I’m back in Vancouver for a bit… just in time for some Vancouver weather, it seems. As accurate as weather reporting has gotten over the last several years, if all else fails… here’s your local weather forecast: Cloudy, sunny periods, chance of rain. You can’t go too wrong with that.
Where you *can* go wrong is a different sort of forecast: Pandemic, irresponsible gatherings, chance of spreading. We presently have over 400 people in quarantine and a significant number of new cases, all due to one party… and it’s quite possible that at that party, it was just one person who had it. I know it’s impossible, but if every single person isolated properly and responsibly for two weeks, this virus would be wiped out, locally at least. Of course, that’d require properly sealed borders, not leaking Americans traveling to and from Alaska (wink wink) and all of the flights arriving from all over the place with people who refuse to properly isolate.
Summary – it’s still up to us to keep doing what we’ve been doing so successfully up to now, because if we don’t… well, maybe it’s time for Dr. Henry to get a little more harsh. Heading into September on an upswing of cases is bad, for numerous reasons. If one person can infect 40 and affect 400, consider the implications when the weather turns bad and we’re all forced inside. As per yesterday, no Deus ex Machina is going to resolve this. We’re on our own.
Word of the day…
Rückkehrunruhe (noun): The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
Indeed, being immersed in the present-day of city life and Vancouver weather will do that to you. It’s still summer, right?
Being away is supposed to give you peace and serenity.
Can foreign words be the word of the day?
I mean, it is your blog and you can do whatever you want. I’m just wondering if it’s fair. I feel like the word of the day should be English, or at least broadly used in English vernacular, like for example, weltanschauung or pueblo or voilà.
I’ll be mildly contradictory (as usual) but slightly optimistic for a change: September was always going to be a shitshow, but having it start to get ugly in August may raise people’s awareness and help when schools go back in and vacations end so people head back to the office. More awareness and caution early is a good thing.
Hmm 1518 in quarantine for close contact and the 811# staff have been discouraging testing known asymtomatic contacts from getting tested at Sun peaks. See article Sun peaks news: http://sunpeaksnews.com/resident-speaks-out-about-contracting-covid-19-35549.htm
At least Whistler residents (after the weekend was over and the flocks of tourists had gone home) appeared with masks in stores for a change.
At least the ski area results so far are better than Summit county Colorado, 706 confirmed so far to date with 4 or 5 per day.
During the cold war my family did a European vacation including a visit to some friends in Berlin. There were two ways to get there, fly from West Germany to West Berlin which we did. The alternative was to drive which involved crossing a border into East Germany and head for West Berlin. The time you entered East Germany was radioed to the border into West Berlin and you were given a fixed time to do it in, which did not allow for any sightseeing. If you exceeded the time allowed by a certain margin you would be in serious trouble. Maybe some version of this would solve the Alaska problem.
An old racetracker somewhere once told me this about his hometown’s weather, and I always thought it fit Vancouver:
“If you can see the mountains then it’s going to rain soon.
If you can’t see the mountains it’s because of all the rain”
????????
Good read as usual.
Another word
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