April 15, 2021
In answering a lot of “Ask me next year” questions, I can’t help but touch upon a topic I wrote a lot about last year… but haven’t touched recently.
Just my opinion, but the U.S. has gotten itself into quite a pickle. If you’re a typical, normal, right-leaning American who usually votes Republican because, above all, you favour their economic policies, you’re not facing a great situation. You want the Republican party, but you don’t want the racist misogynist narcissist that presently leads it. Your former president is as unhinged as ever, and that will never change… just get worse. From his point of view, you’re with him or you’re against him. His VP, Mike Pence, stuck with him through high and low, but that didn’t stop Trump from sending him to the lions on January 6th.
Mitch McConnell made his own deal with the devil… one he’s very much regretting. True to form, now that he and Trump are on the outs, he’s facing his own version of getting kicked to the curb. A few nights ago, Trump called McConnell a “stone cold loser” and a “dumb son of a bitch”. That honeymoon is certainly over.
The problem is that the populist Trump has a huge crowd of support and, as we’ve all learned, a significant percentage of that crowd is unshakable. And if Trump dumps the GOP and goes Independent, he will take most of those people with him, and those people, at present, make up half of the Republican voting base. In that scenario, if the GOP votes were to be split in half, there’s a reasonable chance the next election might be a 50-state sweep for the Democrats, a scenario no Republican wants to contemplate. Third-party candidates appear all the time, but rarely have a significant impact. One has never swung an American election one way or the other… but Trump certainly would. Sweep or not, the election wouldn’t be close, and it wouldn’t be a reflection of what the majority necessarily want… a scenario that’s actually not so uncommon.
Municipally, left-leaning Kennedy Stewart is the mayor of Vancouver… elected in 2018, having beaten the NPA’s Ken Sim by only 1,000 votes… something like 50,000 votes to 49,000 votes. Wai Young, who’s further to the right than Ken Sim, got close to 12,000 votes… the vast majority of which would’ve gone to Ken Sim.
Provincially, we saw it here in 1996 when the right-wing split-vote brought in a Glen Clark NDP government with only 39% percent of the popular vote.
Chile similarly saw it in 1970 when Salvador Allende won that election with only 37% percent of the popular vote, the right-wing having split the other 63%.
The U.S. could be next… so, for the moment, the GOP is stuck with Trump… and their bigger problem is that with cult populists, it doesn’t necessarily go away when the head guy goes away. We’re living it here, where the ghost of Pierre Trudeau lives on in Justin. In the U.S., there can potentially be 8 years of Don Jr. followed by 8 years of Ivanka followed by 8 years of Eric. By then, Barron will be over 40 and it can be his turn. Don’t think this isn’t exactly what they’re try to do.
Indeed, now that the cult of Trump is well-entrenched in the Republican party, those who don’t like it find themselves in quite a conundrum… because, perhaps, there’s no way out. But that’s what happens when you dance with the devil. Sometimes you wind up in a mortal embrace. And then you get burned.
April 14, 2021
About as close to hell on earth as one could ever imagine was Auschwitz. A final destination for countless innocent people, murdered for no reason other than their religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or mental capacity. Most people know that part of it… but here’s something perhaps you didn’t know…
Most of the people arriving there didn’t know the fate that awaited them; they thought they were being resettled, and this was just a temporary stop. That’s what they were told. And they were told they could bring with them up to 100lbs of personal belongings.
As you might imagine, if you had to move on to a whole new life and could take only 100lbs of stuff with you, what would it be? Jewellery, watches, furs… your best clothes. Tools, medications, things for kids. Tinned food for the journey, alcohol… as many things of value as you could within the allowable limit.
Many of those people were murdered within hours of their arrival. What happened to all that stuff?
It wound up in an increasingly-growing and well-organized storage complex which ultimately occupied more than 30 buildings and “employed” more than 2,000 prisoners to sort through the stuff. For the prisoners who managed to get this work detail, it was the dream job. While they were tasked with organizing the goods for distribution for use in not only the camp, but all of Germany, they also would secretly procure what they could for themselves and their friends and family.
And what was it called, this large storage facility… this place of abundance and food and opportunity, smack in the middle of hell? It was called Kanada. Indeed, for all of these people caught in hell, the Kanada warehouses were named after this abstract distant place where nobody had ever been, but they could only dream… of freedom and abundance and wealth and opportunity. One of the very few who escaped Auschwitz (and wrote the report that blew the whistle on the whole operation) was Rudy Vrba, who made his way to Canada. To Vancouver, in fact, where he wound up at UBC, a professor of pharmacology.
We here in Canda take for granted what all of those people only dreamed of. This ever-lasting abundance of wealth and opportunity… but, more fundamentally, food and drinkable water… the latter of which literally falls from the sky. Sometimes endlessly.
Which is why it’s weird for us when all of this stuff we take for granted isn’t readily available. What do you mean you’re out of toilet paper? What, you don’t have a single bottle of hand sanitizer back there somewhere? How can you be out of masks? Many of those questions from last year have been replaced with a single one: Where’s my vaccine?
It’s odd for us here in Canada to be feeling that mindset. For many people, their entire life is a struggle to procure those basic necessities… but never here. And what makes it more odd is seeing the rest of the world having access to something we want, and being unable to get it.
The “out” we have here is that we know it’s coming; just be a bit patient… and that’s certainly the way it’s always been in Canada. Not so much in Kanada… which is why, while I grumble when I read the news that forty-nine percent of Republican men don’t want the vaccine or that forty percent of the U.S. military were offered it and refused it… well, that really sucks. But we’re in Canada, so… eventually, it’ll be ok. We have the privilege of hanging in there a little longer, not something everyone, presently of historically, has had. So we’ll take it.
April 13, 2021
The good old “abundance of caution” is back in the news, thanks to Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, which, like the AstraZeneca, is in the spotlight for potentially causing blood clots. Both of those are adenovirus vector vaccines, as opposed to the mRNA Pfizer/Moderna vaccines (no accusations of blood clots there), so that adds to the correlation.
Here are some numbers:
In the U.S., close to 7 million doses of J&J have been administered. There have been reports of 6 potential cases of blood clots. That’s less than a one-in-a-million chance of developing this particular complication… and one of those cases was lethal, so there’s a close to one in 7 million chance of dying from the J&J vaccine. If it’s responsible for that.
Of the 6 cases, 100% of them were young women between the ages of 18 and 48.
Here’s something else that young women ages 18 to 48 do… they take birth control pills, and they have babies. If you throw that into the mix:
We hear that 1 in 1,000 women on birth control develop blood clots. The number is actually a little lower… more like 0.3 to 0.9… as in 3 to 9 out of 10,000. Also relevant is that in the 3 months after giving birth, that number goes up to 40 to 60 out of 10,000.
I really have no idea how much of that applies to these particular women, except to note that throwing a one-in-a-million factor into it changes nothing. It’s the sort of rounding error that gets lost in the mix. Insurance companies view events beyond one-in-a-million as “impossible”, which makes them easy to insure.
Nevertheless, in this age of litigation and ass-covering and risk mitigation, the CDC and FDA slammed on the brakes until everyone dances around a bit and indemnifies themselves, and then they can get back to it.
In the meantime… as with AstraZeneca, I assume the U.S. is sitting on large shipments of unused J&J vaccine. J&J has, for the moment, halted shipments to Europe. Don’t let it go to waste! We here in Canada would welcome it with, literally, open arms.
Dr. Henry and Premier Horgan and Minister Dix continually remind us all that our infrastructure presently supports much more vaccine-delivery capacity than the supply that’s feeding it. Great! Please secure a few million unused doses of that J&J and get it up here. Perhaps don’t make it the first choice to give young women (optics), but I know a lot of old men (I’m one of them!) who’d happily, unquestionably, without hesitation and with profound gratitude accept it.
Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen… one, because we here in B.C. have zero leverage to be asking for anything… and two, the Americans will quickly come to their senses and realize that even if these two vaccines, J&J and AstraZeneca, actually introduce a one-in-a-million chance of a complication, the benefit is far outweighed by the risk… and the intelligent thing would be to resume vaccinations as soon as possible. As soon as the $2,250-per-hour lawyers are done with it, they’ll be back in business.
April 12, 2021
Let’s tackle another one of those “Ask me in a year” questions that popped up around last April… and this one was pretty contentious… the question of how Sweden was handling the pandemic, in harsh contrast to most of the rest of the world. Sweden’s head epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, had the same response to his critics. “Ask me next year”.
A year later, the answer can be summarized in one sentence: “What else were you expecting?”
Both Sweden and the U.K. initially tried the same approach… which was mostly a version of “Protect the elderly and vulnerable, but the rest of you can go on with your lives as normal. No masks or any of that nonsense needed.” In the U.K., that didn’t last long. They quickly course-corrected when things started getting out of hand. Back in Sweden, Tegnell felt abandoned, but held the line… and, as usual, the longer it goes, the harder it is to admit you were wrong, because then… part of it is having to admit you were wrong all along.
On that note, there are those who will still argue it wasn’t wrong. There are people who have friends and relatives that needlessly died… who’ll tell you it wasn’t wrong. I’m not here to judge people’s opinions, though one thing I’ve learned over the last year is that there are a lot of irrational people, and then more irrational the idea, the more irrationally some people will hold on to it.
Culturally, Sweden is most like its Nordic neighbours, so let’s just do a bit of and apples-to-apples comparisons:
Covid-19 deaths per million of population:
Denmark: 421
Finland: 158
Norway: 126
Sweden: 1,342
Economic impact of C19 on GDP 2020:
Denmark: -4.2%
Finland: -3.1%
Norway: -3.6%
Sweden: -4.0%
Expected GDP recovery 2021:
Denmark: +3.5%
Finland: +2.8%
Norway: +3.6%
Sweden: +3.5%
In summary, thanks to their policies, between three to ten times the number of deaths… and, as far as that being the trade-off for saving the economy? It seems to have had no impact whatsoever. And these days, in Sweden, out in public and especially on public transit… you’ll see lots of masks.
Asked and answered. Moving on.
April 11, 2021
We’ve been at this long enough that we can actually start answering some questions asked long ago… and since there are no new numbers (B.C. and all of Canada) till tomorrow, instead of guessing ahead, let’s look back at something else.
A year ago, there began a whole “This is just a bad flu” crowd… from which emerged the anti-mask/anti-vax/anti-reason crowd. You’ll recall the memes about how “The flu has killed more people than this thing” were flying around. At the time, it may have been true… early April? Sure. With a year behind us, let’s look at typical numbers and compare. And… if this were indeed “just a flu”, then this is what we’d be looking at:
Flu/pneumonia deaths Canada:
2015: 7,630
2016: 6,235
2017: 7,396
2018: 8,511
2019: 6,893
2020: 15,606
Flu deaths USA:
2015: 23,000
2016: 38,000
2017: 61,000
2018: 34,000
2019: 22,000
2020: 360,000
Tucked in there conveniently is 2018, which was indeed, by any measure, an actual bad flu season in the U.S.… enough to trigger some markings on the “excess deaths” charts of the time.
But, by the same token, 2020 would be an insane outlier… and that gives us plenty to learn from these numbers.
First of all, in Canada, with all of the mitigation that took place… lockdowns, masks, social distancing… still, it was double the deaths we’d have expected. What would’ve happened if we hadn’t taken it so seriously?
The 10x south of the border might be an indication. So instead of the 23,000 C19 deaths we presently have, we in Canada might be at 230,000… yikes.
In any event, this isn’t the flu. It never was. But if you want to pretend it is, then you have to come to terms with the numbers above and rationalize them somehow… that it’s some of super-flu that requires masks and social distancing and, ultimately, vaccines… and, even with all of that, its outcomes are still far worse.
Or maybe, you know… it’s just not the flu.
April 10, 2021
In old Star Trek episodes (the original series), the starship Enterprise and the crew would often find themselves in battle against some aliens whose technology was compatible with respect to being able to launch weapons at each other. Accordingly, Captain Kirk would sit on his throne on The Bridge and bark orders to Spock and Chekov… and when they were under heavy attack and the ship was in trouble, it would be something like, “Divert all power to the shields!!”
By that time, though, the poor Enterprise had been suffering volleys of alien torpedoes and lasers and whatever version of energy beam was the flavour of the week… it was springing leaks, and major systems were malfunctioning… so, quite often, Kirk was met with a response of… “Unable.”
Captain Kirk always improvised, and things always turned out well. They always managed to survive. In fact, he, Canadian icon William Shatner turned ninety a few weeks ago. That’s the actor. The actual captain won’t be born till March 22nd, 2233… a birthday celebrated every year in Vulcan, Alberta.
But there’s not much to celebrate in Alberta these days, nor here… nor anywhere in Canada… because, like Kirk vs. The Universe, we’re in an epic battle… against an alien we thought we knew, but now some variant aliens are showing up, and it’s a problem… and the ship is perhaps damaged more than we can tolerate.
To continue with the metaphor, if the Enterprise is the world, we here in Canada are presently the shields. We need more power diverted to us. But… the entire ship is under attack and everyone needs energy, and perhaps there’s nowhere to pull it from. The heroic crew member that’s in the engine room where the Warp Core is about to breach… that guy is asking for help. Send power… we need to vaccinate the anti-matter containment field. Scotty needs to vaccinate the shields. Deck 8 needs to vaccinate the hole in the hull that’s already ejected a few unfortunate red-shirts into deep space. Dr. McCoy needs more power to Sick-Bay so that he can… well, perhaps, actually vaccinate people.
When the shields were low and the Enterprise would take a direct hit, everyone would be bumped hard… left or right, for some reason… never up or down. I guess the gravity system didn’t need a lot of power to keep operating.
The next couple of months are going to feel like that… we’re going to get bumped around. And the present inability to have badly-needed energy/vaccines directed to us will be a good topic of discussion once the ship is docked at Starfleet for repairs. Once the pandemic is over.
But, for now, we just need to get there. Beam me up, Scotty… quickly, before a travel ban is imposed.
April 9, 2021
Today’s update is a lot less political and a lot more informational; I’ve replaced some graphs and added some new info.
The top two rows of graphs represent the second wave, which I defined as starting Sep 8th. The bottom two rows represent the third wave, which I defined as starting March 10th. How’d I pick those dates? Purely arbitrary, but that’s where it looks to me like when the numbers started to turn the corner.
The top row of each wave is new cases per day, as well as the famous 7-day moving average. That’s the black line, cutting through the more-jagged thinner coloured line of daily new cases. As you can see, everywhere, it’s headed in the wrong direction, more steeply in some places than others.
The second row of graphs now consolidates hospitalizations (provincial colour), ICU cases (red), and deaths (black).
Those bottom two rows are the ones to watch in the coming days and weeks… remember when we were all cheering to flatten the curve? It’s sort of like that. We need all of those lines to be slanted like they are… except downwards, not up.
Hopefully we see it start to turn that corner, but if today’s numbers across the country are any indication, we have a long way to go.
April 8, 2021
A tiny glimpse of visibility with respect to how our federal government presently operates – and why we happen to find ourselves behind the 8-ball with respect to vaccines – is evident in the mandate letter sent to Anita Anand, Minister of Public Services and Procurement by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, on January 15th.
But, let’s go back a little further… actually, a lot further.
At a gala held at the National Arts Centre on April 14, 1972, when Trudeau was only a year old, visiting U.S. president Richard Nixon famously raised his glass: “I’d like to toast the future prime minister of Canada, to Justin Pierre Trudeau!”, he proclaimed. Nixon was also later caught on his White House tapes, famously deriding that three-day trip: “… wasting three days up there. That trip we needed like a hole in the head.”
Two little take-aways from that… one is that if the person presently holding the office of Prime Minister had a last name like Smith or Jones, he probably wouldn’t be PM. He has a unique last name and the genetics to go with it, and they’ve taken him right to the top. Perhaps it was assumed that what he lacked in qualifications might be made up magically, with that last name… or, with experience, having been immersed in that life as a child, right from day one.
There might be an element of truth to that; if Justin hung around daddy enough back then and asked lots of questions, he’d certainly have had a very privileged viewpoint as to how things work. The problem is that Pierre Elliot Trudeau, love or hate the guy, was a true statesman. Whether he destroyed the country or helped shape it to what it is today – let’s set that argument aside. Either way, he was a true leader… and I suspect if he were in power today, we’d have lots of vaccine at our disposal.
But that aspect of leadership is not learned; it’s a personality type that requires a level of understanding and big-picture thinking that either you have or you don’t.
Which leads to the second little take-away… that a lot of government bullshit is a complete waste of time, but it’s necessary for the optics. Nixon called it for what it was… three wasted days of fluff. A gala? Pat Nixon delivering a stuffed Snoopy to Pierre and Margaret’s little boy? All while Nixon was facing some serious problems back at home. Like, you know, a war he was losing on the other side of the world.
Back to present day, this letter, publicly available of course… and, its optics. It’s a real work of art… and reading it, the first thing that comes to mind is that whoever wrote it knew that this document was going to live forever, and therefore, every single word needs to be perfect. Every single word, well-thought-out. Nothing is missing. It mentions every political issue imaginable, many of them irrelevant to the pressing issue at hand.
Emissions reduction targets, Gender-based Analysis, intersectional lens, Indigenous people, Métis, Inuit, LGBTQ2, persons with disabilities, reconciliation, self-determination, Yes, of course they’re all important issues… but instead of 3 pages on tangential issues, all of which are affected by the pandemic, how about one sentence: “Every Canadian deserves equal access to vaccines, and your job is to get it.”
Completely lacking in that document are actual targets. Zero deliverables. That part of it is difficult to figure out, but that’s the important part of it… not just inclusive (and vague) hand-waving. If I’d had a shot at it, my letter would’ve been a lot shorter:
“Anita, please go find as much vaccine as you can, as quickly as possible. Don’t be ok with signed documents and promises unless those documents have some clout to them; we need hard numbers with respect to delivery schedules, and they should agree to severe repercussions and/or reparations if they fail to live up to their end of it. Don’t be afraid to overpay to secure that – we can afford it. Don’t hesitate to leverage whatever we may have to offer. Trees, water, electricity, whatever. Don’t be afraid to charter some planes and waste some fuel. We can handle the political fallout from dumping excess carbon emissions into the atmosphere. For now, at this moment, this is more important. Getting these vaccines quickly and reliably is all that matters. We are scaling up a national vaccine program like no one has ever seen, and we need the product to fill the pipeline. Vaccine inventory can not be allowed to be the weak link in this chain. We don’t need 10 doses per Canadian next year. We need one dose… now.”
But, no… instead, we get a nice big fluffy document with zero teeth. It, literally, looks good on paper. So does cheque for a million dollars… until you try to cash it, and it bounces.
That’s the thing; it can’t just look good. It needs to actually work. And that’s perhaps the destiny of that mandate letter. It’ll be printed off on a huge sheet of fancy parchment and signed with a big feather and framed for all posterity… so that all of the grandkids of Canadians who survived the great pandemic of 2019-2022 can one day tour the great halls of Parliament Hill and look at it. And, as they slowly walk by it, say something… like… “Huh.”
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May 27, 2021
You’ve heard me say, “Start at the finish line and work backwards from there.” It’s a strategy that’s served me well in life, and looking at today’s B.C. graph reminded me of something.
Back in high school, grade 12 — our science teacher wanted us to figure out absolute zero experimentally. This isn’t a complicated experiment; it’s simply based on the assumption that the volume of a gas changes with temperature. The hotter the gas, the more space it wants to occupy… so if you’ve got the gas locked into a fixed-volume chamber, by measuring the pressure at different temperatures, you can learn a lot.
Side-note… I got into an argument once with someone who insisted that it’s possible to have a temperature colder than absolute zero. Given that temperature is really just measuring the speed of molecules, and that absolute zero is the speed at which they stop, I think it’s impossible for anything to be colder that that… in much the same way it’s impossible for your car to be going any slower than “stopped”. If any experts want to tell me how it might be possible, I’m listening. In fact, like the speed of light, I believe you can’t even get to it… you can just get really close… but if you reach it, all sorts of universal rules break down.
Anyway, with this experiment, you measure the pressure of the gas at different temperatures… and then you graph it. You plot the points on a graph; pressure vs. temperature. And since this is a linear relationship, you should be able to find the temperature by finding the line that cuts through all the data points and then eventually hits the graph at zero. This process is called extrapolation… where you take certain data, figure out the rules that apply to it, and make intelligent guesses with data points you haven’t actually measured experimentally. If your car passes a fence post every 10 seconds at 50km/h, can you figure out how fast you’d need to be going if you wanted to pass a fence post every one second? You can measure and graph it at 50, 100 and maybe even 150km/h… and if you plot that, there’s a perfect straight line to show you you’d need to be going 500km/h. … [Continue Reading]
May 26, 2021
Just to briefly touch upon a big question mark… that’s slowly being answered as research emerges… what’s the deal with the delayed second doses? Why are we playing with the science, etc…
To rewind a bit, let’s remember that the timeline for these vaccines to be released into the wild was compressed – things happened much faster than usual. This doesn’t mean the science was skipped or compromised; it was the bureaucracy around it.
That being said, in an effort to get the thing out the door as quickly as possible, a different sort of question was asked; not one that’s typically asked of vaccines.
The question was: What’s the shortest period of time where a two-shot regimen would be effective? It was known that one dose of an mRNA vaccine wouldn’t generate enough of a response… and the answer to the question of spacing doses has two answers, because there are two different questions. One is how soon can it be to be effective? And two is… what’s ideal?
The former question was chosen to be answered in the same way that many of life’s problems get solved – decide what’s most important. “Good enough” far outweighs “Ideal” in this case, and that’s what we got. This is not to say that people who got the shots 3 weeks apart got anything bad; on the contrary… that’s what was tested, verified safe, and verified effective with a 95% efficacy.
So, what’s the problem? There is no problem… but now we have enough time and data to answer question two, and it’s what most experts expected… because it’s what’s typically seen with these sorts of vaccines.
Anyone who’s ever had a vaccine booster barely remembers the timing of what’s being boosted. It’s often measured in years… or, at best, months. Never weeks. My recent Shingrix vaccine against Shingles had a follow-up booster that was to be taken within two to six months after the first dose. But what’s optimal? 2? 4? 6? I couldn’t find anything to support a more specific number, but the answer to all of them was “good enough”.
The answer to the optimal spacing of C19 mRNA vaccines… as it turns out, while 3 weeks is certainly good enough, it seems waiting a little longer is “better”. It should be noted that … [Continue Reading]
May 25, 2021
When airplanes land, there’s a lot of maneuvering that takes place in the last 40 minutes… you start descending from the cruising altitude, and you navigate in such a way that you’re lined up with the runway. Depending on other traffic, there may be a holding-pattern loop or two… or you might need to speed up or slow down. You’ll hear the flaps being deployed, which gives the wings more surface area, and the ability to “lift” at slower speeds. But after all the turns and changes in velocity and changes in control surfaces… eventually, you’re lined up with the runway on final approach… and you’ll know you’re there because you’ll hear the landing gear drop. There are no more turns once the gear is down; barring some unforeseen circumstances, you’ll be landing shortly.
Today’s optimistic provincial update felt that way; it felt like the landing gear coming down. There is a clear, straight path ahead of us, and, barring something unexpected, we all step off the plane in early September… and this bumpy, nightmarish, turbulent 15-month flight is over.
Today’s dropping of the landing gear also brought about dropping the circuit-breaker restrictions… as well as a number of social-distancing measures. It was a great day for restaurants and other small businesses.
Step two, in mid-June, with further restrictions being lifted, will feel like the moment when the plane kisses the runway and then slows down and heads for the gate… and you, also, will be kissing people… in gatherings of 50 or more… indoor and outdoor.
Step three, in early July, will be that moment when the plane stops at the gate, goes “ding”, and everyone takes off their seat-belts and gets up. And it’s not just you lifting your sore butt off that seat; that’ll be the moment the provincial state of emergency is lifted. The moment the public health emergency is lifted.
And then… that waiting period… of “just open the damn door and let me out of here”… a couple of months of that, but, by then, things will be feeling pretty normal. We’re on the ground and plane has stopped. We’re not going to die.
I won’t fill in all the detail of what happens on all of those dates; check out the official government site for all that… but … [Continue Reading]
May 24, 2021
These long weekends used to scare me a bit because it’s like flying blind for a few days. We might wake up Tuesday morning to find 3,000 dead and 400,000 new cases. It never happened (not even close), thankfully, and I guess that’s why when B.C. decided to pull the plug on weekend updates, they never came back. But I certainly appreciated they updated numbers today… and they were as good as we can hope for… beautifully following that descent to zero. Today’s less-than-300 new cases was the lowest since Feb. 1st… before the 3rd wave.
For the most part, the other interesting numbers to follow these days (barring a 4th wave appearing suddenly and out of nowhere) are the vaccination numbers. On a per-capita basis, we’ve pulled ahead of our southern neighbours, and it’s to no great surprise. We are vaccinating as fast as we can; they are not.
Other broad brush strokes… our military is 85% vaccinated, and that number would be higher were it not for logistics… so it’ll keep rising. On the flip side, the American military refusal rate is somewhere between 33% and 50%, depending who you ask.
Military aside, what about the general population?
In the U.S., it looks like this…
Democrats: 67% vaccinated + 24% asap or waiting = up to 92% eventually, with 8% saying never.
Republicans: 46% vaccinated + 22% asap or waiting = up to 68% eventually, with 32% saying never.
In Canada, it looks like this…
Already vaccinated or will eventually / outright refusal:
NDP: 79% / 9%
Liberal: 84% / 5%
Conservative: 69% / 19%
Seriously, what is it with right-leaning mindsets? Why does conservative equal vaccine hesitancy? Is it because they don’t trust the government? Is it because they don’t trust science? Is it because it’s not in the bible? Or it IS in the bible in some hidden way?
The first time I ran across this sort of horseshit was when I was only 13 and it was pointed out to me that the new American president (Ronald Wilson Reagan) had 6 letters in each of his names. 666… the sign on the beast. Clearly, he was the anti-christ… notwithstanding he was himself a staunch … [Continue Reading]
May 23, 2021
I hope you got your good dose of sunshine in yesterday, because around here, we’re back to “the usual” for a week. The big Vancouver Weather Wheel (VWW) has only three sections… “It’s about to rain”, “It’s raining” and “It just rained.” A recent spin landed in section 2, and that’s where it’ll sit for a while… and actually, that’s ok. The freshest air on the planet exists when things transition from section 2 to section 3.
The other thing going on these days is the transition from the NHL regular season to the NHL playoffs –lots of rain equals Spring equals NHL playoffs… and there’s an interesting correlation… you can sort of map playoff performance with Covid-19 numbers.
Here in B.C., our numbers have recently tanked, which is very good. The Canucks have also tanked… which is good or bad, depending on whether you like to see a strong finish or a better draft pick. Either way, both our pandemic numbers and our team’s performance have crashed down noticeably. Playoffs? LOL.
One province east of us is Alberta, whose pandemic numbers were riding high. Also riding high were the Edmonton Oilers… who seem to have hit a brick wall when they entered the playoffs. And right around the time the Oilers began their journey to falling down two games to zero to the Jets, so did their C19 numbers. That’s an impressive meltdown, their daily new-case numbers… falling like a rock. Much like the Oilers’ chances of getting much further in the playoffs. They might go down 3 games to 0 to the Winnipeg Jets, who are flying high these days.
Unfortunately, so are the C19 numbers in Winnipeg. Manitoba is the one province that isn’t yet headed in the right direction, though perhaps they’re turning the corner too.
As has happened numerous times in the past, the Leafs and Habs are battling it out; that series is tied, similar to the C19 numbers in those two provinces, as far as things getting better… though I’d have to give the “trending advantage” to Quebec… which, in this warped correlation of mine, is good news for Leafs fans.
Two of those four teams will meet in the next round of the playoffs, and only one will make it to the semi-final round… where they’ll run … [Continue Reading]