Pandemic

January 26, 2021

There’s an episode of Star Trek:TNG where Captain Picard and the gang happen upon an odd planet… completely devoid of life, save for a small but picturesque patch of land where a peaceful, old couple (of humans) are living.

This guy (let’s call him Kevin) and his wife tell Picard that an alien race came by and wiped out everyone… except, for some unknown reason, them.

There’s far more to the story, but as it turns out, the alien who did the real wiping out was Kevin himself… who only looks human, but actually isn’t. Some aliens did come by and attack the colony… and Kevin’s wife was killed in the attack. Kevin, who’s actually a very powerful alien, took it upon himself to exact revenge by wiping out all of the aliens… and not just the ones that had attacked him, but he scoured the universe and found them all. Fifty billion aliens; the entire species wiped out. And now he was just trying to live his eternal life on this patch of land with a reconstructed illusion of his wife.

What do you do with a being that wipes out 50 billion others? Picard concludes that they, humans, are not qualified to be his judge… because there are no laws to fit the magnitude of the crime. Picard and The Enterprise leave, and he puts out the word to Starfleet; stay away from this planet. Leave Kevin alone. You really don’t want to piss him off.

Indeed, the punishment needs to fit the crime… and there are places in this world where that’s the case. Finland, for example… where in 2015, a successful businessman by the name of Reima Kuisla was caught doing 64MPH in a 50MPH zone… which translates to doing 103km/h in an 80 zone. That’s not even excessive speeding, and I’m sure more than one of you reading this today were on a highway today, where the limit is 80, and where you were exceeding 100. You’re lucky you didn’t get caught; that’s a $173 fine and 3 points.

Mr. Kuisla wasn’t so lucky… he got caught, and because of his Ten Million Dollar income, paid a fine of $80,000. To scale it down, that’s like someone making $50,000 a year being fined $400. Sounds about right… proportional fines, depending on the income of the perpetrator.

There are more extreme examples, but they seem to top out at… one million dollars. Yes, in 2010, a 37-year-old Swede had just taken possession of his new Mercedes SLS AMG in Germany and was driving it home. The cameras that clocked him only go up to 200km/h, which is what they captured… but the Swedish cops that caught up with him clocked him at close to 300km/h. He claimed he thought the speedometer of his new car was broken and that he was just putting it through its paces. Sure. That’ll be a million dollars, please.

Which brings us to a couple of local lowlifes, the ex-CEO and his actress-wife, whose actions have made them front-page news all over the world… and somewhat tarnished the view that all Canadians are thoughtful and polite.

It takes a lot of planning and a lot of disregard for others… to charter a plane, head to the middle of nowhere, lie repeatedly, and get into a vaccine line-up that’s supposed to be for, more than anyone else, indigenous elders. They lied about quarantining, they lied about why they were there, they lied about where they worked. And as soon as they got what they wanted, they high-tailed it out of here. Or, tried to… but that’s where piece-of-shit narcissists usually mess up. They’re so completely caught up in the ME ME ME of their existence that they forget everything and everyone else. Ten seconds after they got their vaccines, you can imagine hearing them saying to each other, “Let’s blow this popsicle stand”… and it was that urgent “straight to the airport” request that made people wonder… ok, who exactly are these people?

They were slapped with $500 fines, which is a joke… but, to some extent, like Picard… I’m not sure we have laws in place to punish this sort of thing appropriately. Like the Finnish businessman, the now-former CEO of Great Canadian Gaming Corp. made $10M last year. Is $80,000 an appropriate fine?

It’s a good start, but there needs to be more. A lot more. There are tens of millions of dollars to follow for that guy, thanks to stock options and the sale of the company… but it’s about a lot more than money. I’m not sure the answer is jail time; I think the answer is community service, and lots of it… and all of it in the community they affected.

Remote communities like Beaver Creek can probably use some help. Wash dishes at the restaurant. Mop up the airport. Or, actually, go work at that famous motel they don’t actually work at — and clean some rooms. Contribute back to the community, given that what you stole from them is difficult to pin a value on. Maybe consult with those indigenous elders from whom you stole the vaccine… and ask them what they need. And, might I suggest… you start with a series of apologies… to them, to their entire community, and to the countless others who deserve and need that vaccine ahead of you… but, like everyone else, are patiently waiting their turn.

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By |2021-01-26T20:20:45-08:00January 26th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Business & Economics, Science of COVID-19, Movies, Music & Entertainment|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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January 25, 2021

A year ago today, a man who’d recently returned from Wuhan, China, wasn’t feeling well… and wound up at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital, where he became Canada’s first test-positive C19 case.

Hearing that this morning made me think back… what was I doing at the time? Thanks to modern technology, it doesn’t take much to scroll back through recent history.

A year ago last night, I was at the Chan Centre watching my talented nephew, acting in a very engaging and entertaining theatre production. It was excellent, and so, appropriately, the venue was jammed.

A year ago today was a Saturday, and, at 10am, we were back at UBC — at TRIUMF this time — for a couple of lectures. One was about earthquakes – the famous impending “big one” that will hit the south coast, sometime between tonight and 500 years from now. The other was about black holes, cosmic collisions and sensing gravitational waves. Takeaway: If a large earthquake shows up off the south coast, don’t be in Tofino. And, I guess, if a black hole shows up off the south coast, don’t be in Tofino either… but you won’t have much too time to worry about it.

These lectures are super-interesting if you’re into this sort of thing, so, accordingly, it was crowded. Sold out in fact. So sold out we couldn’t get tickets online, and just crashed the venue, hoping we could sneak in. The tickets are free, but seating is limited; fortunately, some people didn’t show up and they let us in.

The kids were there too, and perhaps it took a bit of gentle bartering to get one of them there as well, because we wound up going out for dinner that night, to Kobe. Kobe is excellent, and always crowded as well; you end up sharing a table/cooking surface with complete strangers for a couple of hours.

Talk about taking stuff for granted. Three very different things, but all had one thing in common; hanging out in close proximity with strangers… and thinking nothing of it. That’s how it was.

So, what’s happened in that one year… today also marks another milestone; today, the world went over 100,000,000 known C19 cases. There have been over 2,000,000 deaths. There have also been over 72,000,000 recoveries. In Canada, more than 750,000 cases came after that guy.

My prediction was that here in Canada, we’d be seeing the worst of this pandemic… right about now. Now would be the time when the gradual decline would begin, and while it’d take a long time to snuff it out in due course, it’d never get worse than what we’re experiencing now.

This completely-non-professional opinion was based on the confluence of a few things, but primarily, it’s this: any negative effect that would’ve been caused by the holiday season would now be known and we’d be in the midst of handling. Whether they were supposed to or not, people got together over the holidays. Some of them passed on infections, etc… so how bad was it? Well, it definitely caused a spike, but if you look at the graphs and numbers, things are clearly trending favourably. Couple that with the fact that there are no large family-gathering-type holidays any time soon… and given that vaccines are every day making slow but steady progress into bloodstreams… and that the majority of people and businesses are still towing the party line… put it all together and, optimistically, the worst is behind us. That being said, who could’ve predicted newer mutations that are more virulent, and which could possibly lead to more cases. The answer to that question is epidemiologists… and they did.

We’re far from sounding the all-clear, but the numbers and pictures at the moment tell a cautiously-optimistic story; declines everywhere… ranging from steep (Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec) to moderate (B.C) to mild (Ontario, Saskatchewan)… but the entire country is trending in the right direction. For now.

Today’s versions of cool lectures, theatre productions, and restaurants look nothing like what they did a year ago. There are online and socially-distanced versions of all of that, but they’re nothing like the real thing. A year ago we had the real thing… and every indication is that a year from now, we’ll have it again.

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By |2021-01-25T17:04:36-08:00January 25th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |9 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 23, 2021

We watched a movie the other night… I thought it’d be a waste of time, but the kids really wanted to see it. OK… I can spare an hour and forty minutes, and who knows… it might be amusing. It’s called “Behind the Curve” (Netflix), and it’s all about Flat Earthers – the society whose members genuinely believe that the earth is flat. Or, pretend to. Or, are members for other reasons. OK, queue it up.

My assumption was that it’d be 100 minutes of idiots espousing theories that make no sense. Certainly, that was part of it. But above all that, there’s a genuine sadness to it, and some enlightening points that are incredibly relevant to today.

Of all the conspiracy theories out there, this is the one that’s most easily disprovable. For more than a thousand years, intelligent people have been devising experiments based on heights, distances, shadows and trigonometry… that show that the earth is a sphere. So good were some of these ancient experiments, that they were pretty-accurately able to calculate the diameter and circumference. This throws a bit of a wrench into the flat-earth conspiracy where millions of scientists, NASA employees and pilots are all in on it. You’d have to add Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle and Archimedes to the list, among many others.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter – the details of how a flat earth could even be possible don’t add up, to the extent there’s disagreement within the group. Is there a giant dome, snow-globe-like, covering the heavens? If not, what are all the stars and planets attached to? Queue the internal bickering.

Shortly into the movie, you realize that there’s something a little off about these people. They’re not dangerously crazy… just… off. Something emotional that comes across as almost child-like… and then it becomes obvious. This is a support group for like-minded people who’ve found each other. They feel like they’re part of something big. They feel they get it, and everyone else doesn’t… and it’s their mission to educate the poor, ignorant masses.

They don’t mind being called stupid idiots by the rest of the world… not only because they’re used to it, but because, to some extent, they bask in it. Us versus them. We know. You don’t. And this is where the bigger-picture relevancy comes in. When everyone tells you what you believe in is nonsense, for many people, human nature dictates they double down. They entrench their belief and they will never let go of it and they will build (and share) crazier and crazier ideas to support something that’s actually unsupportable. Queue the madness.

Sound familiar? At least, these guys aren’t storming The Capitol. Let’s talk about a different sort of queue… just Q.

There’s an interesting thing going on in the U.S. (actually, around the world – apparently Japan has a big following as well…) – and I’m talking about Q and QAnon and all that. For years, their now-absent leader Q has been dropping hints about what’s about to happen. The original finish line was January 6th, when Trump would seize control via – heh, we know what that looked like. That didn’t work out so well, so the Qs shifted to believing the failed storming was part of a bigger plan; one that would now allow the president to invoke martial law, take back those key states, and continue the presidency. None of that happened, of course, and the smooth, quiet transition of power took place. Now what.

Typically, when conspiracies hit their finish line, one of a few things can happen. One is that people realize it’s nonsense and bail. Another is that they’re so sunk into it that they will continue the fight, no matter how senseless it might be. And another possibility is that they claim it all actually came to be, just as they said… and most people don’t realize it. There was a lot of that – all of it – in 2012 when the world didn’t end. Some people came to the conclusion it was all nonsense. Some people claim the math was done wrong, and the end is coming.. later in 2012 (didn’t happen) or maybe 2021. I guess if you keep pushing the date further and further, eventually you’ll be right. And, some claim, the world *did* end, and now we’re in some illusionary remnant version. For what it’s worth, if this is The Matrix, give me the blue pill. I’d rather ride out this illusion than battle aliens the rest of my life.

Q is seeing a lot of disillusioned people bail on them at present. They realize it must have been nonsense; they were duped. There is no master plan. For those not feeling so rudderless, they will continue the fight, though now I’m sure there’s confusion what that might look like. And… there are some who think it all worked out… and that, I kid you not, Trump is still in fact in the White House, and that he and Biden did some sort of face swap thing like in that John Travolta/Nicholas Cage movie. If you really need to keep holding on to this particular conspiracy, and that things are still in place, that’s where you wind up today.

And with these flat earth people… skirting the fine line between philosophy, art, science and madness… the final scene of the movie – I don’t think I’m giving too much away here by announcing that the earth is, indeed, a sphere (an oblate spheroid if you want to be perfectly technical about it… the earth is a little compressed at the poles and bulging at the equator, due to the spin)… so at the end of the movie, these guys have devised an experiment to prove the earth is flat. It’s pretty straightforward… attach a powerful laser to a stick 15 feet high. Point it to a big poster board a few miles away, also 15 feet high. If the laser hits it, clearly the earth is flat.

This is a sound experiment. At that distance, the curvature of the earth is not irrelevant. If you imagine the curve “kicking in”, that laser should hit about 21 feet high to compensate.

The guys wait for darkness and fire-up their well-calibrated laser. But nothing hits the board. “Jeez, what’s wrong”, they wonder. The laser is on, they really should see it. They move the big poster board around, but nothing.

“Try moving it up”, suggests one guy… so they do… they lift it 6 feet, and the bright laser comes splashing in.

“Oh.” says the guy.

Queue the credits.

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By |2021-01-23T17:03:40-08:00January 23rd, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , |6 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 21, 2021

Polish pianist Władysław Szpilman, subject of the award-winning fantastic movie “The Pianist”, was playing live on the radio on September 23, 1939… when the Germans opened fire on the studio, causing him to flee — and run for his life. The piece of music he was playing was Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor – a hauntingly beautiful piece of music, one that I’ve been trying to master for better part of this pandemic. I so wish I’d latched onto it 30 years ago… it would’ve been far easier to learn it… and then, playing it once a month or more, I’d know it for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, neuroplasticity degrades as we age. The ability for the brain to change and rewire fades. Neurogenesis, the ability to create new neurons and connections also suffers. To put all of the fancy words into colloquial language… you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Or maybe you can, but it’s a lot more difficult.

Szpilman was 27 when he was so rudely interrupted, but his young brain, like any of a brilliant musician, managed to retain all of what he knew, and I don’t think I’m giving much away when I tell you he survived the war (he died in 2000, aged 88), and his ability to play the piano was not an irrelevant side-note of that survival… notwithstanding the slow descent from studio musician to holocaust survivor; it’s a hellish story and, again, if you haven’t seen the movie, you must. The first bit of music you’ll hear is the aforementioned piece.

After 6 years of surviving hell, the war ended, and life slowly returned to normal. And Szpilman returned to playing piano, and returned to the same, rebuilt studio… where he resumed playing Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor. Imagine the emotions he must have been feeling at that moment… bridging that gap. Everything that happened in those 6 years. The inward-facing question of “What was the point of all of that, if we’re right back to where we were?”

That’s the sort of question we often find ourselves asking when the universe seems to throw something negative and unexpected in our way… and after you muddle through it, you’re right back to where you started. Why? To what end?

This is the best explanation I have for what I’m feeling, watching CNN the last two days. I will stop after today because it’s somewhat intoxicating and I’m not getting much else done. I’m writing this while watching this 24-hour White House coverage, and I can’t turn it off. It’s just so freaking… normal. There have been two White House press briefings in as many days. They will continue on a daily basis. Reporters ask intelligent questions and get intelligent answers. Dr. Fauci offers his untethered, unbridled, uncensored opinion. Facts. Science. Forget policy, recent changes, and how of course there will be disagreement… above all that, there is now transparency and normalcy. An actual functioning government.

The unfortunate part of it is figuring out and dealing with the mess that was left behind… with the top of that list being no cohesive vaccination plan from the previous administration; lots of mixed messages and confusion. But… they’ll figure it out. And they’ll announce what they’re doing.

I’m switching it off after today, and will try to leave it off. But in the back of my mind, I know that if I turn it back on, it’ll be a lot like today and yesterday. And four years ago. And decades before that. There’s a lot of comfort in that, to be honest… and I’m certainly not equating Szpilman’s 6 years of hell to the last four years of… whatever you want to call it… but once you come out on the other side, there are certainly similarities. A giant exhale, and a giant, collective thought… like… ok, where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?

I know, nothing gets fixed overnight… but state of mind, even with my degraded ability to learn piano, counts for a lot. I know I’m not the only one feeling this way. Whew. Onward.

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By |2021-01-22T21:22:15-08:00January 21st, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19, Movies, Music & Entertainment|Tags: , , , , , , , , |6 Comments
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January 20, 2021

I remember exactly how I felt four years ago, watching Donald Trump’s inauguration, and listening to his speech. A sense of foreboding. Disbelief. Fear of the unknown. That this guy is going to guide the U.S. to some dark places, and he may well take Canada and much of the rest of the world with him. Barack Obama was probably having similar thoughts when he penned his outgoing letter to Trump. In it, he wrote, “… we are just temporary occupants of this office. That makes us guardians of those democratic institutions and traditions — like rule of law, separation of powers, equal protection and civil liberties — that our forebears fought and bled for. Regardless of the push and pull of daily politics, it’s up to us to leave those instruments of our democracy at least as strong as we found them.”

In Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, there is a song called “Goodbye Blue Sky” – and if you watch the video of the song (taken from the movie), it conveys it well… you only need to watch the first 30 seconds… where things go from sunny and happy and hopeful… to darkness. The symbolism is not subtle; it’s blunt, like a sledgehammer to the gut. Trump did indeed take many things in the wrong direction, but at least he didn’t take the planet down with him. He left his country in tatters, from which it’ll certainly rebuild… and now, at least, it can begin. There was a big sigh of relief when noon EST came and went. It’s done.

Biden’s inaugural speech was the polar opposite of what was spoken four years ago; he preached unity, understanding, dignity, tolerance, respect. He faced-up to the challenges ahead. He alluded to the mess he inherits. We shall see. Talk is cheap, and his actions will speak louder than his words… but in my opinion, he offers for the U.S. something that’s been sorely lacking for the last four years… leadership.

I’d never intended to write so much about Donald Trump, but I started writing this blog exclusively because of the pandemic, and what became glaringly obvious very quickly was his brutal mishandling of it… and, along with that, his brutal mishanding of so much else.

I was asked this morning… come on, name at least a few good things Trump did in power. Sure, there are a few… he didn’t start any wars, and the middle east is on a potential path to a more lasting peace. Those who support his policies would argue that the reshaping of the federal judiciary is an achievement. Same with his tax reform. Space Force sounds like a joke, but it actually isn’t. But ultimately, whatever could be called a positive achievement is far overshadowed by the negative. There’s one other achievement, and it’s hard to label it positive or negative; his raging divisiveness served to rip off a huge, ratty band-aid that had been hiding a wound that’s been festering in the country since its inception… the deep, ugly gash of inequality. A lot of issues have been brought to light, and a lot of people (myself among them) are now far more familiar with systemic issues that have been plaguing American society for years. Decades. Centuries.

By now, you’re probably pretty sick and tired of hearing about Trump. It was engaging before he was elected, interesting early-on in his presidency… but grew tiring, repetitive and frustrating as time went on. Four years was more than enough. Four hundred thousand Covid deaths (not all – but certainly a significant amount, his fault). While we’re keeping score… 22,000 lies… about 15 per day of his presidency. 150 rounds of golf (one every 10 days). 127 days at Mar-a-Lago. Two impeachments. Two popular-vote losses. I can’t attach a number to the lawsuits that await him, but they will deservedly hound him for the rest of his life. It’s sad that his brainless followers will be the ones footing the legal bills, but the thought that he and perhaps some family members may be facing prison time… there are some sleepless nights ahead. I’m sure Mar-a-Lago has 24-hour room service; one burnt-to-a-crisp steak with ketchup coming right up, sir.

I’m looking forward to writing about other things. Trump mattered when he could actually do something: Mandate a federal mask policy. Set an example. Say something meaningful to his 70 million Twitter followers. He didn’t do any of that, and now he can’t. Now he’s just a two-time loser… silenced, and facing an unknown future… but now his problems (and lack of ability in solving them) are largely his issue; not his country’s, not this country’s… and, certainly… not mine. Moving on.

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By |2021-01-20T20:59:52-08:00January 20th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Follower Favourites, Politics, Movies, Music & Entertainment|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |10 Comments
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January 19, 2021

OK Saksatchewanites/Saskatchabusihes/Saskatchawenians… you now have your hospitalizations graph… thank you to my friend Richard for providing that data in a usable form. But today, let’s talk about the opposite of that… the opposite of needing to go to the hospital is what’ll prevent the vast majority of us from doing so… and that is… vaccines. And there is news to report.

The headline I read screamed, “Thousands of Israelis Tested Positive for Coronavirus After First Vaccine Shot!!!!!” – the exclamation points are mine, but the rest is verbatim… and while that sounds like a disastrous claim, it’s not. If the headline is meant to grab everyone’s attention, it works… but, as usual, there’s more to the story. Let’s dig into the numbers a bit.

First of all, part of the reason Israel managed to get so much vaccine ahead of everyone else is that they were willing to be, in essence, a test-bed for what it would look like to distribute the vaccine through a first-world technologically-capable infrastructure and collect as much valid real-world data as possible… straight from the source. As previously written, many other places who’ve had vaccines long before Pfizer/Moderna came around (China, Russia) have been putting out numbers… which, for numerous and valid reasons, are met with skepticism. But here we have accurate data, so what does it tell us…

Some 12,400 Israelis tested positive after being vaccinated, and, among them, 69 who’d been vaccinated twice. That first number sounds big, but that’s out of 189,000 people – which amounts to 6.6% — an efficacy of 93.4% — which for any vaccine is off-the-charts successful, and is almost bang-on with the expectations of ~95%

Digging a little deeper into the numbers… 100,000 people were tested a week after getting the vaccine; 5,438 were found to be positive… a 5.4% infection rate. A different set of 67,000 people was tested in the 8-14 days-after period, and 5,585 tested positive… 8.3%.

People were also testing positive more than two weeks after getting the first dose, but in declining numbers as time went on. Immunity is meant to start ramping up in days 15 to 21, and that’s reflected in declining positivity numbers… especially after the second dose.

It should be noted that there are other relevant factors; the majority of those who’ve received vaccinations are over 60, and it’s well-understood that people’s immune systems erode as they get older. Flu shots, for example, are less than 60% effective in those 65 and older… as compared to 80% to 90% for those younger than that.

With the Pfizer vaccine, for what it’s worth, 102 employees at one particular medical center were tested a week after immunization. It was found that 100 of them had antibody levels 6 to 20 times higher than the previous week.

In summary, the vaccine works well. Very well. It’s not perfect, because 95 does not equal 100, and its effectiveness varies on numerous factors; some people are simply far more susceptible to infection, and age is one of those contributing factors. At the end of the day, the idea is to get to herd immunity, and that’s achieved when enough people are immune that they’ll protect those who aren’t – and, possibly, who can’t be. By far, the quickest way to get there is through vaccination.

That’s the plan currently being rolled out across the planet, with varying degrees of success; get the shot into as many people as possible, while carefully following the results to make sure they’re in-line with what’s expected. With Israel leading the charge and making available all the data… from what we can see so far… so far, so good.

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By |2021-01-20T21:43:14-08:00January 19th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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January 18, 2021

You’ll have to pardon me; today was data “catch-up” day, so this is all just fact… and very little “interesting” opinion. And if you won’t pardon me, I’m sure I can convince the soon-to-be-former president… he seems poised to hand them out like candy.

So… I took the opportunity to add a whole new row of graphs (the bottom row); a visual look at hospitalizations and, included within that (overlaid at the bottom, in red), the ICU numbers as well. At a glance, B.C.’s hospitalization numbers are pretty flat over the last little while, hovering in the 350 rage. ICU cases today are at 68, which is down slightly over the recent past… as evidenced by the gradual downslope of the red ICU part of the graph. Alberta’s hospitalizations are down as well, as are their ICU cases.

On the unfortunate flipside, Ontario and Quebec are still seeing slow and steady growth on both fronts.

If you follow these graphs closely, you might notice that the Time To Double (TTD) lines are gone from the 2nd-wave graphs. I’ve been writing and describing and fiddling with TTD numbers and graphs since day 1 of this, but given the numbers, they’re not needed. That’s a good thing, from the point of view that things aren’t growing exponentially. Let’s hope the growth in cases remains, at worst, relatively linear… and then we never have to see those lines again. To be clear, case numbers are still growing in many places, but the rate of growth (at least, for the moment…) is not of the scary exponential sort.

My profuse apologies to the Saskatchewanians (Saskatchewaners?) who are looking at that big space where a graph should be; I couldn’t find the data in a usable form… but will keep looking around.

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By |2021-01-20T10:58:45-08:00January 18th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report|Tags: , , |2 Comments
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January 17, 2021

Once in a while, the trunk of your car fills up with enough crap that it’s time to clean it all out. I usually grab a big garbage bag and dig in. Whatever is garbage goes straight into the bag. Whatever shouldn’t remain in the trunk finds its way to the floor of the garage, and eventually finds its way to where it needs to go. And the rest remains in the trunk, where it belongs. And if there wasn’t enough garbage to justify throwing the bag away, the bag itself also winds up in the trunk… for further use in the future.

Many years ago, I drove to Seattle. Then I came home, and the border guard, bored I suppose – or maybe I looked guiltier than usual – made me get out and pop the trunk.

“What’s this?”

“It’s garbage.”

“You can’t bring American garbage into Canada!”

Fair point… but I explained…

“It’s not American garbage… it’s Canadian. That bag has been in my trunk all weekend.”

“You took your garbage for a ride in the U.S.?”

I suppose I did. Not on purpose, but whatever. Who cares.

Well, he cared. Fine, confiscate it.

“I don’t want your garbage!”

Fine, I’ll throw it away. Where’s the nearest…

“You can’t throw it away here!”

What an odd stalemate. Eventually, he let me go. With my garbage.

I was reminded of this episode because something else (which I’ll get to shortly) reminded me of the opposite… the time we were returning from Seattle after a long weekend. When you do that, be prepared to wait… the border waits are brutal on those Monday nights. But this time, traffic just kept flowing… how odd. Tons of volume, but we never stopped… just slowly crawled toward the border… where all the lanes were open, and there were border guards just waving people through. Go, don’t stop, welcome home, have a nice evening. This was pre-9/11, but still. Wow.

On one hand, I was happy to not have to wait. On the other hand, two things bothered me. One was… well, you know how there are people who keep every receipt, meticulously add up what they spent, who spent it, what it was, how much it was, both in US and Canadian dollars? I’m one of those people. I was ready to answer any question the agent would ask. All that work for nothing. Annoying, but not as important as point two… which was, what a joke. What a mockery of all the times so many people have been stopped for no reason, been given the third degree for no reason, searched for nothing. And now, all the cigarettes and booze and full gas tanks and maybe drugs and guns all flowing into Canada… because I guess they were too understaffed that day, or too tired of dealing with the monotony… or were just realizing none of them would get to go home till 6am with so much traffic to handle. Sure, some stuff will get through. Whatever.

The rules that those people enforce exist for a reason, and when they decide to ignore them, as briefly as it might be, they compromise the integrity of the entire thing. What is the point? What was ever the point?

On that note, we have a rule in place at the moment. If you’re flying into Canada, you have to prove you’re C19-free. Take a test and show the test results at check-in… or you’re not getting on the plane. Very straightforward, and it applies to everyone.

Except, for some reason, not everyone. Like, not Haiti. Why not Haiti? Since the start of the year, flights from everywhere else have had this requirement. And the answer is simple: Haiti, nobody’s example of a first-world country, doesn’t have their shit together when it comes to testing. So rather than just say “No”, we, being the polite Canadians we are, say “Don’t worry about it.”

As a result, two flights from Haiti that arrived in Montreal (Jan 10th and 13th) were so infested with C19 that the post-flight alert that went out to the passengers was not the typical “rows 6 to 10 may have had an exposure”; it was “all rows”. Basically, if you were on either of those planes, you came in contact with someone who was found to be infected.

I had little sympathy for that guy from Kelowna who got stuck in Lake Tahoe, having decided his ski trip was “essential”. He got stuck when the regulations kicked in, and had no way to get a quick test… so he was stuck for three or five days. Cry me a river.

But… had he decided to go waterskiing in Haiti instead, no worries.

The issue isn’t so much with the haphazard rules that seem to appear and rule our lives; borders have always been hit and miss. When you head into the U.S. (and/or come back home), the experience will be greatly defined by what border agent you get, and what sort of day they’re having. That’s just an accepted part of it. Sometimes they’re harsh with the rules. Sometimes they couldn’t care less.

But in the middle of a raging pandemic… whether it’s a self-entitled skier from the interior, or a bunch of tourists in London… and/or pretty-much everyone else… what is the point if it doesn’t apply to everyone?

“Hey, teacher, I didn’t feel like studying for the test today. I mean, I realize everyone else is prepared. I’m just not. Is it ok if I just don’t write it?”

“Oh, of course. I’ll just give you a pass”.

That’s not how it works… we don’t live in a “everyone is equal but some people are more equal than others” society. At least, we’re not supposed to… but stuff like this causes a lot grumbling; a lot of well-justified grumbling. If politicians are going to make rules, make them so that they apply to everyone… and enforce them. Or don’t make them at all.

And/or have a very eloquent staffer ready to write some poetic excuses to the families of people who died of C19 as a direct result of those flights.

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By |2021-01-19T13:05:22-08:00January 17th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report|Tags: , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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