Dear Health Authority Without The Infection Control

Posted on by John Klein

To follow up my Dear Premier letter,

Dear Saskatchewan Health Authority:

Your capable employees had booked me for a routine appointment at a hospital in Regina. To get to my appointment, I’d have to run the gauntlet to the admissions desk where I could be exposed to potentially bio-hazardous air with pathogens likely to include SARS-CoV2. Throughout the rest of my appointment I could be treated by staff without appropriate PPE recommended by Health Canada to prevent the significant risk of Hospital Acquired Infections like that one.

I have a care link home monitor that allows your capable medical people to get routine diagnostic data from my implanted device, similar to every ~6 months since it’s been installed almost a decade ago. It was used during the height of pandemic caution, to reduce in-person hospital trips that could increase the risk of expanding chains of infection.

While you have at the direction of the Minister of Health stopped routinely requiring low quality masks in SHA facilities, it’s your medical duty to do better. The Minister of Health could not order you to reuse sharps for example, there’d be push-back from doctors who realize the harm this would do to a number of patients while putting staff at risk too. Still, that makes as much sense as failing to require masks where visibly sick people go to get help.

Red Cross in Canada lost their role to collect blood donations specifically because they failed to control infections during a pandemic. What will SHA lose when people look back at your culpability in people dying from COVID-19 acquired in your facilities?

I cancelled my appointment, and I’m letting you know it’s because of your anti-scientific policy of not requiring well-fitting respirators on patients and staff who can use them to reduce airborne pathogens in your facilities. I hope I stay healthy long enough for you to come to your senses, or until you can adequately protect me (and others) without me purchasing a P100 or similar mask just to see my doctor in some relative safety. A man with a heart condition shouldn’t risk catching a vascular disease in a hospital or doctor’s office with dirty air.

People should be able to go to a hospital with a reasonable assumption that they’ll leave it with no additional diseases than when they arrived. That’s less possible in your facilities right now, statistically speaking. I could easily bring home a deadly disease to my family, just because the Health Minister(s) want to fit in with other health authorities unwilling to explain their lax change to mask policy during an airborne pandemic.

Sincerely,

John Klein
Regina, SK

P.S. The appointment was pushed back more than 10 days, since I was in the USA during the original appointment time, but there’s still that archaic policy being enforced. It was created when it was thought ‘novel coronavirus’ was only found in travelers from the USA. Whoever is responsible for making health policy make sense, really doesn’t do a very good job.

UPDATE:

Regina Client Concerns, SHA

Thank-you for reaching out. This auto-reply is just to let you know that Client Concerns (Regina area) has received your email.

Please know that if you are in care in one of our SHA, the Manager of the department or unit may be able to assist you in a more timely manner.

Our office hours are 8am-4pm Monday to Friday, closed Statutory holidays.

Sincerely,
CLIENT CONCERNS – REGINA AREA
Saskatchewan Health Authority”

UPDATE II:

“Thank you for sharing your concerns with us. Your feedback is valued and appreciated.

I will forward your email to our senior leadership team for their review and consideration. It is our utmost priority to provide our clients with safe and efficient care, and we consider all feedback instrumental in achieving this objective.

Jennie Antal

Client Concerns – Associate| Patient Safety – Associate
Quality and Safety
Saskatchewan Health Authority”

Saskatoon Hate

Posted on by John Klein

2 Catholic school administrators did damage to their city’s reputation by discouraging teachers and then parents from allowing their kids to attend a welcoming and inclusive space at a corporate sponsored event in their city. Homophobes and transphobes have been siding with the traditionally homophobic and hate-mongering church school system, even after the Pope told Catholics to soften their stance against homosexuality in recent months.

===

And an unrelated story from Saskatoon: A cement truck driver struck and killed a mother in front of her children. MSM screwed up their articles about it by not even mentioning that there was a driver of the truck involved, let alone what charges were laid if any.

Plague Update: What Victims Look Forward To

Posted on by John Klein

If you’re not among the millions killed outright by a SARS-CoV2 infection, your arteries have been stiffened.

From a video by Dr. Rae Duncan at Newcastle University:

Why are stiffer arteries a concern?

Why else could it be an absolutely terrible idea to infect everyone with this virus and its variants?

A majority of Canadians have been infected. At least 2/3rds.

If 80% of a 1/3rd develop tremors later in life, that’s approaching 1 in 4 people. This sound like a manageable health crisis still?

Plague Update: If We Don’t Report It, It Doesn’t Exist

Posted on by John Klein

As governments suppressed the data, so news would have less to report about the pandemic, more people died than before, as the public became less cautious and more likely to consume and mingle in public spaces like bars and stores. The federal government is doing as much harm as provincial Conservative ones.

“You Do You” doesn’t work for Public Health.

Debunking A MAGA Video Against EVs

Posted on by John Klein

I got a mass email two days ago with a video attached of the Republican McClintock spouting lies and misdirection about EVs, oil, climate change, and his place in history. The sender apparently didn’t realize how they were being manipulated into sending misinformation to their contacts.

“Harry sent this to his cousin ( who has an EV ) it didn’t go over to good .L.O.L Guess they can’t stand the truth. I think this guy make a lot of sense ——P”

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=535268254736855

No, the video is really rather ignorant. Here’s a few reasons why:

-He cites needing more cobalt, 6 times more, but Telsa has a battery that uses zero cobalt, so why would we need 6 times more??

– He doesn’t want to admit that electric motors are more efficient than engines, and the electricity can come from wind, in which Texas is leading the nation.

– America has never produced more oil, there’s no war on fossil fuel production, and Biden is expanding it into protected Arctic areas too.

-pretends that no damage to the environment comes from drilling oil, only mining for battery supplies (which he already mischaracterized and got wrong)

– He wants EVs to remain “scarce, and therefore more expensive” (he said it, but didn’t realize it applies to EVs too). Norway, an oil country, has mostly EVs sold there now, ahead of schedule.

-He pooh-poohs another 1 degree rise in climate over the next century. We’re already past 1.1 degrees C of change, so that puts us over 2 degrees, a figure widely recognized by scientists as meaning the end of most coastal cities and a world harsh to human life. Pretending that temporary financial considerations are “not going to end well for humanity” is misdirection. Proclaiming people concerned with the climate crisis as “childish” and harshly judged by history, is laughable. They’re precisely the people fighting for a history to be had.

-We’ve had technology to heat homes with the sun, passively through smart design, since 1977. Those Passive Houses can be heated with no more than a hairdryer. Neither party has done much to reduce utility bills by requiring efficient homes be built.

Thanks for the opportunity to debunk this bad video being circulated by MAGA Republicans.


Dear Premier COVID with the pants on fire

Posted on by John Klein

Dear Premier:

The Government of Saskatchewan’s decision to end masking requirements in Saskatchewan Health Authority facilities is a very poor policy change. Many of these facilities are serving the most vulnerable people in our province, those who are chronically ill and immunocompromised. It’s unacceptable and inhumane for the provincial health authority to put these people at unnecessary risk when they’re attempting to get medical care.

We know that COVID-19 is not “just like other respiratory illnesses,” especially when it comes to those who are already ill, like many of those who are visiting SHA facilities. For people with cancer, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses, COVID-19 can be a death sentence. It is unethical for the province to lift the masking requirements that prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses in facilities where people who need medical care have no choice but to go. 

Prior to the pandemic, hospitals used ISOLATION rooms and encouraged coughing people to wear surgical masks. Health Canada recommends N95 or equivalent masks be worn in public spaces, but your policy blunder moves in the wrong direction.

We know much more about COVID-19 than we did three years ago, including that the virus is airborne and that, even for those with mild infections, it can lead to chronic, debilitating conditions. There is no excuse not to do everything in our power to prevent its transmission. It is especially disturbing that the government is making this decision at a time when 1 out of every 39 people in the province is infected with a SARS-CoV-2 virus. 

The government made a grave mistake in deciding to drop these requirements, but it’s not too late to fix it. I’m urging you to do the moral, ethical, and medically responsible thing and reinstate masking requirements in SHA facilities before people become sick, or even die, unnecessarily.

Lying to people, saying you have CMHO Shahab’s blessing, and that you’re following scientific evidence, only adds to your shame.

Sincerely,

John Klein

Regina, SK

Frustrated Farmer Faults Feckless Finance Phony for Folly

Posted on by John Klein

Forgive me for being frank. Scott Moe’s government is going to do Eff all.

Bottom line is our GHG emissions are rising at a time we desperately need to be curbing them.

One of Regina’s best economists is noting how we’re not doing enough, too. It’s the carbon budget that matters, and it’s got a huge deficit when it comes to being taken seriously by governments that would rather explore for new fossil fuels.

Mammoth Ideas For Past, Present, and Future – Sweetish Meatballs

Posted on by John Klein

They took extinct mammoth DNA, repaired it with elephant DNA, used sheep stem cells for replication, and created an untasted meatball grown in a lab in under 2 weeks. Sure, it’s 30 years after the 1990s, so the writer from the 1890s was a bit off. Still, amazing feats.