Coronavirus

April 7, 2021

History speaks of many examples of products that were designed for a specific purpose, but were ultimately repurposed for something entirely different. For example, bubble wrap… it was originally designed to be cool, textured wallpaper. That market didn’t catch on – especially in households with little kids, I’m guessing – but the inventors, sitting on tons of unused inventory, trying to figure out what to do with it, came upon the bright idea that it’d he useful for transporting fragile goods. They contacted IBM, who they figured would be interested in having a way of safely shipping their delicate electronics, and they were right; that caught on, and we’ve all had the pleasure of popping those little things ever since… the extra bonus when anything fragile gets shipped to us.

Speaking of wallpaper, Play-Doh was originally designed as wallpaper cleaner. I’m not sure how good it is at that, having never actually needed to clean any wallpaper… but as a toy, very successful; there are very few kids who at some point haven’t gotten their grubby little paws on some.

Speaking of toys… there’s the Slinky, originally designed as a spring used on ships to stabilize devices on choppy seas. Until one day, when a slinky was accidentally knocked off a table… and it walked itself over to a guy who had a light-bulb moment; Richard James, the “inventor” of the Slinky. Even he admits he didn’t invent anything; just clued-in to an excellent alternative use for an already existing product.

Speaking of alternative uses for already existing products… toothpaste. Like, for example, white Colgate. Terrific for keeping your teeth bright and healthy, of course… but you know what else? If you have a scratched CD or DVD that’s unplayable, coating it with toothpaste to “fill in” the scratches and then rinsing off the excess… works wonders. I’ve resurrected many dead Discs in my day.

Speaking of health products that have alternative uses… Coca Cola was originally designed to be an alternative to morphine addiction, and to treat headaches and anxiety. The guy who invented it, John Pemberton, was a veteran of the civil war, and a morphine addict. He wanted a sweet, alcoholic drink with some coca leaves thrown in for good measure, so that’s what he invented: Pemberton’s French Wine Coca. Over time, the recipe was tweaked and carbonated… and the rest is history.

Speaking of ubiquitous products that began their existence as something medicinal with a specific purpose, history may end up grouping Covid-19 vaccines into the mix, because the careful research that led to their initial approvals was based on science that described their intended two-dose use, with the spacing of those doses a few weeks apart. I’m not sure those tiny vials have instructions written on them… and if they do, they’re in an unreadably-small font… but anyway, if you take your magnifying glass and read it, you’d find that we, here in Canada, are not following those simple instructions. In fact, that goes doubly-so for us here in B.C… where we are the lowest percentage of fully-vaccinated people in all of North America (!) – but, that’s by design… and I’m totally ok with it because, as we’re finding, and as I wrote about yesterday, if you shift the goalposts a bit… from “not getting sick” to “not getting seriously sick”, the product can indeed be used differently than designed… and very successfully.

Speaking of not following simple instructions… yesterday marked the 3-year anniversary of the devastating Humboldt Broncos bus crash… caused by a driver ignoring a very simple instruction: Stop. Of course, there was far more to it than that, but it’s a good example of how a seemingly tiny rule violation by a single person can have drastic, far-reaching effects… like how Alberta’s outbreak of the P.1 variant can be traced to a single out-of-province traveller. One guy who broke the rules, and here we all are.

Speaking of there being far more to it than that…

Well, there’s always far more to it than that. Enough for now. Speak to you later.

By |2021-04-07T17:03:00-07:00April 7th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , |3 Comments
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April 6, 2021

I’ve heard from a few people who’ve gotten the AstraZeneca vaccine recently that maybe they should’ve waited for Pfizer or Moderna. After all, those latter two have efficacy rates around 95%, while AZ is somewhere in the mid-60s. That’s a notable difference. Or is it?

The efficacy number basically tells you the percentage reduction in disease with respect to vaccinated vs. unvaccinated people. A 95% reduction in the test groups of P & M vs. a 65% reduction with AZ.

But what that’s really measuring is whether you get it at all. What if you get it asymptomatically? Of the 30% difference, what if all of those case are insignificantly mild?

As it turns out, there’s a better number to look at… hospitalizations and deaths. As has been quoted widely, there is a 100% reduction in hospitalizations and deaths with Pfizer and Moderna. What about AstraZeneca, and other vaccines? Here’s a list of the “Big 6”, and their percentages of preventing hospitalizations and deaths… not efficacy:

Pfizer: 100%
Moderna: 100%
Janssen (J&J): 100%
Sputnik V: 100%
NovaVax: 100%
AstraZeneca: 100%

So… ask me again, “Should I get vaccinated?” Yes, you should. “Does it matter which one I get?” No, it doesn’t. If you want to avoid serious illness, they will all do the job. And as much as we’ve heard about Pfizer and Moderna and AstraZeneca… the Johnson and Johnson vaccine will be here by the end of the month, and if I had the option to pick one, that’s the one I would go with. One single jab, and a month later… you’re as immune as you’ll ever be, with zero chance of serious illness.

I recently had a discussion with someone that hinged on the “You don’t know what’s in it” argument. Actually, you do… the ingredients are all listed publicly, for all of them. There is a popular meme going around questioning people who’ll eat junk food without knowing what’s in it, but would hesitate with a vaccine… and that’s the thing; it all ends up in your bloodstream. One way or the other, that’s where it has to go to make its way around your body. To what degree it’s been broken down or metabolized or synthesized or whatever… food, water, medicine, drugs… if it’s not getting into your bloodstream, it’s not doing much. If you’re eating McRibs, but fear getting vaccinated, you might need to rethink the logic.

There are places in the world drowning in excess vaccine, but B.C. isn’t one of them. For the moment, there is a consistent demand by everyone who wants to get it… because, so far, it’s only been 16% of us. That number will rise significantly in the near future as more doses arrive, but now we’re in a bit of a race. Ontario is facing crisis numbers and lockdowns and school closures, and we’re on that exact path unless things change, probably a month behind… and with hospitalizations and ICU cases rising sharply over the weekend, we’re into a critical week. Some say it’s not too late, some say it’s inevitable.

What’s the efficacy rate of enough people doing what we need to do to prevent this from getting out of hand? An excellent question. We’ll be finding out in the next couple of weeks.

By |2021-04-06T17:03:50-07:00April 6th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , |5 Comments
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April 5, 2021

Not a lot to report today; Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates it today. Today we simply wait.

In the short-term, we wait for tomorrow’s more detailed news, and perhaps a clarification… the press release that just went out has a typo in it, and undercounts the provincial total by 800. My numbers below are correct… I think. The medium-term, and possible new restrictions, will be dictated by what happens this coming week.

In the long-term, wouldn’t it be nice to get some really awesome vaccine news? Maybe it’s too much to hope for, but it’s the optimist in me that’s hoping and waiting for something unexpected. If 1.5 million doses of AZ can materialize out of nowhere, why not more… maybe our leaders have been on the phone over the weekend trying to figure it out. We can hope. At least the online booking system we’ve all been waiting for in Vancouver arrives tomorrow.

On a completely different sort of waiting, check out the video of the wait staff… and the owner and the patrons of the Corduroy Restaurant in Kits… all of the above chanting “Get Out!” to the health inspectors who went in there and were met with a completely maskless and somewhat aggressive crowd. Those health inspectors intelligently did a 180 and got out of there, because it was very clear nothing of value was going to be achieved. I’m pretty sure that’s former Canuck anthem singer Mark Donnelly sitting by the window… at around 0:45 of the video. The restaurant has now been shut down by the PHO.

Beautiful day for a bike ride… that’s where I was. By the way, it’s great exercise… maybe it’ll help me lose some wait.

By |2021-04-05T17:07:11-07:00April 5th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |5 Comments
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April 4, 2021

I have seen some ridiculous finger-pointing in my life… people, yelling at each other for 15 minutes, trying to assign blame for some problem. It didn’t matter that the problem was relatively insignificant, nor that it had been resolved painlessly. No, that wasn’t important. The only truly important thing was making sure everyone knew, and agreed upon, whose fault it was.

I don’t think that way. Frankly, I consider that sort of nonsense a complete waste of time that vast majority of the time… because the vast majority of the time, either the problem has been resolved, or it’s still a problem that needs addressing… and that’s where the energy should be focused.

Forgetting whose fault it is, and what could’ve and should’ve been done better, let’s figure out where we are today, and what we need to do to get out of it.

The new variant that’s in town, the one colloquially known as the Brazilian variant, is far more concerning than people might realize. It’s highly contagious, evidently more dangerous, and it can infect people who’d previously been infected with other strains. It’s quite likely the variant that’s running through the Canucks, because some of them had already had, and cleared, previous strains of C19.

How’d it get here? I’ll leave the finger-pointing out of it. It could’ve been prevented, or at least its spread fiercely mitigated. Spring Break, Whistler, yadda yadda. In Vancouver, at this moment, there is more Brazilian variant than in the entire country of the United States. Yes, really. And it’s what led to the very sudden turn-around, and the new restrictions. You know, those restrictions that two days ago were being protested by maskless screaming crowds insisting we’re all just being controlled and that the government is trying to screw us.

I sincerely wish we *were* being controlled, because the mess we’re in might have been avoided. So, again… finger-pointing aside, what now?

Let’s simply accept that there is a group of people who don’t understand, don’t want to understand, who will insist to their dying day, even if that dying is sooner than later, in a hospital, on a ventilator… that all of this isn’t such a big deal. That person’s struggling, dying breaths still denying the seriousness of the situation should be enough to convince you that nothing would ever have changed their minds. So, what do you do?

Their ridiculous attitude and filling of restaurants and irresponsible partying and all the rest of it will go on, no matter what the PHO, police, neighbours and common sense say. Let’s accept that, and not waste more time thinking that slapping uncollectable fines on these people is the answer. Arrest the leaders and throw them in jail? Sure, but I have a better idea.

This will only go away when most of us have been vaccinated. We are way behind. Embarrassingly behind. On the whole topic of sourcing, procuring and getting vaccines into arms? There is no version of spin that justifies the mess we’re in. We are pathetically behind every other first-world nation… and embarrassingly behind our southerly neighbours who are drowning in the stuff, especially in places where, ironically, nobody wants it anymore. The number of people vaccinated in the U.S. yesterday and today adds up to more than Canada in total since day one. Many states have huge surpluses. In many places, you can just wander into a pharmacy… look at the vaccine menu of the day… “I think I’ll have the Pfizer… my wife would like the Moderna… and a couple of Johnson & Johnson’s for the kids, thanks so much.”

OK leaders… the Trudeaus and Horgans of the land; our local nuclear clock is approaching midnight. Given the lackadaisical attitude being displayed locally, unless something changes… around here, we might be a lot more screwed than we think. We need vaccines, and we need them now… and they have it. They have plenty to spare.

Justin and John… get on the phone. Call the governors of those states that are going to soon be throwing out their doses, and offer them something. We have lots of trees. We have lots of fresh water. Get us the vaccines *now*, and give them a sweet deal… set up shop on the banks of the Fraser River and take a much fresh sparking glacier-runoff water as you want for 10 years… but get us the vaccines… now.

Bonnie… I don’t know where the choke-points are with respect to getting doses into arms… but if the paragraph above were to work, what would be needed to handle it? More trained vaccinators? More syringes? More tents for more parking lots for all the pop-up vaccine clinics? I have no idea, but let’s assume we’ll need it, because let’s assume that finally, our leaders will step-up and cut through the bullshit and deliver.

J&J&B, start at the finish line of the problem and figure out how to get us there: We need vaccines, and soon. Much sooner than the present plan allows for. We are on the edge of this thing blowing up… in fact, we may well be beyond the tipping point. The timing of Spring Break last year saved us… but it may have royally screwed us this time. Now we throw Easter into the mix. Yeah, the whole “Here’s what we need to do to control case counts” thing may actually have reached beyond the tipping point… and we may already headed to overrun hospitals and ICUs. A severe and instant lockdown may prevent that, but that’s unlikely to happen.

The leaders put a lot of this responsibility on us, and for a while, we delivered. Now it seems that enough of us are tired of doing so… but that’s where true leaders course-correct. “The people didn’t listen to us!” isn’t a valid excuse for the history books. It’s up to you to mitigate that, and not participate in the finger-pointing.

Let’s not worry about whose fault it is. Just fix it.

By |2021-04-04T17:03:00-07:00April 4th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |10 Comments
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April 3, 2021

“It’s always darkest before dawn”… one of those sentences that’s used in the context of “As bad as things seem, they’ll always get better.”

Pragmatically, it’s not really true… for numerous reasons. At the most superficial level, we live in a world of artificial light… and if you’ve ever been out in the street at dawn, right at the moment the streetlights switch off, you may have noticed that the little bit of sun doesn’t actually make up for all the acetylene or halogen or neon or argon or sodium vapour or whatever lighting that just disappeared. And even if you’re out in the middle of nowhere, there are stars and the moon, which themselves can be bright and offer light… and whose brightness fades when the sun begins to emerge. I guess if it’s pitch black and then that first photon of sunlight appears over the eastern horizon, this would hold true… but there are too many other variables.

If you assume the end of this pandemic is sunrise, we’re in more darkness today than we might have thought a month ago. It’s hard to plan for the sunrise if you don’t know where you are, nor what time of the year it is. The darkness-to-full-sunshine in Costa Rica in July (around 20 minutes) is a different experience than being in northern Finland in late December. Dress warm; you’ll be waiting a long time.

Waiting for the end of this pandemic is like that… but where, geographically, we change locations every day. And date. And, just for fun, the earth slows down and speeds up without telling anyone.

Variants, transmission events, uneven vaccine rollouts, anti-vaxxers, politics… these are all independent variables in a formula that’s unsolvable because there are other variables too, and we don’t even know what they are.

In the meantime, locally, it’s gotten a bit darker. Numbers are up. The majority of people getting sick are younger… and that now includes the majority of our Vancouver Canucks. These guys are among the healthiest people around, yet some of them are concerningly ill and receiving IV treatment. And, in the midst of these concerning new variables, a protest was organized yesterday at 2pm at City Hall… small business owners protesting the recent 3-week restrictions.

I certainly understand their frustration. They want the sun to rise too, but it’s elusive. The rules seem arbitrary… and seem to change overnight. How can anyone plan for anything?

I have no problem with business owners protesting/advocating for what they perceive to be their best interests.

I have a huge effing problem, however, in seeing that the vast majority of those protestors, all standing close to each other, yelling and chanting and whatever else… were not wearing masks. It boggles the mind, and I would hope the irony is not lost on them. “If only there were a way to open up sooner”, they masklessly commiserate with each other. “If only people realized that restaurants aren’t the problem”, they masklessly voice loudly into each other’s faces.

More than 1,000 new cases each of the last two days. And as the news will be reporting tomorrow, Canada has just gone over 1,000,000 cases.

In the meantime, the long night rolls on… and the horizon, distant as it is, has yet to start spilling over some much-needed sunshine.

By |2021-04-03T17:03:01-07:00April 3rd, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Business & Economics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |5 Comments
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April 2, 2021

The last time I wished I were a year or two older than I was… was a long time ago… back when I was 18, and had just gotten booted out of one of those charity casinos that Great Canadian used to operate out of the Sandman Inn on Howe.

I’m a few years away from 55, but I know a lot of people who fall into that 55-65 range, and I’ve been hearing from many of them. Half of them tell me they just got the AstraZeneca vaccine, and the other half ask me if I think it’s ok to get the AstraZeneca vaccine. My response to all of them is the same: “Hell yeah!!”

This story keeps evolving because every day there’s a little bit more to throw into the mix of information, misinformation, speculation and fact.

There’s a chance the AZ vaccine causes no blood clotting whatsoever. There’s a chance it does, in astonishingly low numbers. Those numbers are less low when other risk factors are thrown in… low platelet counts, already-present clotting disorders, being on birth control, and being young. Indeed, if there’s any commonality between any of it, it’s that it affects younger people. Therefore, whether it’s 55 in some places or 60 in others, some restrictions have been imposed. The old “abundance of caution” thing, because it looks like the numbers might go from one in more than a million… to one in less than a million (though still in the hundreds of thousands).

The most recent UK data counted 30 clots (linked with low platelet counts), including 7 deaths… out of 18 million people vaccinated. That’s a mortality rate of 0.000039%. One in 2.57 million. And that’s if you attribute the vaccine to those blood-clotting events, which is not a given. In any event, for the sake of this example, let’s pretend the AZ caused all of them, as small (or large, depending how you look at it) as those numbers are. Numbers like that are sometimes hard to visualize, so here’s a simple example.

Get a plastic cup. Fill it with 21 coins of your choosing… pennies, quarters, Loonies, whatever… it doesn’t matter, any mix will do, as long as you know what all the heads and tails looks like. Hold your hand over it and give it a good shake. Now fling all the coins out of there… watch them bounce all over the place. Now go look at the coins. As soon as you find two that are different, you’re good. This one is heads, this one is tails… and that’s it. You’re safe. It would take all of them to land identically to approach the risk of dying from the AstraZeneca vaccine, and that data included those who may be of higher risk. Take out younger women on birth control with low platelet counts… and anybody who’s had clotting issues… and you can add a few more coins into the mix.

Your chances of dying from the AZ vaccine are far less than dying on your way to get it, whether by driving or biking or even walking. Not bad, but it’s a risk… so, what’s the benefit?

By many orders of magnitude, you’re now two weeks away from never having to worry about Covid-19 again. Yes, you’ll still have to wear a mask till the rest of us catch up. You might get a little sick, with symptoms no worse than a common cold. Indeed, the next time you have the sniffles, it might be C19. You might not even know, and even better, you might not even care. You’ll worry about it in the future about as much as you worry about catching a seasonal cold.

Sounds good to me; I can’t wait to join you. And happy I can do so in a couple of months… not years.

By |2021-04-02T17:03:25-07:00April 2nd, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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April 1, 2021

There is fire and there is ice. Fire might be ignoring this virus entirely, and watching an entire society, its economy and its people, crash and burn. Ice, on the other hand, would be freezing everything… cold, hard lockdowns until the virus is extinguished, for as long as it takes. Several months at least. And extinguished along with it, the entire economy… of now healthy — but starving and broke — people.

Neither is a palatable alternative, so we’re stuck navigating a mix of the two… an endless ocean of lukewarm water… where we float around with no destination in sight, hoping to eventually find a shore where we can disembark from this brutal journey.

That being said, actions aside, the *messaging* can’t be lukewarm. It can’t get a little warmer or a little colder. It needs to be decisive, and, around here, it’s not. The result of it is irresponsible parties in Big White… and Whistler… and Surrey weddings… and Yaletown Penthouses. The list goes on.

The lukewarm messaging, along with the lukewarm weather and the lukewarm vaccine rollout has led to this lukewarm attitude… and it’s not good.

I haven’t talked about Chile in a while, so here’s an update: They are the most vaccinated country in the Americas. Their one-jab percentage is 36% (The U.S. is 30%; we’re at 14%). Awesome, right? They must all be out in the streets, partying it up, having a great time, right? Yeah… no. They are, as of today, on a full-on lockdown. Like, full-on… for two weeks.

How did that happen? Many reasons, but a lukewarm attitude to following restrictions is a big part of it. Easing here, easing there. For a while, things were bad. Then they locked it down hard. Then things got better… then they started easing restrictions… then they started making exceptions. The following people are allowed out… caregivers, pharmacy visitors, cab drivers… whatever… the list slowly grew till fully some 5 million people out of the population of 19 million were legally out and about, ostensibly during a lockdown. Not a big deal, because that was when vaccinations were ramping up, and the variants hadn’t arrived. And suddenly, very quickly, with everyone already living like things were back to normal, it’s all gone to hell.

While it’s possible this level of vaccination and nonchalance might have kept up with the original virus, it’s no match for the far-more contagious variants. Accordingly, 5 steps forward has led to 10 steps back. New cases have risen dramatically, and hospitals are near capacity. ICUs are overflowing… and so are the morgues. There can’t be a worse indicator than when the emergency overflow morgues start showing up.

I’ll be honest… I’m not impressed with our lukewarm provincial messaging. Things are kind of good one day, not so good other days. Wishy and washy. Ninety percent of Covid fines are unpaid and, given what we’ve seen with respect to organization around all of this, unlikely to ever be collected. And they are insignificant slaps on the wrist anyway, considering the potential implications. It bothers me greatly that people behave that way, and it bothers me that many do so because they’re just following an example they see all around them. Please don’t do this; please don’t do that. It’s perhaps the biggest downside of being a Canadian during all of this; our inherent politeness doesn’t seem able to impose a degree of harshness that’s truly needed. Give me fire or give me ice. We’re not getting anywhere anytime soon, floating around aimlessly in this vastness of lukewarm water.

But there is some good news… my mom got vaccinated today!

By |2021-04-01T17:03:13-07:00April 1st, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |3 Comments
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March 31, 2021

There is absolutely no better argument against the existence of vast, complicated government conspiracies… than the simple fact that it’s difficult to sometimes understand how government operates at all. Complicated conspiracies? Even the simple stuff gets completely mis-managed. .. and this isn’t based on slamming any particular party. It’s all of them. The governments of the future will no doubt find ways to disappoint us… but today, it’s the NDP.

A few hours after me posting my sincere wish that the Province of B.C not botch up the vaccine distribution any further… that they should have planned ahead, that they should know what’s coming, that there should be a complete, holistic deployment plan…

… the government posted that as of Wednesday, people aged 55 to 65 in Metro Vancouver can call their local pharmacy and book an appointment for an AstraZeneca shot. The one good thing was to see how much interest there was in it… but, boy… what a mess. First of all, people started calling in right away. Whether it’s toilet paper or salt for icy roads, we Vancouverites seem to forget the rules with respect to following queues and limits. Pharmacies were flooded with calls, and many of them were not prepared. At all. Many were not prepared to start booking appointments, and accused the callers of using leaked info that’s not yet public… notwithstanding it was already proudly proclaimed on the government’s own website.

Many were incapable of booking appointments, and that shouldn’t have happened. But also, many *did* take appointments, and that shouldn’t have happened either… at least not until today. By the time Wednesday rolled around, all vaccination appointment slots we spoken for… all before even the first one should’ve been booked.

Needless to say, there were many upset people. I guess we’ve learned to expect busy signals from overloaded phone systems, but pulling out the rug from under people’s feet like that?

I remember waiting 12 hours in line for concert tickets… I was first in line. Ten seconds after tickets went on sale, I asked for 4 front-row-center tickets… and was told that the first 3 rows were all already sold out entirely. What a crock.

Actually, a better example… a 5km cross-country race back in grade 10 when I was in perhaps the best shape of my life and was looking forward to setting a personal best. There were a lot of people running, so we were told to stagger ourselves in likely groupings so as to not get in each other’s way… as much as possible, anyway. The elite runners at the front, those who were going to walk most of the way at the back, and so on.

So here we are, hundreds of us… with 500 yards of open road ahead, and then 3km of trails in the forest where you’re not easily passing anyone.

The started has his dinky little starter gun… “Ready! Set!” . The gun didn’t go off, but that didn’t stop half the crowd from starting to run. If he’d yelled “GO!” and the gun didn’t go off, maybe ok. But he didn’t. The was no start, and half the people, myself included, were waiting for a re-start. But there wasn’t one. He just waved his hands and said, “Just go! Go!” – and we’re all like “But that’s not fair, they’ve already…” and he’s like “Just Go!”

So there I was, stuck behind a wall of slower runners, my chances of running any sort of half-decent race completely shattered. What a crock.

Do it right. Or don’t do it at all. Or, as we all know, if you don’t do it right the first time, you’ll probably have to do it again the second or third time.

We do not have re-starts with this pandemic. There is no second or third show added where there will be plenty of tickets available… and we are at the mercy of our ticket distributor/race starter/provincial government to get this right.

Today… more than 1,000 new cases in the province… for the first time ever. Today… when the province went over 100,000 cases. Today… we need them to get it right.

So far, they seem to find innovative ways to get it wrong. What a crock.

By |2021-03-31T17:03:09-07:00March 31st, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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March 30, 2021

Here are a couple of dictionary definitions:

Mitigate (v): to make less severe, serious or painful

Alleviate (v): to make (suffering, deficiency, or a problem) less severe

Almost the same definition, but there’s an important subtle difference that’s crept into how those words are used… with one, you’re taking corrective action to correct a problem; with the other, you’re taking steps before the problem happens in hope it never becomes one.

A distant example was when I got my first car, and my dad telling me… no matter what, change the oil. Every 3,000km or every 6 months, whatever comes first… change the oil. Even if you don’t want to worry about spark plugs and fan belts and brake pads and everything else… change the oil. Mitigating that risk cost me $23 at Mr. Lube every 6 months. Alleviating the problem of a seized engine that ran dry of oil, or gummed up the motor because it was old and dirty… would’ve cost far more. I put close to 300,000km on that car and never had a serious issue with it. It was a rusty pile of junk when I sold it for $400… $200 cash, $200 in cheques that ultimately bounced… but the oil was pristine.

A far-more recent example… as told to me by my friend Henry, who designs boats… including tug boats, for the local company, Robert Allan Naval Architects. Six RANA tugboats were instrumental in freeing the Ever Given from the clutches of the Suez Canal yesterday. Not too long ago, RANA provided the Suez Canal a proposal advocating for escort tugs for all ships transiting the canal. This would be mitigation, and it would have a cost… but I suspect that cost would’ve turned out to be a lot less than the week-long alleviation that was necessary.

Getting sick with C19 requires alleviation… and I have no doubt for people knocked down by it, they wonder if they could’ve mitigated the risk of catching it. If they were wearing masks and distancing and not attending crowded events and they still caught it, that’s most unfortunate. It’s also possible that my car develops an oil leak and the engine light fails and one day I’m driving around… and the engine melts on me. It’s also possible that high winds or whatever it was that caused the Ever Given to ground itself might have been so strong that tugboats would’ve been helpless.

Sure… you can mitigate all you want, but it’s inherent in the definition of the word. It makes things better, not perfect. A vaccine that’s 95% effective says, in the same breath, that for 1 in 20 people, it won’t help in preventing infection. Unbelievably, that’s the reason some people give for not wanting the vaccine: “If I get the vaccine, I can still get sick… so why bother?”. There are actually two answers to that question. One is that a 19 out of 20 chance of not getting sick makes it worthwhile. And the other is that, with the vaccine, even if you do get sick, it won’t be so bad. It’ll just be a mild case.

If you don’t like the math of that, then I would ask you a simple question: Why aren’t you buying lottery tickets every week, and if you are, why aren’t you already filthy rich? After all, if you buy a ticket, either you win or you don’t. What’s the difference?

Eastern medicine has always been about mitigating; some Chinese doctors don’t charge you when you’re sick… they’re there for fix you. But they do charge you when you’re healthy, because their job is to keep you from getting sick in the first place. That’s mitigation, versus the western method of alleviation of going to the doctor when you’re already sick. Mitigation is the answer to a question we used to ask… why is that perfectly-healthy Asian person walking around with a mask?

We all have the knowledge and tools to mitigate the risk of C19… for ourselves and for others. Many of us do whatever we can, and it certainly helps… but it’s not full-proof. But it’s still worth doing, because, having spoken to people who’ve survived this thing, the cost of alleviation (which in some cases goes on forever) is far higher… and I don’t mean monetarily. That’s the least of it.

By |2021-03-30T17:03:06-07:00March 30th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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March 29, 2021

To be honest, I don’t really like surprises. Don’t ever throw me a surprise party.

But today’s surprise update at 1pm from the PHO wasn’t really a surprise… not after last week, and what things looked like heading into the weekend. Add to that the end of Spring Break, and there are enough worrisome moving parts that it all needs a serious look.

That serious look is providing us with new restrictions, much to the delight of some, despair of others. Either way, necessary… and possibly more than people can appreciate. In the U.S., the head of the CDC is warning of “impending doom”. It’s not that bad around here; at least, not yet… and there’s no reason it should get to that point. And it won’t, if enough people actually listen to and respect the rules. Many people do. Many people don’t. And many people are somewhere in between, and like a close election, they’re the ones who might make all the difference.

The numbers were trending towards exponential growth, and they still might… Spring Break ended today, it’s a week or more till the results of that shows up… and a week after that for hospitalizations, or worse.

It’s concerning enough to implement a “circuit breaker” – the same thing we’ve been hearing since Day 1: Break those chains of transmission. Case counts are up, test-positivity rates are way up, and the ever-growing presence of the more contagious variants… all of it is concerning.

Accordingly, for three weeks – till April 19th, starting at midnight tonight – a series of restrictions; some we’ve seen and some are new. Here are the highlights:

– All students grade 4 and up will wear masks
– All indoor dining in restaurants and pubs, suspended. Outdoor dining and take-out is ok.
– Indoor fitness classes are suspended. One on one training is ok, but that’s it
– Indoor religious services suspended
– Whistler/Blackcomb closed

All of that on top of what’s already in place… don’t socialize indoors, don’t socialize outside of your group of 10. Essential travel only. Wear a mask. If you’re not sure, err on the side of caution. If you’re not feeling well, stay away from other people and do not go to work or school, period.

This erring on the side of caution, some would argue, is excessive. I will simply go back to what I was saying around this time a year ago; we can’t afford to be wrong, especially now, with a clear finish line in sight. “Short term pain for long term gain” has never been so relevant. It’s exactly where we’re at.

The erring on the side of caution has also dragged the AstraZeneca vaccine back into the discussion, because now, the number of younger people in Europe who’ve developed blood clots is up to 30. This is out of five million people… so, one in 166,667… which is 0.0006%. The typical random rate for getting a blood clot in any given year for any given person in Canada or the U.S. is around one in 1,000… 0.1%… a far higher number. I’m still going to put it out there; in the future, the AZ vaccine will be used to mitigate the risk of blood clots… because – and someone correct me if I’m wrong – my numbers suggest a far lower prevalence of blood clots among those who’ve had the AZ vaccine. Certainly not the other way around. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe there’s more to the story.

For the moment (and I’m guessing it won’t last long), the AZ vaccine will be used in B.C. only for those aged 55 and over. I suspect that’ll have changed by next week.

Either way, it doesn’t make a big difference… we’re being told there’s enough Pfizer and Moderna showing up that there will be enough for one dose for all eligible adults by the end of June. Let’s hope it works out… now *that* would be a nice surprise.

By |2021-03-29T17:03:01-07:00March 29th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , |4 Comments
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