Bed bugs and a bad paint job: Analogies to rage about the CAQ COVID response
If you have ever seen your paint job basically melt right before your eyes, as you tried to put a coat of water-based paint on top an oil-based one, there are 2 ways you might have reacted.
If you cursed a bit, stripped the paint, tried again with a coat of primer, and grew from the experience as a more knowledgeable person, congratulations! You might be a normal human being capable of learning from their mistake.
If you busted out the lights and replaced them with blue and red gyrating ones hoping it would distract from your laughingly obvious fuckup, I have bad news for you. You might be François Legault or Horacio Arruda.
How to get rid of bed bugs (or not!) with François, Horacio and Vanilla Ice
Before talking about bad paint jobs, let’s talk about bed bugs.
If you ever had bed bugs, you were already equipped in March with the base knowledge to understand the mechanisms of confinement. If you are unfamiliar, you luckily stumbled upon an essay that doubles as a how-to guide on getting rid of them.
As most challenges life throws your way, this one can be approached with one simple Vanilla Ice aphorism: “Stop, collaborate and listen”.
Stopping whatever the hell your doing is the first capital step of dealing with bed bugs. If you happen to find bed bugs in your home, please, for the love of baby Jesus and otters floating away holding hands, do not grab the nearest pair of pants from your floor pile of unfolded garments to go cry about it on the cushiest piece of BANQ furniture your can find. In the face of bed bugs, no waiting period is short enough to take action. The thing to do upon discovery is containment.
Now, since this piece is still about the abysmal CAQ response to COVID, let’s talk about the “Stop” step of their response to COVID. Incredibly enough, the CAQ initial response, although arguably too late under the scrutiny of insight, was well within the norms at the time. After the confirmation of a first case on February 27th, the schools in Québec went into lockdown on March 13th, followed by most businesses in the following days, roughly 2 weeks after the first official case. In comparison, New-Zealand, that is generally lauded for its exceptional response to the pandemic, went in full national lockdown 25 days after its first official case.
Life in plastic, it’s fantastic
Back to bed bugs! The containment and elimination technique of bed bugs is a nerve-wrecking experience based on the premise that they are everywhere and that the treatments against them are kinda tentative more than anything at this point (a bit like a novel virus…). The two things that actually work against them is extreme heat and extreme cold. So, until you get rid of them completely, two parallel processes will happen and last until they are gone:
1- Exterminators will look for the path that they took, so they don’t come back once you got rid of them, and try to poison the ones that are already there
2- Your whole life will be transferred in a series of plastic bags.
In order to get rid of bed bugs, you need to pay very close attention to what might be infected and what is treated. On day one, every piece of fabric you possess is presumed riddled with the disgusting little beasts. So everything needs to be washed and blasted with the fury of the highest temperature setting of your dryer, genuine wool be damned. Whatever piece of textile that survived the hell fire of the drying machine is then put in a hermetically closed plastic bag that’s going to be your new closet for the next couple of weeks, because, as mentioned earlier, the extermination treatment for bed bugs is meh at best. So, for the whole duration of the seek and destroy mission in your apartment, you need to keep up the daily routine of quarantining your worn and unworn clothes in separate hermetic bags, because everything you have worn is now presumed crawling with tiny and gross bloodsuckers. In COVID terms, this is where the CAQ went very, very wrong.
As you can imagine, cycling your clothes through plastic bags is physically and emotionally draining, particularly if you’re an usually very tidy person. But, if you’re particularly tasty to bed bugs, you understand that the discomfort is a necessary part of the path that will lead to the end of you moonlighting as a bloodsuckers’ buffet and this is what you want at the end, because being a source of nutriment for a colony of you-eating mites is not gonna work for you long-term.
So, you begrudgingly hold your end of the deal knowing that the exterminators you hired are doing a top-notch job at combing trough your apartment, spraying the bugs that are already there and making sure they don’t have an active path from which to come back. Unless, of course, you hired François Legault and Horacio Arruda to de-bug your apartment.
An utter waste of time
I cannot stress enough how fundamental the combination of the two processes is to the elimination of bed bugs. Spraying the surfaces that can’t be put in the dryer does nothing if eggs always end up in clothes and restart the cycle. Developing a sanity-challenging clothe sorting discipline does nothing if the very source of the problem is never handled. If you’ve been following, you already know that, in the context of COVID, this complementarity mirrors the way confinement goes hand in hand with the establishment of an apparatus of science-based measures, including the development of a contact-tracing plan and the restructuration of the healthcare system’s human resources to avoid spreading the virus between hot and cold zones. In other words, the CAQ’s only job during the confinement was to make sure we had a safe public sphere to go back to once we would be done pondering Carole Baskin’s involvement in her first husband disappearance.
But if Emergency Alert recently slid in your DMs to inform you of the beginning of the after-8 purge, you already know that while you were metaphorically keeping your whole wardrobes in carefully designated bags, the CAQ’s extermination service was busy jerking off in your apartment using your WiFi before telling you it was fine to put your clothes back in your drawers without as much a flipping your mattress to see what was underneath.
Starting May 4th, Québec was the first Canadian province to start reopening its economy, with 11685 active cases province-wide, a whooping 38% of Canada’s active cases of COVID at the time, for only 23% of its population. Ontario, by comparison, didn’t start opening until June 12, with roughly 3000 active cases in nearly double the Québec’s population.
The cherry on top of this sundae of exhausted healthcare workers is the absolutely cavalier way Québec reopened its economy, maximising the utter and complete waste of strides made during the confinement. While New-Brunswick (that has more or less beaten the pandemic NZ-style as of now) opened up by gradually enlarging kinship bubbles that are easy to observe and contain, Québec figured it was fine to just, you know, wing it. If we come back to our bed bug analogy, it’s like if, on top of all their other failures, your exterminators also told you it was fine to mix your bag of worn and unworn clothes and to just put them back as is in the drawer without bothering with a wash. If the two provinces had been playing a game of Minesweeper, New-Brunswick would have opened a corner of the board and carefully tried to expend its demined territory by deduction work, while Québec would have been poking around the board thinking it was possible to beat the game this way.
Oh yeah, on a side note, the contact tracing app that was available nationwide since early August was only activated in Québec in October. Because of reasons.
Wasn’t there a bad paint job involved?
So why did we start off this essay with an analogy about a very bad paint job? Well, because in the end, this exploration of our confinement’s past is actually very much about our confinement’s future. We know the pain of working hard at one thing and having to start all over again for a reason that’s out of our control. I want to make it exceedingly clear that the CAQ government carelessly wasted the output of our confinement effort with a series of mind bogglingly ridiculous decisions that have to be attributed to a tremendous amount of incompetence if we wish to avoid attributing it to malice.
We have every right to be angry with the way the CAQ government asked us to make enormous sacrifices that amounted to basically nothing, and I completely understand people not wanting to start over again with a new confinement, fully knowing that the last time around, CAQ did not hold their end of the deal by a long shot. But the sad truth is that even though the fruit of our labor has been robbed from us by crass ineptitude, the job that was ruined still has to be done.
We endangered our sanity and our livelihood thinking we were doing the right thing, doing our part in making our community safer, hand in hand with our government. Instead, the CAQ made us metaphorically fuck up a paint job to an extent they refuse to acknowlege. But the job is very much ruined and very much needs to be redone.
Against the most elemental notion of common sense, the CAQ government is once again planning on making a complete waste of our time while throwing at us a ridiculous, insulting and counter-productive measure as a misdirection while rushing directly into a wall and an inevitable second confinement.
As of now, school children have about 3 weeks of confinement under their belt, thanks to the holiday breaks that were already at the school calendar. With hospitals running above 100% occupancy, efficient measures are necessary now or in a very short order. Right now, we can piggybank on the Christmas holidays to achieve a 6-week period of confinement at the price of only 3 weeks by waiting a little bit longer to open the schools. But in yet another bid of theatrics that will inexorably end with imaginary delinquents being thrown under the bus to cover up the CAQ abyssal management of the crisis, the government plans to throw away the 3-week advantage we have now and open the schools for a period that has every statistical chance of being extremely short, ultimately leading to at least double the amount of school days missed.
Luckily, now we are fully aware of the extend of the CAQ’s cartoonish incompetence, so we can make the collective decision of never blindly following them ever again and to make them accountable for their mistakes.
What about collaborate and listen?
If you paid attention, you should remember that the whole plan for fighting both bed bugs and COVID involves 2 more steps we didn’t talk about. We will extensively touch upon them in the second part of this essay, where we will explore the full extent of the curfew’s ridiculousness talk about the way the CAQ subverts collaboration. Stay tuned, my cool cats and kittens.