Health 360.0
• Timiskaming Health Unit 318.1
• North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit 265.1

• TOTAL ONTARIO 617.8

[jeffster]

It'd be interesting to understand why this is. Is it because we've barred unvaccinated people from most parts of society now, so they don't have much interaction with the public outside of friends/essential shopping? Regardless, although vaccinated are more likely to catch this virus, if we're staying out of the hospitals it's working exactly as intended...although the unvaccinated will double down on their rhetoric and say "see, the vaccine doesn't work".

Also, the poor vaccination rates in the Indigenous community is alarming but not surprising. I'm Indigenous myself and maybe it's because most fellow Indigenous people I know are urban and university or college educated, but we're all vaccinated and understand the necessity for it. But so many others do, indeed, have poor faith in the government. Our leaders (Indigenous leaders, not the provincial/federal politicians) need to be doing more to spread the message out there. It's particularly bad up in Northern Canada - Nunavut is having a serious outbreak right now due to the close living quarters and longer winter nights which are keeping more people indoors. Considering we tend to have poorer health than whites or other people of colour, we should be doing everything we can to reach people.

What parts of society exactly are unvaxxed people barred from? There are a handful of workplaces, and restaurants, bars, and gyms (which are now closed to everyone) where unvaxxed people were barred from.

That isn't "most" of society by any measure.

They were:

Barred from all restaurants (and related establishments), theatres, arena's/stadiums, many workplaces (and 100% of gov't workplaces), etc. The only places they were not barred from were places like grocery stores and most retail, but according to PHU's and PHAC, the risk of transmission at those places are very low.

Being barred from the above is 'most of society' even if some of society never do those things (theatres, sports, food establishments).

[jeffster]

1) Native Canadians -- they don't trust the government, especially Trudeau, as his father and their party had a huge part in the residential schools.  Not to mention their slow action when dealing with compensation.

What does Trudeau (even Sr.) have to do with it?

I looked through the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_I...ool_system

According to it, mandatory school attendance ended in 1947, and it says the government closed most of the schools in the 1960s. Trudeau Sr. was first elected to Parliament in 1965. The remaining schools closed as late as 1997; except for the ones that didn’t close at all because their management was transferred to a First Nations group. I actually wonder how bad that last school really was in 1997; there is no fundamental reason why a federally-funded residential school has to be a bad thing for the children and their communities.

So Trudeau had precisely zero to do with setting up the system; I’m unclear on how much he did to improve/replace it; I’m sure he could be criticized for not doing enough fast enough. But the idea that First Nations people can’t figure out the difference between a slow response by modern governments to the residential schools legacy and our vaccination effort is insulting to First Nations.

Similarly, the idea that Black people are mistrustful of the vaccine “because Tuskegee” is insulting to Black people. Black people are perfectly capable of understanding the difference between unethical studies that took way too long to shut down (but which even at that, ended 50 years ago — it has been longer since the Tuskegee experiment ended than its entire duration) and a vaccine which is not being tested specifically on Black people but which instead has been administered to hundreds of millions of people of all ethnic backgrounds worldwide with no significant safety problems.

I think this is a nice summary.

https://www.anishinabek.ca/wp-content/up...ooklet.pdf

The schools were horrible for the kids, and, as you sort of mention, and according to this overview as linked above, the last school close in 1996 -- a full 12 years after P.E. Trudeau retired.

There was no apology until 2008, when Harper apologized for what had happened.

Also sterilization of native women:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/9keaev/i...ir-consent

Why would anyone wonder why they don't trust government?

[ac3r]

There's a lasting legacy of the Trudeau's that still impacts people to this day even if they were not very directly involved.

One of my parents went through the residential school system and to this day, she still cannot trust our current Prime Minister. The reason being is that neither him nor his father have done anything meaningful for reconciliation. Virtually every other Indigenous person I know doesn't like them either.

When your family and community at large has suffered through this, it's hard to just say okay well he didn't do anything and shrug it off. It isn't that straightforward. There's very, very, very deep intergenerational trauma that impacts us to this day and will likely impact us for the next century and beyond.

Personally, I don't trust the current government to do the right things needed, but at the same time I don't distrust them regarding things like vaccines. But others? It's no surprise when they do, when our communities are still suffering dire conditions and trauma. A couple apologies from white politicians doesn't fix that sort of stuff. When you're brought up in poverty, living on reserves or have family (or personally) feel the impacts of what was done to us in the past (or today, when we witness heavily militarized RCMP forces constantly battling us as we fight for our rights, high levels of incarceration, unsanitary drinking water, poor education etc), it's not shocking that many of us think they don't have our best interests in mind...because they really don't.

[tomh009]

There's a lasting legacy of the Trudeau's that still impacts people to this day even if they were not very directly involved.

One of my parents went through the residential school system and to this day, she still cannot trust our current Prime Minister. The reason being is that neither him nor his father have done anything meaningful for reconciliation. Virtually every other Indigenous person I know doesn't like them either.

But who actually has, in the federal government? My perception is that neither of the Trudeaus was particularly worse (nor better) in this regard, as compared to other modern prime ministers.

The current government has improved some things (the drinking water situation is significantly better though not completed) but much work remains on other fronts.

[tomh009]

Current stats:

Vaccinated people are about 1.2x more likely to contract Covid than non-vaccinated
Unvaccinated people are 2x more likely to be admitted into the hospital
Unvaccinated people are 7x more likely to be admitted into the ICU

How is this calculated? Because the gap looks even bigger to me with Omicron.

   

[ijmorlan]

There's a lasting legacy of the Trudeau's that still impacts people to this day even if they were not very directly involved.

One of my parents went through the residential school system and to this day, she still cannot trust our current Prime Minister. The reason being is that neither him nor his father have done anything meaningful for reconciliation. Virtually every other Indigenous person I know doesn't like them either.
[…]

Thanks to you and to jeffster for the links and for the personal perspective.

I didn’t say much about how bad the schools were because I take it that in this context we all understand that they were bad, even if we (or at least I) don’t fully understand; just hearing stories and testimony in the media is no substitute for hearing directly from a survivor or being a member of a community that was directly affected.

I was just questioning the specific mention of Trudeau with respect to vaccines. One doesn’t have to like Trudeau to recognize that the work that has gone into developing the vaccines is excellent science and that the people responsible for the vaccines care about making something that is safe. The vaccines wouldn’t be safer, or different, if Mary Simon was PM instead of Governor General.

[plam]

It'd be interesting to understand why this is. Is it because we've barred unvaccinated people from most parts of society now, so they don't have much interaction with the public outside of friends/essential shopping? Regardless, although vaccinated are more likely to catch this virus, if we're staying out of the hospitals it's working exactly as intended...although the unvaccinated will double down on their rhetoric and say "see, the vaccine doesn't work".

Also, the poor vaccination rates in the Indigenous community is alarming but not surprising. I'm Indigenous myself and maybe it's because most fellow Indigenous people I know are urban and university or college educated, but we're all vaccinated and understand the necessity for it. But so many others do, indeed, have poor faith in the government. Our leaders (Indigenous leaders, not the provincial/federal politicians) need to be doing more to spread the message out there. It's particularly bad up in Northern Canada - Nunavut is having a serious outbreak right now due to the close living quarters and longer winter nights which are keeping more people indoors. Considering we tend to have poorer health than whites or other people of colour, we should be doing everything we can to reach people.

What parts of society exactly are unvaxxed people barred from? There are a handful of workplaces, and restaurants, bars, and gyms (which are now closed to everyone) where unvaxxed people were barred from.

That isn't "most" of society by any measure.

So I don't actually have an Ontario-compliant vaccine pass, but that hasn't actually mattered; the only vaccine-required places I've gone to were the climbing gym, until this week, and the University of Waterloo. (I did get my NZ-issued vaccine certificate scanned in Quebec and that worked on the Quebec app, back before Omicron and when I thought things were relatively safe). I think it's reasonably possible to not have a vaccine pass these days.

Quebec is now requiring vaccine passes to shop in person at the SAQ and the SQDB (cannabis). And then the daily first-dose rate went from 1,500 to 6,000. Coincidence?

[tomh009]

The schools were horrible for the kids, and, as you sort of mention, and according to this overview as linked above, the last school close in 1996 -- a full 12 years after P.E. Trudeau retired.

133 of the 139 schools were closed by 1984, the year Mulroney won the election. Three of the remaining six were in the far north, but I could not find anything in my searches that indicated why those six took much longer to close. Two thirds of the schools were closed in the 25 years from 1959 to 1984, most of them in the 1970s.

Did the elder Trudeau delay those closings? I didn't see anything (in my admittedly brief search) indicating that but it's certainly possible. But almost all were gone by the time he retired.

Reconciliation? That's where all of our prime ministers have fallen short, to date.

[JoeKW]

It's disingenuous to pin it all on both Trudeaus. The blame lies with all our leaders, and by extension, ourselves.

[panamaniac]

I'm wondering which PM people think did more for "Reconciliation" than has Trudeau (fils)?

[JoeKW]

It is true that he has made efforts towards Reconciliation but it does feel lacking when the RCMP are acting like a private army on behalf of corporations against the Wet'suwet'en... with that said, this has gone off topic and I'm really not an expert in this topic so I'll leave it there.