Science of COVID-19

The Last (Daily) Post – July 6, 2021

The Last Post.

That’s the piece of music you’ll hear on Remembrance Day, November 11th at 11am, commemorating the end of The Great War.

At my school, there was a Remembrance Day service every year, and the lead trumpet player of the school had the honour of getting up in front of everyone and playing it. In my grade 12 year, that was me… but instead of standing in front of everyone, I did it from the gym next door… where the acoustics allowed me to harmonize with my own notes. As it’s typically played on a bugle (on a trumpet, you simply play it without pressing any valves… it’s all lips and air pressure), there are only three notes to work with… C E and G (in three different octaves)… and, as any musician will tell you, any combination of those notes (including all three) go together very well. Accordingly, my rendition of notes blending and harmonizing with each other was really-well received. A very successful gig – notwithstanding the somber occasion — and the largest crowd I’d ever played to. A few months later, at Expo 86, my Dixieland band played in front of 3,000 people at the Kodak Bowl. My largest and — with the exception of my sister’s wedding — last public appearance as a musician because, the truth is, I’m not a big fan of being on stage.

Which brings us to this particular Last Post.

People have asked me how many people actually read these posts. The answer varies… from a minimum of a few hundred for the lame ones… to thousands for the good ones, and, on a couple of occasions, the number well-exceeded 10,000. The first one of those big ones got close to 500 shares in the first 24 hours, a piece comparing B.C.’s response to that of Louisiana. That was back in April of 2020, when the glaring differences in responses between countries, states and provinces were becoming very apparent, and I didn’t have a lot of great things to say about what they were doing down there.

It was really the first time I realized I was reaching an awful lot more people than I imagined… a few scattered people from some very far-away places, sure… but also large pockets of people in places like Texas, Arizona and Kentucky who… to put it delicately… didn’t really see eye-to-eye with my opinions with respect to American politics and, anyway, what the hell is some Canadian yahoo doing commenting on things he knows nothing about; go build an igloo or race your huskies or whatever, EH.

Still, I prefer this version of being on stage; when you blow a wrong note, there’s always the backspace key; not so in front of a live audience.

I used that key a lot… because, when I started this back on March 17th, 2020, like everyone else, I knew very little about pandemics. And today, we all know much more than we’d ever imagined… knowledge I hope for everyone reading this simply fades away in the future because you won’t need it. One hundred years between these sorts of pandemics seems about right; we all just got a lifetime’s worth of experience and I don’t think any of us have any strong desire to ever re-visit it. Here’s how to properly wash your hands. Here’s how to properly wear a mask. Here’s a safe distance from which you… yeah, yeah… we get it.

So… I picked a good day for this Last Post. Today:

– The Provincial State of Emergency officially ends at midnight

– B.C.’s one-jab percentage went over 70% for the entire population, not just those presently eligible. That’s a magic number in many people’s eyes when it comes to herd immunity

– I’m officially two weeks past my 2nd vaccination (AZ / Moderna)

By those… and a few other different measures… around here, it’s over. And for me, four hundred and seventy-seven straight days of writing about this pandemic – is also over. But, of course, what ostensibly (that’s my niece’s favourite word!) was meant to be a simple little blog about the pandemic and current numbers… morphed into much more.

For me, it was a discipline, a brain dump, a sanity check and a way to make sure I was current with whatever might be important… and a self-imposed 5pm deadline to update the numbers and write something to go along with it. I woke up every morning with my brain rumbling around some ideas… what’s current, what’s important, what’s engaging… and how might some previous experience of mine help explain it. I never knew what I was going to write about, but I never worried about it either. I never approached 5pm panicking, and out of 477 posts, I think only three weren’t within 10 minutes of 5pm… one was a vet emergency, one was getting stuck behind an accident that turned a 15-minute drive into more than an hour, and one was believing my computer when it told me that this little OSX update would only take a few minutes.

And for you?

If putting some complex ideas in a form that made it easier for you to understand… good… I was happy to do it. I’ve certainly found that, for myself, talking through complicated topics in simpler terms helps me understand them as well.

If displaying colourful numbers and pictures provided you with a centralized place to view the info that, at a glance, you most needed… great. What you saw is what I considered the best way to convey what was most important in the clearest manner possible… an exercise that changed a lot over 16 months. I started with simple charts and graphs for a few different countries… then added Time To Double (TTD) lines to everything when it looked like they might be spiraling out of control… and ultimately got rid of them when things settled down. Then I got rid of the other countries when we needed to worry more about ourselves… and then added other provinces so we could have a holistic view of all of Canada… and, finally, of course… the vaccinations. I loved adding those columns, formulas and graphs… and then watching them – initially with a lot of frustration at how slowly those percentages were going up… but ultimately with joy as those numbers accelerated upwards. I’ve added a fourth row of graphs today; what the pandemic looked like for the U.S., Canada and the provinces… from day 1. It’s incredible to look at the tiny little bump at the far left – the beginning – of the B.C. graph. That tiny little bump is when we were all really, really worried.

And… indeed … if I had any part in holding your hand through this pandemic, and if my posts gave you some comfort and some optimism… I’m really happy to hear it. I’ll be honest; I was scared too. I also looked everywhere for the reassurances we all sought. I had to be the one to talk to my kids and have answers to their questions. When they asked, the first question was always, “How were the numbers?”

Sometimes, those numbers weren’t so good… and that’s where you need to look ahead, to think big-picture, to skate to where the puck is going to be… whatever metaphor you choose; I always felt we’d come out of this ok… but conveying that message wasn’t always so easy… yet I, myself, was comforted by everything I’d learned, and I sincerely hoped I could pass along those feelings. How many times and in how many ways did I say the same thing: There’s a finish line, and we’re all going to get there.

And here we are. If you’re reading this, it’s because I made it… and so did you.

It’s somewhat ironic that The Great War ended largely as a result of the pandemic that began in 1918. The War ended, the pandemic began… because while different countries were all trying to figure out effective ways of killing each other, along came an invisible enemy with an answer for everyone. It’s also somewhat ironic that this particular Last Post is the other way around… that the pandemic might be over in this neck of the woods, but the war rages on in others. A World War of a different sort.

So yeah… around here, no more Provincial State of Emergency… and no more daily posts. But, exactly like Covid-19, I’m not going away entirely… and I’ll pop-up unexpectedly from time to time. I’ve found that this habit of needing to voice my opinion is a tough one to break… so don’t unfollow me quite yet; if you think I’ll have something to say in the future, you’re absolutely right. Just not every day. And especially not in the next week or two, because life is returning to normal… and I am diving head-first into it.

And so… with that – it is I, your humble, faithful and consistent pandemic blogger signing off… and wishing you all the happiest and healthiest and Covid-freest-imaginable — rest of your lives.

Cheers.

By |2021-09-10T19:58:48-07:00July 6th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Follower Favourites, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |25 Comments
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July 5, 2021

First things first… the contest! It is indeed a good time to shut it down because now there are far more people guessing than reasonable guesses out there. Special shoutouts to Carey Brown and Kiyomi Hunter whose guesses of 88 missed by one. Also special shoutouts to Claudio Arato and Stephen Silver whose guesses of 86 also missed by one. Extra special shoutout to Lauren Faccin whose guess of 87 was bang-on, but unfortunately… she wasn’t the first to guess that.

That excellent guess was first posted by Sam Ari – so… congrats, Ari! And let me know to where you’d like the $100 donation directed!

It’s a good thing when we’re running out of room for guesses. The last twenty-four hour period saw a grand total of 20 new cases… a number so low it takes a lot of hindsight to find the last time… which was in July of… 2020. See? Good hindsight. Things are very much heading in the right direction. Around here.

But… on that note… a final word about our neighbours to the south…

The pandemic journey of what used to be the most powerful and respected nation in the world has been a bumpy ride, and it’s not over yet. It could be. It would be. For numerous reasons I’ve been hammering for 16 months, it most definitely should be… but it isn’t. It actually might have been… had the virus not adapted faster than the attitudes of so many people. There’s a chance it might have faded away, had the Rø remained what it was figured to be originally. Variants changed that, especially Delta… and there could be others, and hopefully they don’t run out of letters in the Greek alphabet to name them all.

Last week, the U.S. had 12,219 people hospitalized. Today, that number is 12,740. Last week, the U.S. had 3,522 in ICUs… and today, it’s 3,634. This doesn’t imply frightening, scary growth (yet…), but it certainly indicates things trending in the wrong direction. Just look at the U.S. graph of hospitalizations compared to Canada or any of the provinces… there’s a flattening, and then a slight bend up… and all of it driven by places with low vaccination rates. The lecture halls of the future studying this pandemic will see a lot of hands up; there will be a lot of questions. And the vast majority of them will begin with, “Why didn’t they…”

Some questions have no good answers. As much as I actually detest these words, sometimes they’re appropriate: “It is what it is.”

We’ve wrapped up the contest, we’ve wrapped up the provincial and Canadian responses, we’ve wrapped up cases/hospitalizations/ICUs/deaths, we’ve wrapped up vaccinations and we’ve wrapped up the U.S.

Only one thing left to wrap up. See you tomorrow.

By |2021-07-05T17:04:52-07:00July 5th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |9 Comments
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July 3, 2021

Death and taxes aren’t actually the only certainties in life, of course… there are a few more… among them:

1. Have you ever had a cold?
2. Have you ever had the flu?
3. Are you presently alive?

The answer is 100% for all three, for everyone reading this… but if you want to argue it’s not, that it’s probably 99.999 something percent, then ok, I’ll mention that not everyone pays taxes either… exhibit A would be the former president of the U.S. and his entire organization… who are about to find out the hard way that you don’t mess with The Tax Man. Al Capone got away with racketeering and bootlegging and murder… for decades. But he couldn’t defend himself against the charges of tax evasion, and that’s what sent him to prison for the rest of his life.

But this article is neither about Trump nor his ill-fated organization. Rather, it’s a discussion about certainties, and what they look like going forward.

Colds are around. The flu is around. Measles and Mumps and Rubella are all around too, but we rarely worry about them… for good reason. They’ve been vaxxed out of our “worry zone”.

There are some important things to note going forward… and that is, that cases of C19 will come and go. Pockets of cases will flare up here and there, like that group of insane anti-vax moms in California responsible for a measles outbreak. Up next, the glorious state of Arkansas with its deplorable vaccination rates; bring on the completely preventable next wave of C19.

Actually, to clarify, we may see flare-ups of cases here too. Should we be concerned? At some point (and we’re at it, of very close to it…), the thing to watch is no longer cases. They become irrelevant. What becomes important are hospitalizations, ICU cases and deaths… numbers which have plummeted, and there’s every expectation they’ll remain low… because, again… you know… vaccinations.

This pandemic turns into an “endemic” in different places at different times. We’re pretty-much there now around here… because once you’ve done everything you can, and the support infrastructure is in place, there’s really not much else. As odd as it sounds, does it actually matter if you catch C19? If you catch it, but you’re asymptomatic and/or non-infectious to others? I’d never really thought of it before all this, but how many times have I had a cold or flu and not even known? Their presentation can also be so mild as to be asymptomatic.

So… with certainty: It’ll be around for a while, but if you’re fully vaxxed and/or fully immune for other reasons, you have little to worry about. The new seasonal cold will likely hit you harder, because for that one, you have no antibodies.

The one group that needs mentioning here are those who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons and/or whose immune systems aren’t up to the task of reacting adequately to the vaccine… a group all of us become part of as we get older… which is why research into this will continue forever… or, until it’s eradicated from existence. We did it with smallpox… and we can certainly do it here too.

By |2021-07-03T17:01:23-07:00July 3rd, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |4 Comments
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June 30, 2021

I’m overwhelmed by all of the messages I’ve received… thank you. I realize I said my last post is on Tuesday… and some took it to mean yesterday… but I meant next Tuesday – July 6th – the day the official State of Emergency is lifted. That being said, everyone in the news is saying the SoE ends tonight. What’s certainly true is that Phase 3 starts tomorrow… but that’s not necessarily tied to the SoE, which, according to the official government EmergencyInfoBC site… still says July 6th.

… so, guess what… one more week of my ramblings, because I think I have about another 6 days of “wrap-up” to provide… of the “broad brushstrokes” sort… and we can’t end all of this without one final “guess the numbers” contest over the weekend…

So, with that… a final word about vaccines and their effectiveness:

There’s an interesting sort of Darwinism that’s emerging from this pandemic… of the “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink it” sort. To follow up on that well-known saying, I’ve added a corollary (n. a proposition that follows from (and is often appended to) one already proved) – which is, “you can take that horse’s head and jam it into the water and hold it there… but there are some stubborn old horses that’d rather drown than take a drink.”

I would hope nobody’s tried this experiment, and I should note… I’ve met a lot of horses in my time. Some are very smart. Some are as dumb as a mule… but, to be honest, perhaps all of them would be smart enough to take a drink if that’s what it’d take to not die. But humans, on the other hand… the sort that’d never admit they were wrong… that’s another story.

The data that has emerged is pretty straightforward.

In the U.S., there were 18,000 C19 deaths in May. Of those, around 150 (0.8%) were in fully vaccinated people. I don’t have the age or breakdown of those people, but I’m assuming age and compromised immune systems are part of it for some, if not most.

Also in May, in the U.S., there were 853,000 C19 hospitalizations. Of those, fewer than 1,200 (0.1%) were people who were fully vaccinated.

The U.S. is down to a few hundred deaths a day these days, and virtually all of them are people who are unvaccinated.

In English: Ninety-nine percent of people dying from Covid-19 are unvaccinated. Virtually all of those deaths are preventable.

In mid-January, 4,000 people a day were dying. The significant decrease began exactly at the time the vaccination campaigns began in earnest.

I’m really not entirely sure what more persuasive evidence someone would need. To me, and fortunately, many others… it’s all startlingly obvious.

What can you do…? You can lead a person to a vaccination clinic. But you can’t make them take it.

You know… it’s ok to be wrong. It’s ok to change your mind. As long as your fragile ego can take a hit, and as long as you have the capacity to do some critical thinking, if you haven’t gotten sick… it’s never too late. The overwhelming data coming from every trustable scientific source agrees. The guy in the basement with the red tinfoil hat disagrees.

Horses don’t always have choices, but humans do… and sometimes, they make the right choice. And sometimes, they let Darwin make it for them.

C’est la vie… or, in some unfortunate future cases… lack thereof.

By |2021-06-30T17:00:57-07:00June 30th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |10 Comments
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June 29, 2021

A very memorable day here in B.C… the announcement that this is all pretty-much coming to an end; the official announcement that as of July 1st, we’re in Phase 3 and that the public health emergency will be lifted five days later.

Some notable changes, effective this Thursday:

– For the most part, masks will be optional… recommended, but not mandated

– No need to provide proof of vaccination anywhere

– Return to normal for personal indoor and outdoor gatherings

– For organized indoor gatherings, 50 people or 50%, whichever is greater

– For outdoor organized gatherings, 5,000 people or 50%, whichever is greater

– No capacity limits or restrictions on religious gatherings and worship services

– Fairs, festivals and trade shows – back to normal (with a plan in place)

– Canada-wide travel is ok

– No group limits for indoor or outdoor dining

– Normal liquor service, though no socializing between tables

– All indoor fitness classes allowed at normal capacities

– Gyms and recreation facilities, normal capacity

Given today’s new-case count of 29 and zero deaths and given the strong momentum still in place for vaccination (around here), it makes perfect sense. It’s exactly on track with what was optimistically expected… and all of this announced on what’s to be the last Dr. Bonny / Mr. Dix live 3pm briefing. I saw the first one, saw many in between, and, evidently, I saw the last one… though I didn’t know it at the time.

I started writing about this pandemic on March 17th, 2020. The Provincial State of Emergency was declared the next day, on the morning of March 18th. Accordingly, when the PSoE is lifted on Tuesday, I think that’ll be an appropriate finish line for me as well. A few more thoughts, one last contest… and, on Tuesday, call it a day. It’s Summer, and I’ve barely been anywhere for 18 months; time to get on with it and not have to be near a computer every day at 5pm.

This is all, in essence, the end of the pandemic… but it’s not the end of Covid, and there are a lot of variables that could cause wrinkles in the end-game… but the biggest game-changer… the one big, important piece… vaccines… will have a lot to say with respect to mitigating any sort of grand resurgence.

Sure… there will be pockets of outbreaks… but they’ll be dealt with swiftly. We may see an uptick in cases in the fall, but I suspect most people won’t know whether their sniffles and C19 or not; nor will they care. If hospitalization is needed, there will be plenty of beds and an awful lot of knowledge with respect to effective treatment. And if it’s a mild case… and if they’re vaccinated and everyone else around them is as well, that’s as much as any of us can do.

Beyond that, it’s pretty simple: Let’s get on with our lives.

By |2023-04-02T13:54:03-07:00June 29th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Follower Favourites, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |28 Comments
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June 28, 2021

It really is too hot to sit here any type too much; I hope you’re reading this in whatever version of “Ahhhh… nice and cool…” you’ve managed to find for yourself.

So… as I said… we’re down to incredibly low and optimistic numbers… to the extent the correct number was exactly guessed, and four other people were off by 1. Way to go Denise, Esther, Carey & Sharon… almost!

But congratulations Mark Johnson, who nailed the three-day total of 145 right on the nose… after changing his guess, having realized someone ahead of him had guessed the same. See? Good research pays off! Mark, please let me know where you’d like me to direct the $100 donation.

The last 24 hours saw 38 new cases… the lowest number since last August. And, looking over last August, that was probably also the last time the temperature exceeded the case count. That’d be a nice trend to start today… and especially heading into the fall; any day from now on where the temperature exceeds the case count will be a good one.

And given what the rest of the week looks like, that shouldn’t be too tough to achieve.

OK, back to the shade…

By |2021-06-28T17:05:04-07:00June 28th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |6 Comments
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June 23, 2021

Let’s take a closer look at out neighbours to the south, where the overall single-jab vaccination rate is around 54% and stagnating…

The top-10 most vaccinated states are: Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire & New Mexico.

Vermont tops the list with a vaccination percentage of 73.1%, while New Mexico rounds out the top-10 with 60.8%.

The bottom 10 looks like this…

North Dakota, South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Idaho, Alabama, Wyoming, Louisiana & Mississippi.

The best of those worst-10 is North Dakota at 43.4%. The worst is Mississippi at 36.0%

That’s quite a divide… where the top state more than doubles the worst one.

Here’s another interesting stat about all of those states…

In the last presidential election, of the top-10, all of them voted Democrat.

Of the bottom-10, 9 of them voted Republican. The one that didn’t, Georgia, is so inwardly-horrified at the result that their Republican-controlled government recently disenfranchised more than 100,000 potential voters, striking them from the rolls… and this was after enacting a number of laws that can only be called “Voter Suppression”. Take a guess which voters are most affected.

None of this is much of a surprise, though the blatant starkness of it is a little eye-opening… but what’s the deal? The blue state/red state divisions largely precede the pandemic, so how does it necessarily follow that raving, unrelenting Trump supporters would also be the anti-mask/anti-vax crowd?

The answer is a bit more complicated than “They’re just a bunch of ignorant rednecks”. The answer, in fact, has a lot to do with distrust of the government. When you’re poor and/or uneducated and/or sick and tired of hearing lies about how the government is going to do so much for you (and then doesn’t), you end up jumping ship to the guy you can relate to… he’s one of us, loud, abrasive, calls it like he sees it, etc. He’s not cut from government cloth.

Which makes Trump all the worse. If anybody could’ve convinced that group about masks and vaccines, it would’ve been him. It could’ve and it should’ve been him. Notwithstanding the shitshow it took to get him elected, it’s like the universe said “Hmm… there’s going to be this pandemic, and a lot of Americans will lose their lives. At least, who could we put in power in the U.S. to mitigate that? Someone that people who’d generally ignore government advice actually listen to?”

Without a doubt, his handling of this pandemic will be what history judges him on, and it’ll be appropriately brutal. When all is said and done, countless American deaths that could’ve been prevented… a figure officially set at over 600,000 at the moment, but the real figure is already a two-comma number.

Trump likes to make shit up as he goes along, depending who he’s talking to. We know he quietly got vaccinated while at the same time telling everyone it’s unnecessary. And then, a couple of months ago, this magnificent quote: ““In a certain way, I’m the father of the vaccine because I was the one that pushed it.”

At least we can end this relatively sad commentary with a good laugh.

By |2021-06-23T17:05:12-07:00June 23rd, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19, Space & Astronomy|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |7 Comments
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June 22, 2021

Summer is only one day old, but it’s certainly making a statement. Glorious warm sunshine… hopefully a continuing sign of things to come, and I don’t just mean the weather. Blue skies, calm seas, smooth sailing… pick your metaphor; they all apply.

I’ve replaced the usual graphs today with others that are pretty cool to look at… and that tell an interesting story. These are vaccination rates since March 1st… for Canada, the U.S., and the usual provinces we’ve been tracking. These graphs show the daily totals (how “tall” each line is) as well as the breakdown between first and second doses… first doses near the bottom, in the lighter colours… and second doses above them, in the darker colours.

I posted one of these graphs for B.C. recently, but here’s all of them… and what do they tell us…?

First of all, with respect to the Canadian ones – the national one and the individual provinces – you’ll notice that the tips of the lines mostly trend upwards or are, at worst, flat. The flatness of some of those lines, for the moment, has more to do with supply limits than demand shortages. You’ll also note the disparity between first and second doses… a pattern that’s mimicked across the country; sometime around June 1st, there began a big push towards second doses… and today, in all provinces, second doses make up the vast majority of vaccinations. Here in B.C., today… close to 80,000 jabs… of which less than 10,000 were first vaccinations.

It’s also interesting to note what the U.S. graph has to say; that they’ve been doing second doses for a long time, and continue to do so… but with diminishing demand. And first doses…? Today’s levels are less than half of what they were seeing in April.

I’ll keep some version of these graphs around from now on, because… unless things really slide backwards, the story is shifting away from new daily cases and hospitalizations and ICU admissions… and now it’s becoming all about how vaccinated we all are, how immune we all are, and how ready to get back to normal we all are.

On this beautiful day… when B.C. crossed the 1,000,000 fully-vaccinated threshold… when the pharmacy where I got my AZ shot two months ago finally got around to calling me for the follow-up.. “Yeah, no, I’m good… thanks anyway…” and when there wasn’t a single C19 death west of Manitoba… yep… it’s Summer… in more ways than one.

By |2021-06-22T17:03:39-07:00June 22nd, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |2 Comments
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June 21, 2021

First things first… the contest! Congratulations to Shahar Ben Halevi! – whose guess of 231 was only two off the actual total of 229. Shoutout to Theresa Christina who guessed a few minutes later and was also only 2 off, but in the other direction, with her guess of 227. Shahar, let me know where you’d like it donated!

** EDIT ** Oops… ignore most of that last paragraph. Garry Saitz, congrats… 228 is closer to 229 than anything else. Shahar, I’m not going to pull a Steve Harvey here… we have two winners. Shahar, let me know. Garry… you too!

Secondly, to put to rest my decision-making with respect to dose two: My research, as I’ve written, has led me to think that, given the option, an mRNA vaccine for the second dose would be the way to go… if it was literally a choice, right at that moment. As it turns out, I wasn’t given the choice… I would’ve expected the pharmacy who gave me the AZ on Apr 22nd to have reached out by now, but they haven’t. The provincial system, however… the one I registered with ages ago – they did. And last week, booked me for an appointment for today. So… today I went, received my 2nd shot (Moderna) and, as far as I’m concerned, at least for now… that’s that. Almost exactly 15 months ago, I was writing pieces about how I expected vaccines would be available in 12 to 18 months. In hindsight, given my penchant for little contests, we could’ve held a pool where people guess, to the day, how long it would’ve been till vaccines show up. That would’ve been fun, and we could’ve raised a lot of money for charity. Oh well, a missed opportunity. Maybe next pandemic.

Finally… today, June 21st… often the longest day (ie most sunlight) of the year… the Summer Solstice, the first day of summer… has held, for the last 5 years, a more profound meaning. June 21st, 2016, was the day my dad passed away… and so now, every year, this particular day has a lot more meaning. It sometimes, appropriately, lands right on Father’s Day as well.

I wrote a lot about him five years ago… and, if you missed it the first time around, here you go:

Happy Summer everyone – it’s going to be a good one.

By |2021-06-21T17:13:50-07:00June 21st, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , |12 Comments
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June 18, 2021

If you grew up in these parts and have been around long enough, you certainly remember Expo 86. The world came to visit, and the city hasn’t been the same since.

One thing that most people who visited the World’s Fair had was an Expo passport. You’d carry it around and get stamps from everywhere you visited at the fair. Somewhere in my basement storage is my well-tattered Expo passport, and it’s full of pretty-much every stamp that existed. Every pavilion, every restaurant, every ride, every kiosk… all had their own unique stamp, and it became my mission to get them all. Even the Expo 86 mascot, Expo Ernie, had one… and if you could find him wandering around, he’d stamp your passport too.

There were a few very rare ones… like, for example, Jimmy Pattison. He had his own stamp, and the story of how I got him to stamp my passport is pretty good. Jimmy P, the well-known legendary-yet-ruthless businessman / epic philanthropist / CEO of Expo 86, at least back then, drove a monster of a car… like one of those 8-gallons-to-the-mile Lincoln Continentals from the early 80s. And maneuvering a big car like that around the tight spaces surrounding the fair wasn’t so easy, I guess… and, on one bright sunny summer day in 1986, he almost ran me over. It wasn’t actually that close, and I wasn’t actually that shaken up… but he stopped and made sure I was ok and asked if I needed anything. Yes, Jimmy, in fact I do… and that is how I got the coveted JP Expo 86 passport stamp.

It’s starting to feel like any sort of vaccine passport will have the look and feel of an Expo passport, where instead of visiting countries and getting their stamp, you’ll visit their vaccines and get those.

What’s starting to become apparent is that there is no such thing as *the* vaccine. That was a concept we all collectively came up with last year; “once *the* vaccine shows up, we’ll all be saved.”

Not so simple now, is it.

All vaccines are not created equal. And even if they were, it seems some vaccines are more equal than others. We’re starting to see some hints of vaccine “protectionism”… like, in the U.S., if you want to go to the Springsteen concert (yeah, how appropriate… Born… In The U.S.A….), you will need an American-made vaccine. Pfizer? Yeah man. Moderna? Sure dude. AstraZeneca? Not so fast, old chap.

This morning, Singapore began offering the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine, and clinics were overrun with demand. This, notwithstanding the fact that Pfizer and Moderna have been available there for a long time, and half the population of 5.7 million have already had one or the other. And notwithstanding that Pfizer/Moderna have efficacy rates of around 95% while Sinovac is only 51%.

None of that matters. What matters is… that if you’re a Chinese national who lives in Singapore and wants to travel to mainland China, the only way to avoid quarantine upon arrival is to have the Sinovac vaccine. Oh, you’ve already had two shots of Pfizer and are completely immune? That’s nice, but if you want to visit our country hassle-free, you’ll have to have this one as well.

And so, perhaps, once it’s established that there’s no way to O.D. on vaccine, people will have some decisions to make. If AstraZeneca is going to be treated like a second-class citizen south of the border, what do you do? What does it mean for those who’ve had two doses of AZ and want to cross the border? What if you’ve had one AZ and one Pfizer/Moderna? What if you’ve had AZ, Sinovac, J&J *and* Sputnik? What if you’re so loaded with vaccine that you’re immune till 2027 and serve as your own 5G beacon?

These are not irrelevant questions. The U.S. may consider AZ a 2nd-tier vaccine just like China considers Pfizer/Moderna… but Canada will end up making its own policies as well. And it’s going to get messy, because people will scream discrimination. And, of course, that’s exactly what it is. Little of this has anything to do with actual science or vaccine efficacy or actual practicality. It’s mostly just bullshit politics.

One of the tag lines of Expo 86 was about “Inviting The World”, which we certainly did. And we still do… though, in future… well, bring your well-stamped passport with you.

By |2021-06-18T17:02:38-07:00June 18th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , |4 Comments
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