Masks

February 20, 2021

Vaccines have been around long enough that now we are getting more and more real-world data. Forget the tiny samples extrapolated to the general population… these aren’t trials of a few select people, or Phase 1 or 2 trials. These aren’t good guesses. One recent study from Israeli data has a sample set of 500,000. I think it’s fair to assume that whatever those numbers imply, they’ll apply to everyone.

In summary, after getting the second dose and waiting two weeks, you have a 96% chance of not getting sick at all. You have a 99% chance of not dying from C19, even if you do get sick… because if you do get sick, it’s exceedingly unlikely to be a serious course of illness.

Those are the numbers people need to hear… and, around here, in B.C… perhaps more-so than other places. We are the number one province for disobeying orders from the PHO, and that’s worrisome, especially with Spring Break coming up. If we were all well on our way to being vaccinated, that’d be a different story. The issue is that significant numbers of people aren’t following the rules, and adding vaccine delays and more contagious variants to that means almost certain exponential growth in daily cases. We might easily be heading into the “Wow, didn’t see that coming” territory… except, now, we do it see it coming. It’s blatantly obvious, and it’d be unfortunate to see it all go to hell one more time.

Almost certainly, it’d be the last time… because by the time the next wave subsides, the science implies the virus would be out of gas… nowhere to hop to in any meaningful way; relegated to the nooks and crannies of rare illness that pops up in a while. But we’re at least a year away from that, and it can be a very bumpy road… a road where even if the numbers don’t blow up, we’ll be hearing a lot of constant whining: “Why can’t we do this, why can’t we do that… while at the same time we’re allowed to do these other things…”

These rhetorical questions are easily answered: Because the majority of infections are happening in completely-avoidable social settings. That’s it. If you could be trusted to visit someone’s house, but be outside and far apart and wear masks… go right ahead. Except, you can’t… because over and over we see examples of people saying to hell with it; my mental health is more important and I’ve had enough. I’m going to visit and I’m going to hang out and there’s nothing anyone can do or say to stop me.

It’s true… around here, there’s no threat of going to jail. There’s no threat of a fine that really hurts; it’s just a slap on the wrist. The consequences just aren’t there to serve as a deterrent, because the deterrent is supposed to be self-evident…. short-term pain for long-term gain. I (and many others) will tell you: “Stick to the program now, and we will all be out of this sooner.” If enough people listen, we’ll be ok… yet, people were disappointed that recently, restrictions weren’t lifted.

We could be back at the “hang out with 6 friends” thing soon. In fact, we could’ve been there right now had people followed the rules a bit better. No Yaletown rooftop parties. No games nights. No karaoke. At least, not yet. We’re still at the point where a few people can ruin it for everyone.

I’m not here to judge or tell you what to do. I am just here to tell you what might happen, and the only evidence I’ll provide is information that’s available everywhere. Look at places that are well-along the path of vaccination. Look at the places where they’ve eradicated the virus, and the militant steps they’re taking to keep it out. For us, presently, neither of those options are relevant… so… here it is again. I’ll repeat what we’ve heard from Dr. Henry a thousand times: It’s up to us.

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By |2021-02-20T17:03:00-08:00February 20th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , |0 Comments
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February 19, 2021

Two somewhat-related items as we head into the weekend…

Yesterday’s post sparked some interesting discussion; it was supposed to be about the difference with arguing opinions versus facts. When it comes to English or Political Science, there are opinions. When it comes to Math, there are facts… and just because the facts were taught incorrectly (or not at all), it does not negate their validity. The big difference between Math teachers and English teachers is that one has more “wiggle room” than the other. Or, should. Thinking back to elementary school, grade 5 to be exact, I remember this interaction… and it bothers me to this day. I am a big fan of good teachers (and have written about, and will do so in the future as well) – many I’ve experienced in my lifetime.

But school teachers… public or private / elementary or high-school… it’s always hit or miss.

On this day back in 1978, the English teacher who was now also teaching Math… asked the class something like “Of the numbers from one to ten, which ones go into twenty?”

Hands shot up and kids were called upon…

“Five!”
“Yes”
“Ten!”
“Yes”
“Four”
“Yes – very good”

And then I put up my hand and said, “Don’t they *all* go into twenty? I think you mean which ones go into twenty *evenly*”.

“What?”

“Like nine… it goes into twenty twice, but not evenly. Remainder two”

And instead of “Oh, well… yes, you’re right…”, what she said was, “Oooohhhh… boys and girls, looks like we have a little math genius in the room!” – which of course was met with derision and “Hee Haw” from around the classroom. Up yours, Mrs. T.

Hey, teachers… your kids are impressionable. They remember stuff like that. Here we are, more than forty years later.

And speaking of education, and possible lack thereof, the messaging around vaccines has not been great. There are people who “get it”, but they are not the ones that need convincing, explaining or educating. They understand, and they will get their vaccine as soon as they’re able.

The messaging towards the vaccine-hesitant has been awful, to the point of making things worse. Now, finally, we are on the cusp of seeing ramped-up production and delivery… and now the issue will simply be that people don’t want to get vaccinated… and when you ask an otherwise well-informed person why, you’ll hear things like:

“The vaccine isn’t 100% effective”
“It doesn’t work against the new variants”
“You can still be contagious after you get it”
“We’re told we still have to wear masks and socially distance, so why bother?”

Most of that has some truth to it, but that’s totally missing the point. Yes, 95 isn’t 100. It seems to work just fine against the new variants, but we won’t know for sure till we have some data. Yes, for a period of time, you can still be contagious… but after two weeks, almost certainly not. And, finally, yeah… we still have to wear masks and socially distance because we’re not all immune… because, guess what, we’re not all yet vaccinated.

But, for whatever reason, the clarity of the message gets lost with all of the more-effective fear-mongering… and, as a result, a third of the U.S. military have refused to get vaccinated. Some 60% of Ohio nursing-home workers have declined it. Ultimately, as per the latest poll, half of Americans would refuse the vaccine today… a number which is ironically higher in Black in Hispanic people; ironic, because they generally have a higher chance of getting the disease… and worse outcomes. Data has shown that two weeks after getting the second dose, your chances of dying from C19 are near zero. At worst, you’ll suffer what seems to be a conventional cold… but that message is not getting through.

This is the end-result of awful, inconsistent messaging from former leadership in the U.S…. but here in Canada, while the numbers are better, they’re still alarmingly high… probably because for people who like to see things in terms of a binary solution… good/bad black/white right/wrong… no matter how good vaccine outcomes might be, there’s always the caveat… it’s not perfect. Therefore, it’s useless.

The messaging needs to be consistent. It needs to be hammered home unequivocally. And it needs messaging from trusted experts, not politicians. Not English teachers posing as Math teachers whose attitude is to lash out at those that don’t agree.

At the end of the day, it’s all about education… and that needs to be happening a lot better than it is now.

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By |2021-02-19T17:03:09-08:00February 19th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |12 Comments
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February 17, 2021

There really is no better medium than social media when it comes to stupid arguments. And perhaps the epitome of stupid arguments are these reply-threads that discuss not masks or vaccines or politics… I mean, as misguided as some opinions might be, they’re at least based on some “fact” that someone has latched on to and decides to defend it, no matter what. There are certain personality types who simply can’t admit they’re wrong, and will simply double-down when called on their bullshit. There seem to be more of them these days, no doubt empowered by the former president of the U.S., who, incredibly, was never wrong in four years of power. That he had to descend to incredulous lows to defend his indefensible positions went from confusing to concerning to finally just amusing. Remember that sharpie-modified weather map?

On Facebook, I’ve stepped back from a lot of discussions because they’re not actually discussions; they’re just people trying to bury others with their opinions. Very few are actually listening… even fewer with the mindset that their opinions might even be changed. Just loud echo chambers where everyone either agrees and pats each other on the back… or disagrees, and roasts each other mercilessly.

But then… there are these things that come up for discussion, usually in the context of “Only 5% of people get it right!!” or “Even Einstein was fooled!!” Of course, it’s just click-bait… and it’s usually something like: What is 3 + 6 x 4 ?

They are usually more complicated than that, but that will suffice for my example. Some people will say the answer is 36. Some will say it’s 27. Others will come up with something else… and if you came up with something other than those two numbers, I’d like to hear what you came up with and how you came up with it.

The correct answer here is 27… because there exists an order of operations (you may have learned it as PEDMAS… or, depending where you’re from, PEMDAS, BEDMAS or BODMAS. In the U.K., it’s BIDMAS. No matter what acronym you attach to it, they all say the same thing… and one thing they all say, with respect to my example, is that multiplication gets done first; after that, addition. Accordingly, this example is 3 + (6 x 4) which is 3 + 24 which is 27. If you did this going left-to-right, you’d get 3 + 6 equals 9, and then 9 x 4 = 36. But that is wrong.

And that’s the thing… there are countless message threads with people arguing this, like it’s up for discussion. Like math can change with differing opinions. “Well, that’s the way you do it… but I choose to do it differently.” … or, “I was taught left to right, no matter what” or, even, “PEDMAS didn’t exist when I went to school.”

As infuriating as it might be to engage with an anti-mask or anti-vax proponent, at least they have their misguided facts upon which they can fall back. But there are no opinions when it comes to math… or, at least, there shouldn’t be. But there are, and the name-calling and bullshit is as strong as anywhere else… and, honestly, it drives me even crazier.

It also reminds me.. it’s not up to me to understand why some people refuse to accept facts. These aren’t convoluted, contrived, complicated theorems that take a lot of understanding to unravel. They’re just facts, and they’re indisputable. But people choose to “not believe in it”, because “science is just a theory” and scientists change their minds all the time, so they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about.

Wanna try to convince someone who “doesn’t believe in math” that they should get a vaccine and wear a mask? Yeah… me neither.

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By |2021-02-17T17:04:21-08:00February 17th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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February 16, 2021

Today is the day when most of the numbers catch up from the weekend gaps… and one thing is clear; they’re all mostly continuing their trend in the right direction. Cases, hospitalizations, outbreaks. deaths… the numbers tell a good story and the graphs paint a pretty picture. Especially impressive are Ontario and Quebec numbers these days; solidly trending in the right direction.

In the U.S., while possibly some of that can be attributed to vaccines, the numbers (15%) are still too low for it to make such a tangible difference. Among many other potential reasons, it’s… the masks… a policy now in place that would have had a drastic effect on the pandemic. How many lives might have been saved? That’ll be discussed for a long time, but most will agree… it’s a figure with six digits… and closer to seven, not five. Also… we’ll soon be hearing a lot about the current U.S. number of deaths; by tomorrow this time, it’ll have surpassed 500,000.

In Canada, the harsh imposition of what some consider to be overreaching orders are also having that effect. All of the “I just had to go on vacation but shouldn’t be forced to pay $2,000 for returning home” crowd… well, you’ll get little sympathy from me. Trust me, there are times when I’ve felt like saying “to hell with it” and booking us all a nice trip to somewhere sunny. What difference will it make? How bad can it be? I never get too far down the “Quick, before we come to our senses!” line of thinking, but I can see how it gets to people. That being said, that’s an explanation, not an excuse… and when all those 100+ people who flew to Hawaii over the weekend come home and are met with restrictions and derision… well, they’re adults making adult decisions. They can face the adult consequences. All of the restrictions, all of the non-essential travel that’s not going on… it’s making a difference.

On the flipside, some local games-night party with 50 people attending ended up infecting 15 of them, who unknowingly went home and then to work or wherever else, subsequently infecting a host of others. We won’t know how far that little super-spreader event will reach, but when I say all numbers are going down, there’s a caveat… which is that while the overall numbers can go down, the localized numbers can go up… in this case, Fraser Health, where numbers are indeed up – a fact somewhat obfuscated by the rest of the province. And… to be clear… one little super-spreading event, a little tail of an event… can end up wagging the entire big dog of a province.

I really hope the numbers keep going down. And they can. It’s almost like the numbers *want* to go down. We just have to continue giving them the opportunity to do so.

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By |2021-02-16T17:03:35-08:00February 16th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report|Tags: , , , , , , , , |3 Comments
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February 10, 2021

I must admit, it feels good not to be writing about Donald Trump. Because now, I read the news about the guy and my first thought is always, “Who cares”. Washington will have their hands full with the impeachment circus, and by the end of it it’s highly likely he’ll be acquitted… but through the motions they go.

I find it pathetic that the Republican Party hasn’t got the internal fortitude to figure out what’s really important to them; some of them cling on to their has-been demagogue for the simple reason that there’s still an army of misguided supporters out there. What they perhaps don’t realize is that those aren’t fellow Republicans. They’re cult followers. Jeez, if the events of January 6th can’t convince you of that, nothing can. Or, of course, they *do* realize that, and don’t care. Which is really far worse, when you consider the implications. Either way, I look forward to it all going away. And, hopefully, not coming back.

Sifting past the pages of all that nonsense for something relevant to write about in the few minutes I have to do so, I found an interesting story from the CDC claiming that double-masking can block 93% of potentially infectious particles. That number varies, depending how well you double-mask and how well knotted it’s done… but it’s drastically different than single masking in the 40-60% range. It’s a far cry seeing that published and possibly adhered to, as opposed to the aforementioned has-been demagogue who spent a year telling everyone masks are useless. For those who like math, the extrapolation of triple-masking goes to 97% and quadruple-masking 99%. Beyond that, it’s 100% because you probably can’t breathe.

Yeah, wear a mask or two… it makes a huge difference. I look around with some envy at places that had these mandates in place early and effectively… places where two-week mandatory quarantines don’t have exceptions and you pay for it yourself and you don’t complain; those are now the places that have bustling restaurants and crowded stadiums and no mask mandates. There are indeed places on the planet that are back to normal. The U.S. completely messed-up their opportunity, but that was because of colossally crappy leadership, right from the top, and right from the start. We’ve done a lot better here in Canada, but now that we’re a year into this thing, it’s not difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons. It could’ve been a lot better. In gambling terms, it’s called the “woulda coulda shoulda” – it’s what you hear from most frustrated horseplayers moments after the horses cross the finish line… I woulda bet the 6… I coulda bet the 4.

And yeah, we shoulda had masks everywhere… long ago.

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By |2021-02-10T17:05:17-08:00February 10th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |4 Comments
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February 6, 2021

The only thing more brief than today’s update might be tomorrow’s… not just because it’s the usual incomplete weekend numbers, but also… it was a beautiful day… and a long, sunny-yet-freezing-cold bike ride was it order… and it’s interesting to people-watch as you whizz by… everything from large groups of mask-less people, to solitary souls standing in the middle of nowhere… wearing a mask.

At the moment, we are in the midst of restrictions that puzzle some people, but it’s really very easy. Sometimes, the only way to get what you want to is to over-reach, because that’s potentially the only way people will get it.

Like, Dr. Henry says no SuperBowl parties… but what she really means is, don’t get together in crowded, stuffy, over-crowded living rooms to watch it. She could’ve said, “Go ahead and have SuperBowl parties… just be sure to wear masks at all times and keep 6 feet of distance”… but she didn’t, because a lot of people would’ve stopped reading after the first 6 words. Or… would’ve had the intention of following those rules but we can all imagine what it’d look like an hour into the game. So – it’s the strong over-reach, and that’s that. At least it’s clear.

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By |2021-02-06T17:04:19-08:00February 6th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report|Tags: , , , , , |2 Comments
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February 2, 2021

Happy Groundhog Day! Happy Groundhog Day! – and if that little repeat doesn’t make sense to you, it’s time for you to emerge from your own gopher hole, and forget about shadows… just go see the movie… and, also, if you haven’t seen the movie, you might not want to read all of this because it’ll spoil it for you. And if you’re thinking “Who cares, I’m never going to see the movie”… that’s a bad way to look at it… because it’s a good movie. A great movie. In fact, so great… that it’s been selected by the U.S. Library of Congress to be included for permanent preservation in the National Film Registry.

The film isn’t really about Groundhog Day; it just so happens that its repeated events take place on this particular day. It could have been any other holiday… or just some regular Tuesday. And, like most worthwhile films, it touches on many different things; some obvious and some subtle.

Many days of this pandemic have felt exactly like what Phil Connors (Bill Murray in the movie) went through… the same repetitive pattern, day after day after day. Certainly, initially, in the movie, Phil embraced the novelty of having day after day to pursue whatever he wanted… with no consequences. He did more than make crafts and bake sourdough and watch Tiger King, but same idea… and, no matter what, back to 6am the next day. The same next day.

Eventually, he got sick and tired and depressed of it all… but even killing himself didn’t work. Back to a perpetual cycle of day after day… but let’s be clear… this wasn’t a few weeks or months into it… it was years; possibly decades.

Eventually, after all of that, he emerged with some clarity… that if he’s stuck in the same day forever, why not make the best of it for other people, if not himself. He fixes a flat tire. He saves a guy choking to death. He catches a kid falling out of a tree. He lights someone’s cigarette without being asked. On a touching note, he continually and persistently tries to save a man’s life, yet no matter what he tries, it’s to no avail. And that’s just touching the surface of it. There’s a lot of discussion regarding exactly how long Phil replayed that day. Some estimates are in the range of 34 years… more than 12,000 times. No matter what. No matter where. No way out of that town, and no way out of that day… no matter what he tried.

It was eventually living through a “perfect” day that gets him out of his loop. From a spiritual point of view, in Judaism, there’s a concept of “repairing the world”, and that by doing a good deed (a “Mitzvah”) you release a spark of holy energy to the universe… and if everyone went around doing good deeds all the time, we’d all benefit. Certainly, on that particular day, Phil lit a forest fire of reparation.

Like the movie, there’s an end to the pandemic… and like the end of the movie, when we eventually get there, it’ll be happy… but we can all sympathize with Phil. If we didn’t quite get it the first time we ever watched the movie, we certainly do now. I recall watching an interview after Schindler’s List came out… and one of the Schindler Jews who survived The Holocaust was in the audience. She was asked after if she thought the movie was too long. “The real thing was longer”, she replied. Yep. Understood.

And back to today… in a very pandemically-themed ceremony (Groundhog Punxsutawney Phil was wearing a mask), the official little guy came out and saw his shadow… so, as far as Pennsylvania is concerned… six more weeks of winter. On the other hand, Ontario’s Wiarton Willie saw no shadow, so it’s an early spring for them. Here in B.C., I’m not sure we have an official groundhog to make the call, so I’ll do it – and it’s very easy, because unless we hit one of our annual 20 days of sunshine (which obviously today we didn’t), it’ll be cloudy and gray, which means no shadow, which means an early Spring. Great! I can’t wait to go… nowhere.

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By |2021-02-02T17:05:03-08:00February 2nd, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Space & Astronomy|Tags: , , , , , , , |5 Comments
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January 24, 2021

Weird things happen when you’re dealing with big numbers, but when you get to them slowly. Here’s a very basic example, speaking purely with respect to financial wealth:

A man whose net worth is only $1 is not rich. Far from it. Let’s call him poor.

If you take a man who’s poor and give him $1, he’s still poor.

Given those two starting premises, start a little loop. Give the guy another dollar. Is he rich now? No. $3? No. $4? No. But you loop a billion times, and of course, now he is. Somewhere along the line, he went from being poor to being stable… and, continuing, at some point he went from being stable to being well-off. Then he graduated to financially secure… on his way to rich. A dollar a time, he crossed all those lines.

The thing is… it’s difficult to figure out where to draw those lines, because they’re big, wide and blurry. And I don’t mean because everyone would have different definitions and opinions. I mean just you. Pick a number where you’d consider the guy to be unarguably in one of those categories. Now think of a number that’d plant him squarely in the next category up. Those two numbers are far apart. Even if you try to bring them closer together, you’ll still never get to a point where it flips by $1.

This same concept is what plays with our minds in elections. What difference does my one vote make? We keep getting told that it makes all the difference; every vote counts, etc. But the truth is… all other things being equal, your one little vote doesn’t matter. It’s quite a paradox. Take the last election, wherever you are. Change nothing except your one vote… remove it from the election. Did that change anything? Of course not. But also, of course, everything changes if more people start thinking like that. Many elections went the other way (Hilary 2016 comes to mind) because so many people become convinced that their one little vote wouldn’t matter (like people in Michigan) that they didn’t bother voting. At some point, even though it got there one missed vote at a time, it made a difference.

I’ve been accused of being a bit preachy and/or being a little shame-bashing on those making some individual decisions based on how they’re navigating their lives these days; choices with which I don’t agree with, with respect to travel or socializing or whatever… let alone masks and vaccines… but the intent of this post is not that. I’m just here to share a thought… reflecting on how we suddenly hit tipping points where everything changes… and how we got there.

Most rags-to-riches stories are long and drawn out; tiny, incremental gains over long periods of time. Perhaps not dollar-by-dollar, but it’s not a fine line that was hopped over one particular day.

Similarly, it’s like that with a pandemic. I look at these numbers every day, and there’s micro-movement in some direction. On a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem to matter much. But when you take a step back and look at it from a bigger-picture point of view, one day you realize you’re in a totally different place. These days, that looks a lot better than it did just a few short weeks ago. But it’s worth remembering how we got here, and how we’ll get to wherever we’re going next… one dollar or one step or one person… at a time.

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By |2021-01-24T20:11:48-08:00January 24th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Business & Economics|Tags: , , , , , |2 Comments
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January 22, 2021

I’ve written about queueing (Oohh! Five vowels in a row!) theory before, but sometimes you don’t need the fancy theory and rocket-science math that goes with it… sometimes, you just need common sense to understand what’s going on.

Example… I own a retail store. I’m open 10 hours a day, and I typically get around 600 customers a day. Conveniently, the math is easy… on average, that’s 60 customers an hour… one per minute.

What happens if I decide to close 3 hours early? Assuming all those customers want their stuff, and they’re all going to show up… now I’m facing 86 customers per hour… a 43% increase.

On Dec. 24th, around 42,000 people showed up a B.C. Liquor Stores. One might expect around the same number of people might go shopping on New Year’s Eve, and one would be correct… it turned out to be around 41,000.

The big difference, of course, is that the window of time they had to do so got shrunk by 3 hours, thanks to an unexpected announcement that materialized the previous day. All liquor sales to end by 8pm, announced Dr. Henry, much to the surprise of everyone… and the panic of those who worked that day, and had planned to swing by in the evening. Ultimately, I assume everyone got their booze… one way or the other; traffic was up 188% in those last few hours.

That part of it did not catch anyone by surprise; certainly not the people who make the decisions. It’s easy to understand what they were weighing: Upsetting a lot of people and having some crowded liquor stores… or having a repeat of Halloween downtown. They voted for the former, knowing full-well there’d be a rush inside those stores… but also knowing there are safeguards and mask policies and all the rest of it… and that the risk of trouble was higher in uncontrolled crowds.

Did that decision cause an appreciable bump in case numbers? See below…

There’s little reason to keep the 2nd-Wave graphs logarithmic, so I’ve now made the Y-axes all linear. It shows a clearer idea of what’s going on. Also, for today, I’ve removed the Deaths and Hospitalizations graphs; it leaves more room for the numbers above… although the graphs below tell the same story.

If you look at the 2nd-Wave graph, there’s the big run up… and then it starts to slide downhill (downhill is good in this context). That downhill started in late November and kept a nice, consistent run down. Then it turned uphill again… about a week after New Year’s, right around the time those effects would be kicking-in. You can see a smaller version of that in Alberta, and a much bigger version in Saskatchewan; the new cases caused by the events of New Year’s.

Was it a catastrophic increase? Certainly not. Was it due to the liquor stores closing early? That’s probably a part of it, but by how much…? Your guess is as good as mine.

But what’s interesting about it is that if you remove the effects of Christmas and New Year’s, you can see where we’d likely be at… just remove the uphill part and slide whatever is to the right of it down. That’s easier to do visually, but the numbers tell the same story, and the implication is that we’d likely be seeing new case counts in the 300s, not 500s… and death counts in the single digits, not double.

These are the sorts of trade-offs we’ll be dealing with until this pandemic is over. Re-openings and softening of restrictions are all based on the risk/reward of doing so. Same with masks in schools and inter-provincial travel. There are strong opinions on both sides of all arguments… and yeah, it’s not rocket science… but they’re not easy decisions either.

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By |2021-01-22T21:23:32-08:00January 22nd, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , |2 Comments
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January 12, 2021

There was a presumed silver lining to this pandemic… that the masks and social distancing and just plain staying away from each other would lead to the number of seasonal colds and flus being less than usual. To be sure, those illnesses are around… and if you didn’t catch a cold this year, you’ll probably get it eventually… but, for that to happen, it has to get near you, and, like C19, if it can’t get close to you, it can’t infect you.

Catching a cold or flu is easier than C19; these things are generally more infectious. They’re also, of course, far less lethal… and the conventional trade-off with life in general is that you expect to get sick once in a while, especially during winter when these viruses/bugs are around, and our immune systems are more susceptible.

As per the CDC… let’s pick the 3rd week of December, where in 2019, 30,000 samples were tested for Influenza A…. 16.2% came back positive. This year, ie 2020, ie a few weeks ago… that same sample set of 30,000 came back with a positivity rate of… 0.3%. A drop of two orders of magnitude. Hugely statistically significant.

Some of that can be attributed to the fact that flu-shots were way up this year… but if you’re a rabid anti-vaxxer, you’ll have to pick your poison here… because something worked, and it worked very well. Was it the flu vaccines? Was it the masks and social distancing?

Whatever the cause (a lot of both is the answer), that’s a huge drop, and similar huge drops are being seen across the board of illnesses, including the common childhood infections of not just flu, but also croup and bronchiolitis.

As per above, it’s not that these things are gone… it’s just that they’re just more difficult to catch these days. Once measures are relaxed, these things will come back and numbers will be way up… but hopefully some of the measures we’ve become accustomed to stick around. The whole “hug-hug kiss-kiss everyone” that’s so prevalent in some cultures; good riddance. Go ahead and hug and kiss strangers if you like, but let’s make it optional and not frown on others who choose to not partake. And if you’re asking yourself “WTF is he talking about”, I’m guessing you’re Canadian, American, British… from one of these “low-contact” cultures.

There are cultures where saying hello with three kisses (alternate cheeks, start on the right) is the norm. In parts of France, that number is actually four. Heck, there are cultures where kissing on the lips (a quick peck, no tongue!) is a normal greeting. Latin American culture has a wide variety of customs, and they vary significantly from place to place… but they all have one thing in common; if someone is already sick, everyone will be getting sick.

At the risk of being accused of cultural appropriation, going forward, might I suggest what ancient cultures have been practicing for centuries: “Namaste”, or a similar bow – it conveys respect, and it respects personal space. And it also keeps the bugs far away.

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By |2021-01-12T17:03:20-08:00January 12th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , |2 Comments
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