I guess they had to find something to do to keep warm

[Scooter]

Exactly nine months after a vicious ice storm crippled the Greater Toronto Area and left thousands in the dark for days, hospitals are reporting a surge in births.

GTA hospitals plan to handle the extra bundles of joy by beefing up staff with more nurses and obstetricians, and making more beds available.

New parents Nicole Pollock and Kyle Niezen welcomed their son Dallas on Monday at 12:24 a.m., weighing in at nine pounds, nine ounces.

“I don’t even know how to describe it, it’s just an amazing feeling…We’re just so happy to have him,” Pollock said.

Pollock and Niezen were not planning on having a baby. When they found out they were expecting, they were surprised, but not completely shocked as they counted back nine months to when the ice storm hit.

“When you have no power and there’s nothing on TV, what else are you going to do?,” Pollock said, laughing.

In anticipation of the ice storm babies, Lakeridge Health in Oshawa took out an advertisement in a local parenting magazine, letting parents know what they could expect for their hospital birth.

“Parents are telling us they lost power for three to four days, sometimes longer, sometimes less. Most people didn’t want to leave their homes, so they used creative ways to keep warm,” Deb Galet, Lakeridge Health’s director of women’s and children’s health care, said with a coy smile.

Galet said the maternity ward at the Oshawa hospital is now full. On Friday night alone, 10 babies were delivered at Lakeridge Health.


Read more: http://toronto.ctvnews.ca/gta-hospitals ... z3ECUYZOsS

[Guinevere]

Well what else is there to do, read by candlelight?????

[rubato]

Is this just anecdotal or is there good data to support it? How large is the change in birthrate/wk. You hear this kind of thing so often, and never with any data to support it. It would be nice if it was more than merely a plausible rumor.

yrs,
rubato

[Crackpot]

Unfortunately full term gestation is closer to ten months.

[Guinevere]

"Full term" is 39-40 weeks, or 273-280 days.

It looks like the storm was around the 24th of December. 39 weeks from that date would be today, 9/24, so yeah, babies born last week are a bit early. Lets see what the next week brings.

[rubato]

http://spacefem.com/pregnant/charts/duedate0.php

If the effect is real you would expect the largest increase at exactly 40 weeks with a smaller increase in the weeks before and after.




Yrs,
Rubato

[Joe Guy]

If you view the graph below, you will see that this time of year is typically when most babies are born. This is because winter is the human's mating season. These births are also a result of the combination of winter's typically inclement weather keeping couples indoors and the fact that the nights are longer and couples get drunk more often because it's the holiday season and they go to bed earlier because it's dark earlier and they aren't sleeping because they aren't tired.

So, the Ice Storm in Toronto probably had very little or no effect on the overall rising percentage of new births beginning in July and August but may have had a very minor effect on September births.

News organizations quite often will create news where there isn't any because the reporters are mostly morons.

That's the scientific explanation, anyway...

[Scooter]

I posted this because I thought it was amusing. It turned out to be more amusing than I thought, because it brought out every closet "expert" who apparently, from thousands of miles away, claim to know more about birth patterns in Toronto hospitals than those who actually staff them.

It reminds me of that doctor in the U.S. Senate who purported to do a better job of diagnosing Terri Schiavo from a few seconds of video, than all of the specialists who actually cared for her.

[rubato]

I merely asked for data which you do not have. When I have asked my wife, who delivers a lot of babies, what is the weekly and monthly rate at her hospital she admits that she does not know. Why would she?

Thanks for playing.

yrs,
rubato

[Scooter]

Interesting that you should jump to the conclusion that I was referring to you. A coda di paglia, my mother would call it - a tail of straw, which when lit quickly burns one's ass.

[Gob]

A coda di paglia, my mother would call it - a tail of straw, which when lit quickly burns one's ass.

I'm stealing that one!!!

[Joe Guy]

I posted this because I thought it was amusing. It turned out to be more amusing than I thought, because it brought out every closet "expert" who apparently, from thousands of miles away, claim to know more about birth patterns in Toronto hospitals than those who actually staff them.

Thank you. I arrived at my conclusion using a highly sophisticated mathematical formula and simultaneously incorporating global meteorological data thereby eliminating regional anomalies as a factor in the equation and maintaining the integrity of the resulting probative value.

No scientist has ever disagreed with any of my findings.

[rubato]

So you're unable to get the data but still have to emit a little nasty to cover for it.

Apparently, once again we have only rumor to support the idea that an ice storm changed the birth rate in Toronto. And a zero everywhere else.


yrs,
rubato

[oldr_n_wsr]

My sons birthday is Sept 19th, 1985, 9 months after my companies Christmas party on Dec 19, 1984. A good time was had by us that night.

[Sue U]

Most of my family has birthdays in the last week of August/first week of September. (Being Jewish, we don't have any Christmas shopping to do on Black Friday.)

[oldr_n_wsr]

And both my nieces were born around November 14th. Subtract nine months from that and you get Valentines day. After those two were born, my brother was not allowed around his wife during valentines day.

[Sue U]

My youngest was born Dec. 4 which I know for a fact was the result of a Valentine's Day, um, incident.

[Lord Jim]

Well, Tati was born on The 4th of July, and Jimmy was born on August 16th...

But unlike apparently some folks around here, we haven't just had sex on special occasions...

[Gob]

and you've had it twice.

[Guinevere]

My family has lots of birthdays from mid-August to mid-September as well.

It would be interesting to see if the Toronto birthrate has a statistically significant uptick.