Forced Exposure in Hospitals

If you're feeling unwell, McMaster is advising you to NOT go to a hospital because they no longer require masks there, and they don't want people in there spreading their diseased germs around. Wha...?? Some doctors and nurses are excited to ditch their masks, despite the potential harm that could come to their patients. 

Of course this message blatantly ignores the over 30% of people who have an asymptomatic case and have no idea that they're carrying and spreading a brain-invasive vascular disease, which is how it spreads so brilliantly and why masks are so useful just in case!!

There are still a few holdouts in Toronto and Cambridge, but that's a long drive in an emergency.

St. Mary's, in my city, made their message sound happier, but mask-friendly and covid-friendly are pretty much the same thing.

Covid's one of the main reason people are IN the hospital in the first place, and hospitals have already become a vector point for transmission of Covid between patients sharing rooms, since they no longer separate Covid-positive patients from others. 

Enough people are getting sick from the hospital that there's a worry people won't go when they need to. We're back to the olden days, pre-antibiotic, when people went to hospitals to die, and they were a terrifying place. Here's a thread of cases of people who got Covid from a hospital, and this is one below is from @MeetJess

Someone online jumped all over the top 5 stays in hospital image because it's older, from February 2023, but the rates of hospitalization haven't changed that much. 

For the past year, we've been hovering between 100 and 150 Covid hospitalization per million people, or about 3,000-7,000 people admitted to the hospital, daily, for SARS-CoV-2. About a quarter of that, 750-1750 people, is in Ontario. Our valleys are about as high as previous peaks. Per capita, we're worse than the United States, currently twice as many in the hospital! The turning point came in February 2022. 

I'm not sure why that bothers me so much. I think it's because I'm still tied to the fantasy that Canada does a much better job of taking care of its citizens than the states. We're following their guidance more now. At least we still have better gun control. 

Since last April, we're still ranging between 140 and 500 deaths from Covid each day, we've just gotten used to it. Compare that to the 6-7 daily fatalities across Canada from all forms of traffic collisions. Covid is at least 20 times as fatal as traffic collisions. 

So, when are you going to stop wearing a seatbelt?? And when is this government going to stop fining people for not wearing one? 

Could you imagine if they had fined anyone not masking in public?? Covid would have ended in a month! Now I'm worried they'll start fining anyone with a mask. That could be next. 

Keep in mind the wealthy still have Davos-levels of protections, excellent ventilation and filtration, upper room UV lights, and access to private hospitals and private schools. The public hospitals and schools have largely protected themselves from legislation, so that avenue's out. It's starting to feel like a big contest to see who makes it through relatively of sound mind, both cognitively and psychologically. Similar to how residential schools were cheaper than bullets as a means to "take the Indian out of the child" in a massive cultural genocide, allowing a virus to spread freely will take out the "useless eaters" among us for free! As I said back in September 2020, as I was teaching online, laptop on a scrap of wood balanced on a radiator in a corner of, basically, a storage room, 

I have that uncomfortable feeling that we're being led by politicians with ulterior motives. Sure, that's always been the case, but this feels really different, a sinking, pit of the stomach kind of different. And I think it's because I'm a pleb in this scenario instead of, maybe, middle management. In my brief time in this part of the world, it has always been some other group who is baring the brunt of the neoliberal shenanigans; my privilege has protected me from knowing it in that gnostic, embodied way. I've been on the cursory of it; the ripples have lapped up on the shore, but I barely felt it. Now, I'm in the group experiencing it like cement boots hardening and dragging us down. We're no longer in the protected class. We're just waiting to see which one of us will die first, and quietly, secretly (shamefully) hoping another school is hit hard enough to shut it all down and spare the rest of us. And it will have to be bad before Ford will let it end.

I still can't shake that feeling that something nefarious is in the works. No longer teaching, I'm closer to middle management, but the type that will end up cleaning up after it all, not the type in a lush office.

But I'm probably just being dramatic, right?!?