1. The disaster at Vancouver's Little Mountain Place care home - 41 elders dead, 87% infected - is stunning. How did it occur? A leaked briefing by VCH investigator says infected staff tried to "push through" symptoms & kept going to work. Result? Tragedy scmp.com/news/china/art…
2. Pre-outbreak covid detection system at LMH (and across BC homes) is based on "active self-monitoring" by staff, instead of having them tested. It failed. Multiple infected carers infected numerous frail residents, other staff, said VCH officer Dr Andrew Hurlburt in Dec 29 call
3. As staff started going down, it created roster shortages, and a deadly snowball effect. Other staff fell prey to the phenomenon of "presenteeism" - they downplayed their own symptoms because they felt compelled to make up for the shortages. All told, 70 staff would be infected
4. Dr Hurlburt:
5. Relatives of LMP residents (who are mostly members of the Chines and Asian communities) told me they were bewildered as the death toll mounted: 5, 17, 31, 38...each weekly update came like a bombshell. They are angry at the handling of the crisis
6. What can be learned? Without talking directly to LMP epidemiologist Ashleigh Tuite says rapid tests shd be embraced in care homes. Screening staff w/ questionnaires? "Somebody can be asymptomatic. You won’t know they are infectious if they are asymptomatic/mildly symptomatic"
7. TL;DR? BC's non-testing pre-outbreak detection system for care homes failed catastrophically at Little Mountain Place. Infected staff - asymptomatic or downplaying their symptoms - kept coming to work, with best of intentions. But a horrific outcome: BC's deadliest outbreak
(PS: rather oddly, I've received some negative comments for mentioning Little Mountain Place catered to Chinese community. Most residents - 50-70%, say relatives - are Chinese/east Asian. My response? The SCMP reports on Vancouver's Chinese communities. That's in my mandate)
And full credit to @NEWS1130 and @lisa_steacy and @Bernardo1130 for being the first to reveal the extent of this outbreak, BC's worst, at a time when VCH and LMP refused to even discuss the numbers. They were on this before Christmas
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So, regarding Kevin Falcon and his probably run for BC Lib leadership. Falcon was instrumental in creating BC Panda Bonds, joined by HSBC on trip to China to pitch the idea of the yuan-denominated bonds. He left govt in 2013 to join the #VanRe industry as VP of Anthem Capital
At the time, Anthem CEO Eric Carlson said Falcon’s duties were to “assist in raising [money] from institutional and individual investors.” HSBC would go on to be the joint lead underwriter of BC panda bond, along with Bank of China
The BC Lib govt would go on to pitch the province to China (and elsewhere in Asia) as an investment destination on the unusual basis of the strength of its real estate price growth. These slides are from the province's 2016 pitch to Asian investors
So, the NYT’s story about AI-generated faces is getting a lot of attention. It’s a phenom I encountered when I was recently mobbed by pro-CCP folk on Twitter and some of them used AI-generated avatars, like this one:
Look pretty normal but there are a number of “tells”. Let’s look. Here’s one: a weird fleshy protuberance out of the side of her head that clearly isn’t an ear
Here’s another: a missing earring. AI faces often have missing or mismatched earrings
You mean, you were invited to TRU by the TRU Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which like other CSSA’s falls under the CCP United Front Work Dept and which held this flag raising in military type uniforms?
The same umbrella organization whose McMaster branch was expelled from the university for ratting out a Uygur to the Chinese consulate, right? cbc.ca/amp/1.5298882
So what you really meant to say is that you were invited to give a speech by a group under the Chinese government whose members elsewhere have acted as informants for the CCP on Canadian soil, right?
It occurs to me that most people haven’t got any concept of how large a crowd of one million people actually is. They haven’t the faintest idea what it looks like
Here’s the crowd in Freedom Plaza. It’s about 1.6hectares, including the roads. This isn’t a super dense. You cld walk thru most parts. At one person per sq meter (tight enough to hit people all round if you spin with bent elbows), it’s abt 16,000 ppl
If the govt won’t do it, then private citizens, businesses and institutions should do it themselves. Require masks and politely refuse to engage with unmasked folk indoors