Quebec

March 7, 2021

We’ve all had colds before… the little sniffles. It’s annoying, but nothing some chicken soup and/or lemon tea and/or NeoCitran and/or a warm blanket and/or lots of water can’t cure.

And if someone said to you ok… here’s the deal… the pandemic is now over, but you have a 50% chance of catching a mild cold in the next 6 months… would you take it?

The overwhelming “HELL YEAH!” that you’re all screaming leads to a path we’re on now, though probably not by original design… because there’s a fundamental aspect to C19 and vaccines that perhaps wasn’t entirely expected, but that emerging data suggests… which is that a single shot of any vaccine of our “big 4” – Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and now Johnson and Johnson – prevents serious illness 100% of the time. Yes, it’s a bold statement, one worthy of marketing departments… but this one is coming from the science.

Two shots of Pfizer and Moderna suggest a 95% chance of not getting sick at all… and the appropriate doses of the other ones also suggest a remote chance of illness if you follow the directions… but proper recommended usage aside, one single shot… and you’re good.

Entering the mix (in Canada) as of Friday is the newly approved J&J vaccine… which, in the context above, is a true game changer. Its numbers don’t reach the lofty heights of 95% efficacy, but it’s becoming apparent that’s not so important. Should we take the Ferrari with a top speed of 340km/h? Perhaps the Porsche, but it only goes to 280kmh. How about the Tesla, which accelerates faster than those two… but is capped at 200km/h?

Dude, we’re going to the 7/11 that’s a block away. Take the bike. Or walk. We don’t need to get fancy here.

The J&J vaccine efficacy is in the 65%-75% range… compared to the 95% of Moderna and Pfizer. J&J serious illness and death rate 28 days after the dose (at which time its full effects have kicked in): Zero. Not a single case of hospitalization or death.

From a “fancy” point of view, J&J isn’t top 2… but who cares. It gets us there… and it does so in game-changing ways: It’s single dose, and it’s easily stored at convenient temperatures… for months. Don’t like needles? It’s only one. Don’t like side-effects? Far less reported with J&J. Allergic to preservatives in vaccines? J&J seems more tolerable. And, unlike mRNA vaccines, this one is optimized to both antibody and T-cell responses. Accordingly, it doesn’t need tuning to new variants… and therefore has been shown to be more effective against the South African variant. Pfizer and Moderna have modified their vaccines for these new variants, but J&J doesn’t require it… which implies it probably won’t require it for future variants either.

Red-lining the first doses seemed a little premature and perhaps not-so-well thought out when it started. In fact, I wrote some words to that effect; why mess with the science? The answer to that rhetorical question is the basis of science itself. To some extent, we’re all part of a big experiment… but assuming it’s being handled correctly, we should be able to trust the results… and the results are telling us a lot. Different people interpret them in different ways, but this is all not speculative guesswork… there’s a method to the madness. For example, it’s dawned on me that perhaps the province of Quebec has no intention of *ever* giving out second doses of Pfizer or Moderna… because, as per above… what’s better…. 95 people out of 100 who will never get sick at all… or, 200 people, none of whom will develop a serious illness or die? They’re betting on the latter, and so far, perhaps correct in their assumptions. Their hospitalizations and ICU admissions have been trending sharply down consistently; just look at the pretty pictures. They might just keep doing this until the pandemic fizzles out, and the answer to “When do we get our second shot?” will be “Next flu-shot season”.

The issue with vaccines that we’re quickly approaching has more to do with vaccine acceptance, though that’s also turning a good corner in some places. There seems to be a core of around 20% of people that adamantly refuse to consider the vaccine. The other 80% has been a spectrum based on hesitancy, but it’s mostly sliding in the right direction; more and more people seeing what’s going on around them and realizing that indeed… the vaccine is useful, the vaccine is safe and the vaccine is an integral part of all of us getting back to normal. That’s here in Canada. Our neighbours down south?

Last November, before any vaccines had actually been approved, 51% of Democrats said they’d get vaccinated when possible… as opposed to 43% of Republicans. Asking that question today yields this: 78% of Democrats would say yes… but only 47% of Republicans would agree. In fact, 44% of Republicans say, adamantly, “Never”. Interesting — but not surprising — that their cult leader and his entire family all quietly got vaccinated when no one was looking.

I’ll stop here because you know exactly what the next 3 paragraphs would say.

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By |2021-03-07T17:03:52-08:00March 7th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |1 Comment
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February 28, 2021

Welcome to the end of February. Tomorrow begins March… and you’ll recall last year, March 2020 felt like the longest month in history. To some extent, it’s been a year but it feels like we’re still in it. Happy Sunday, March 334th.

At this time last year, Canada had seen 15 cases of Covid-19. Seven of them were here in B.C. Another 7 were in Ontario, and the other was in Quebec. By the end of March 2020, Canada had over 8,000 cases and 100 deaths. A month later, the case-count was over 50,000 and the deaths were around 3,000 and we were all freaking the hell out.

We’re all too exhausted to be freaking out anymore, and we’ve realized the numbers didn’t follow that trajectory. Had they, my quick math implies we’d all have caught it by the end of July, and we’d all have been dead by the end of Summer. None of that happened, and none of that will… but it’s worth thinking back to how things felt at the time, just to remember that things can change quickly and we shouldn’t take anything for granted.

On the flipside, like a lot of people, I’m actually starting to wonder what society is going to look like after this is all over. Many profound changes, and I’m not just talking about remote work and Zoom and virtual offices and things like that; let’s recall that in no small part, the end of the 1918 pandemic launched the roaring 20s… a decade of romanticised, glamorous fun that lasted until the economy collapsed and The Depression took over.

But here’s something else that with great subtlety changed the world drastically…

Up until 1918, there were steam cars and there were electric cars… and internal combustion cars were around, but not so popular. People with steam cars used to fill them up at horse troughs… free water, everywhere… but, with the pandemic, and standing water being a great collection point for mosquitos, those troughs got covered up… and the car manufacturers like Henry Ford seized that opportunity to tell the world how awesome gas-powered cars were. No waiting for it to charge, no waiting for the water to heat up, no chance of a steam explosion. Gas stations sprung up everywhere… and a hundred years of R&D that’s gone into gas-powered cars might have gone into steam-generated engines and/or electrical systems and batteries. Hard to imagine what society might look like… and how it would’ve evolved… without this dependency on oil.

I wonder what’s changing these days that’ll have such a profound effect on the entire world. What will they be talking about 100 years from now as one of the largest radical shifts caused by all of this?

I don’t know… I’m just asking the question… but happy to hear you thoughts.

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By |2021-02-28T17:03:10-08:00February 28th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |6 Comments
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February 25, 2021

Leap years… leap seconds… even, with some calendars, leap months… these tiny (or not-so-tiny) course corrections are necessary because, unfortunately, the earth doesn’t rotate exactly every 24-hours, nor does it orbit the sun exactly every 365 days. At the moment, one rotation is 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.09053 seconds. One year is 365.2422 of those rotations. These are not nice, round numbers to work with… and even if they were, the earth is slowing down, so it’d all have to change eventually. In fact, they change continually.

The people who manage all this keep careful track of it, and often fiddle with it without us even knowing. If you weren’t aware of it, you certainly would’ve missed the extra second that was tagged on to New Year’s Eve in 2016. Approaching midnight, the time went from 11:59:58… to 11:59:59… to 11:59:60 (!) before continuing on to 12:00:00am, January 1st, 2017.

If those little adjustments didn’t take place, the errors would accumulate. The sun would start rising and setting at weird times. It would snow in Spring and get super-hot in late Autumn. And, once in a while, having not kept up with the corrections, some abrupt fixes would need to be implemented.

The calendar we’re all familiar with is the Gregorian calendar, which was preceded by the less-accurate Julian calendar… and not everyone switched over at the same time. While the Gregorian calendar was adopted in places line France, Italy and Spain back in 1582, it wasn’t until 1752 that the U.S. and Canada switched over… and since the Julian calendar is less accurate with respect to leap-anythings, it was falling further and further behind. In 1582, it required a 10-day adjustment. When Canada and the U.S. did it, it required 11 days… and when Turkey and Greece finally made the change, less than 100 years ago, they had to drop 13 days from existence. History is full of stories of landlords who tried to charge a full month’s rent during those half-month switches; you can imagine how popular that was…

Indeed, that’s what happens when you keep letting errors pile up; they become more difficult to correct down the road.

All of this is relevant because of the data and charts you see attached to this little blurb… and it has to do with the inconsistency of the data with respect to testing and cases and deaths and vaccinations. Like I wrote about recently, if you have one watch, you know what time it is. If you have more than one, you’re not so sure.

I have managed, I think, to consolidate and normalize all the data so that going forward, it’s not quite so apples-to-oranges. But to get things to align, there’s a bit of a Julian/Gregorian leap-year adjusting to do. In some calendar switchovers, a February 30th was added just to make it work; think of it like that.

Actually, it’s not so bad… but here’s what’s changed, if you’ve been following closely:

The U.S vaccination number has gone down. I’d previously been getting a number that was confusing with respect to its allocation of first and second doses. The number now is up-to-date, and certainly only first doses. It’s also dropped the vaccinated population percentage from 20% down to less than 14%.

While it’s important to know how many doses have been dished out, it’s more important to know how many individuals have had at least one. Now, for all the data, … U.S., Canada and all the provinces, those numbers should be accurate and far-more up-to-date than before for “at least one dose” – as well as the vaccinated population percentages that go along with it. Note how Quebec seems to be way ahead of other provinces; in a way, they are… that’s an accurate representation of first doses they’ve injected. Along with that goes the not-so-irrelevant-fact that they still have yet to dish out a single second dose.

The other number that changed radically is Ontario. They had 1,138 new cases today, and that’s what I wrote down… even though the case counts grew by 5,000. Why? Because the new data source is a bit more ahead of the game; they tap into the individual health departments instead of reporting the single province-wide number that’s relayed daily. Ahead or behind the curve isn’t as important as it being the correct curve, and that representation hasn’t changed. Now that everything is newly-aligned, it should work just fine going forward… but looking at today’s data feels a bit like those lost 10 or 11 days… like things don’t add up. But they do.

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By |2021-02-25T17:03:19-08:00February 25th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |2 Comments
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February 18, 2021

Around five years go, Donald Trump famously said that he was so popular, he could stand on Fifth Avenue in New York and shoot someone, and not lose any voters. Indeed, I have to agree… anyone today who’d consider again voting for Trump is certainly someone whose mind is made up to the point where him murdering someone in cold blood would do little to change it.

What’s presently left of the Republican Party is full of people like that, who realize that no matter what, they’re now dealing with an unshakable core… and, therefore, anything goes. While it was Trump who took that limelight for the better part of four years, he’s presently faded from the forefront, some it’s up to some other despicable full-of-crap demagogue to step up.

Enter Ted Cruz, who didn’t hesitate to show America (and the world) where his loyalties lie. He fully supported Trump’s insurrection from start to finish, if for no other reason than to hold on to that core for his potential 2024 run.

But don’t let it fool you. Cruz, like Trump, cares about nothing but what matters to him… and realizing that he can do no evil, will simply do whatever the hell he wants. So… while his great state of Texas is greatly suffering from bitter storms and power outages, off he went to sunny Cancun.

Hypocrisy is nothing new for these guys, but sometimes… the “Are you kidding me?” factor is just too much. In a radio interview on Monday, Cruz told people to “stay home” and “not risk it”. And to “Keep your family safe and just stay home and hug your kids.” That was a few hours before he and his kids jetted off to the sunshine of Mexico. Cruz, who in the past has criticized other public officials for vacationing or golfing during times of crisis. Cruz, who violated a travel ban. Cruz, who works for a government that at present is telling everyone that Mexico is out of bounds.

Pandemic, ice storms, freezing cold, no power, people dying in the streets. Their vaccine distribution infrastructure paralyzed. More than 2,000 new C19 cases today. Whatever.

Texas is in a heap of trouble because they’re fiercely independent and their power grid doesn’t connect to the rest of the U.S… and as much as others might like to help, the infrastructure doesn’t support it. That’s a whole other story, but there are plenty of people who’d argue Texas isn’t a state but its own independent whatever that never actually whatever’d their way into the U.S. It reminds me a bit of Quebec and how every so often, likes once every generation, the “Vive le Québec Libre” bullshit fires up. When you dig into it, Québec would be an instant 3rd-world country if that were to happen… because if you’re truly independent, a lot of national things you take for granted go away.

So Texas wants their own power infrastructure; here’s an issue that might come up. But don’t worry about it… as long as their fearless leaders can jet off and leave the problems behind, no problem. Nobody will care, and Cruz will get re-elected because… well, because “Republicans” I guess, though that word has now achieved a completely new meaning. This group of “leaders” needs a different word than the same one attributed to the likes of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan. And their present group of followers… don’t get me started.

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By |2021-02-18T17:03:42-08:00February 18th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |6 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 11, 2021

A kind of funny story… back in 1968, parts of Chile were pretty disconnected from the rest of the world, and, more to the point, so were the people who were born, grew up, and worked there. For a lot of the workers there, they were born in small towns, and they remained in those small towns their entire lives. Some towns were only 40km from the coast, yet some of them, guys in their 20s, had never even been to the ocean. Accordingly, they weren’t too clued-in as to what exactly was going on in the world.

On June 6th, 1968, my uncle was in his office, sitting at his desk… also there was my dad… both of them discussing whatever. Then the phone rang, and my uncle picked it up… and it was a group of miners expressing their condolences… “We’re so sorry to hear the news”, they said, “It’s so sad, it’s so awful, him with his pregnant wife and everything…”

“What the hell are you talking about?”, asked my uncle.

“Your brother, of course.”

“What about him?”, asked my uncle, staring at my dad sitting across from him.

“Well, we heard he got shot and killed in Los Angeles yesterday.”

“That was Robert KENNEDY, you idiots! KENNEDY… not KEMENY!”.

Perhaps an innocent but somewhat amusing misunderstanding for some people who weren’t granted the benefit of the big picture.

But here’s something that’s not so funny… and it has to do with Robert Kennedy Jr… the aforementioned’s son… someone who certainly should have a good grip on reality.

He just got banned from Instagram, for promoting a whole bunch of anti-vax bullshit. But this guy is especially awful… because he lobbies Congress to give parents exemptions from state requirements that mandate vaccinations for children. He has an anti-vax Facebook page with over 300,000 followers… and yet… all of his children have been vaccinated. This is the worst kind of hypocrite on the planet… pandering to the masses; “elevating” themselves to the crowd they feel they need to reach. Vegans who secretly eat meat when no one’s looking. Environmentalists who throw all of their garbage and cardboard and food scraps into the same, landfilled-destined plastic garbage bags. Green Party members who drive 12-cylinder mega-fuel-injected super-turbo-charged Italian sports cars that get 2 miles to the gallon. Robert Kennedy Jr. They can all go to hell, pontificating their holier-than-though ideas while brazenly doing the exact opposite.

Speaking of vaccines, if you’ve been watching the bolded, inverse vaccination-percentage numbers near the top of the attached data, you’ll be disappointed to see that most of them went down. It’s because I adjusted the data… and because, for a while, all doses being dished out were first doses, and that’s what I was tracking. But now that the second doses are kicking in, it throws things off. The idea is to represent how many people have had at least one shot… not just simply shots divided by population… a number that doesn’t really mean much. Accordingly, the numbers have all gone down, and the more second doses that have already been injected, the bigger the change.

Well… not all. It was most interesting to see Quebec, the huge outlier… who have given out a total of… zero second shots. They’re really going all-in with their policy: Get as many first shots done as possible, and stretch that window for the second shot as far as possible and… hope fervently that enough doses show up in time when they’re needed.

Anyway, going forward, that’s what those bold inverted numbers mean; the percentage of the population that’s had at least one shot. B.C. is at 2.8%. Canada is at 2.5%. The U.S. is at 14.5%. For a bit of comparison… Israel is at 68%, the U.K. is at 21%, and Chile… even though they may not know the difference between the U.S. Attorney General and a local mining executive… is at over 7%, which puts them in the Top-10 in the world. Canada used to be in that Top-10, but we’re now we’re barely hanging on to our Top-40 position… sliding down the charts like a one-hit-wonder whose moment has come and gone.

We’re told that’ll change in the coming weeks. Let’s hope so.

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By |2021-02-11T17:03:27-08:00February 11th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |5 Comments
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February 1, 2021

Monday is data catch-up day, when we try to make some sense of where numbers are… and, on the surface… for the moment… not bad. The downward trend is evident everywhere… all across Canada. Here in BC, the first 10 days of the year averaged 539 new cases a day and an average of 364 people hospitalized. The next 20 days saw an average of 493 daily cases and 339 hospitalizations. The last 10 days have shown an average of 445 new cases… and 303 hospitalizations. Today’s numbers show 277 new cases and 289 people hospitalized across the province with C19 (79 in ICU).

If looking at numbers isn’t your thing, just look at the pictures. Great, right?

Sort of. Also, over the weekend… Canada surpassed 20,000 C19 deaths. Quebec alone is approaching 10,000. Nevertheless, the trends are going in the right direction. What could go wrong?

Three big things, with varying degrees of potential impact.

One is that I mentioned, perhaps a little short-sightedly, that the worst is over with respect to large family gatherings. Notwithstanding the ridiculously irresponsible penthouse parties popping up in Yaletown… upcoming, we have the SuperBowl. Then there’s Lunar New Year. After that there’s Family Day. All of that is supposed to look a little different this year, and for most people it will… but not everybody… so, there could be an effect… especially because of number two…

… which are these new C19 variants, which have everyone a little concerned. The concern isn’t that they’re any more deadly, because they’re likely not. As viruses evolve and mutate, their intention is to propagate faster, and killing the host too quickly isn’t part of the plan. Killing the host at all, by the way, isn’t necessarily part of the plan, from the virus’s point of view. It just wants to propagate. The fact it makes us sick is an unfortunate side-effect, one about which, I assure you, the virus couldn’t care less. Because, of course, it can’t care in the first place.

But, we can care, and we should… because, as we’ve learned, we’re never too far from a full-on outbreak, and a virus with a higher Rø the potential to cause exactly that. Many people are sick and tired of hearing Dr. Henry’s “Now is not the time to (party/travel/get together)…” and “Now it’s our time to (oh, you know)…” slogans, but they’re true… more than ever.

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By |2021-02-01T17:05:20-08:00February 1st, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report|Tags: , , , , , , , , |3 Comments
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January 30, 2021

If, off the top of your head, you had to guess which three countries in the world had the most cases per 1M of population, you would think about it, come up with three countries, and be completely wrong. It wouldn’t make sense not to include places like U.S, India, Russia, Brazil, U.K, Spain, Italy… etc… on that list of guesses… but again, with exception of the U.S. (which lands in 8th place), none of the others even make the top 10. In fact, with only Spain at number 18, none of the others make the top 20.

The list of the top three countries with the highest case counts on a per-capita basis are: Andorra, Gibraltar and Montenegro.

Wait, you say, those places are barely populated and that skews the numbers. That is correct. Andorra, top of the list, scores 128,000 per million of population who’ve tested positive. Close to 13% of the population. That’d be like Canada having close to 5 million cases (we’re at less than a million). But, of course, Andorra only has a population of 77,000. Only 100 people there have died of C19. Gibraltar has a population of 34,000. Same idea… and, for what it’s worth, both of them share a border with Spain, where, no doubt, all of their cases came from.

So what, you may be asking….

If you look at Europe as a sort of big country, and each individual country as a province, then some issues relevant to Canada come to light.

Like, with respect to vaccinations, guess where in this country we have the highest per-capita vaccination rates. Now you know it’s a bit of a trick question, so perhaps it’s harder to fool you… so if your guesses included places like the three northern territories, you’re correct. By far.

Vaccination rates for a few key provinces…

B.C.: 2.5%
Ontario: 2.2%
Quebec: 2.8%

Vaccination rates for the territories:
Northwest: 21.0%
Nunavut: 13.5%
Yukon: 15.4%

Some say that’s fair. Some say they should be distributing it more evenly. Some say more should be directed to the hotspots. And everyone is a little perturbed with last week’s news… at the start of the week, we heard how we were not getting what we were expecting from Pfizer… and at the end of the week, we heard how we were not getting what we were expecting from Moderna. Too bad. C’est dommage.

At what point could we conceivably start counting on ourselves for some vaccine? Some homegrown, domestically produced vaccine where we would be first in line?

The only viable possibility would indeed be home-“grown”, and that is Quebec-based Medicago’s tobacco-plant-based vaccine which recently wrapped up phase-2 clinical trials and is about to enter phase 3, involving 30,000 people in 11 countries. For what it’s worth, it’s off to a great start… 100% of people who received the vaccine developed significant antibody responses with no severe side effects. Like Moderna and Pfizer, this one also targets the spike protein, so there’s no real actual virus involved and therefore zero chance on getting sick with C19 from the vaccine. Side-effects – nothing bad so far, and we shall see what phase 3 reveals.

Unfortunately, the earliest we could hope to see this vaccine available to the public would be the second half of the year… but, certainly the government’s order of 76 million doses (and all the money that came with it) is helping push things along. But also, unfortunately, although they’ve been trying to get funding for years, we still don’t have the manufacturing capabilities in place. Medicago reps met with government officials no less than 24 times from 2017 to 2020 trying to find a way to fund the construction of just such a facility. The funding finally came through… in March of last year, when the “Oh shit” moment arrived. At least we’ll be all set for the next pandemic.

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By |2021-01-30T17:04:17-08:00January 30th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |3 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 15, 2021

Nothing too exciting to report in the U.S. today – well, other than the revelation that the insurrectionists did indeed intend to take hostages and assassinate government officials. But other than that.

So… let’s get back to vaccines…

As promised, some Canadian jurisdictions have blown through their supplies, jabbing as many arms as they can, with the vast majority of those being first doses… many people having now decided that that’s the way to go – get it into as many people as possible, stretch the time frame a bit, and catch up in due course.

The advantage of that is that it maximises the number of people who are at least a bit immune, which is obviously better than nothing at all. If not being vaccinated is a 0 and being fully vaccinated and immunized is a 9.5 (there is no 10; there are no guarantees), it’s not like the first dose gets you to 2 or 3. Depends who you ask, it’s anywhere from a 5.2 to a 9.0… and then the second dose gets you up to 9.5.

That being the case, the right strategy for the big picture is to give everyone a first dose… and counting on getting the second dose in time. But don’t pick 50 people and give them both. Or don’t do it where 33 people get two, 33 people get one, and 33 get zero.

Here in B.C., we’ve administered 98% of the vaccine we’ve received, and the plan is in place to keep doing that; that we have the infrastructure to dish it out as fast as they can serve it to us, and that the limiting factor is supply. It should be noted that 100% of that 98% are first doses.

Interestingly, Alberta has administered 112% of their vaccine. They’ve received 74,000 doses from Pfizer and have injected 84,000 arms… also all first doses. How is that possible? Notwithstanding the fact that every vial of vaccine ostensibly ships with enough for 5 doses when thawed and diluted, doctors have found you can squeeze out perhaps 5.2 or 5.3… so 5 doses per vial might turn into 6 or even 7 after a while of collecting scraps. Pfizer has not said that’s ok, but they haven’t said it’s not. We’ve all scraped the bottom of the peanut-butter jar… with a spoon, with a finger, with whatever… because we all know there’s no difference in yumminess. Hopefully the vaccine is the same.

In Quebec, though… they may be stretching things a bit far. They’ve similarly administered 110% of their vaccine… but that’s not the issue; it’s not the extra doses they’re squeezing out… it’s that they’re aiming to measure those second-dose timings in months, not weeks… and the risk is that Pfizer pulls the plug on that. The province has said that of course they’ll follow those guidelines if it comes down to not getting the vaccine at all, but for now… they will pedal-to-the-metal red-line it while they can. And for the moment, 100% of that 110% has been first doses… over 127,000 of them. Why does this sound like it might be even remotely ok? Because there’s some British science to back it.

According to Pfizer, the vaccine is only 52% effective after the first dose. But according to British scientists, who are measuring the results differently, that number is 89%.

For comparison, according to Moderna, their vaccine is 80% effective after one dose, 96% after two…. and with respect to the CoronaVac vaccine developed by Sinovac in China… none of these results have been peer-reviewed and they’re all over the place, so hardly worth comparing… but here they are. The press releases from countries using it vary widely: Turkey says 91% effective… Indonesia 66%, Brazil 50%… and all of those results are based on the full two doses.

A few days ago, I wrote about this aspect of it, and was corrected by a few people… in my case, I was uneasy about B.C. stretching the dose-gap to 35 days. As I’ve learned, that’s no big deal. In fact, even though Pfizer has recommended 21 days for their vaccine, and Moderna 28 days for theirs… Canadian guidelines, ie the Federal Public Health Advisors have OK’d up to 42 days for both.

But, Quebec… 90 days. Three months instead of three weeks. Their argument for doing that? Well, see above. Good idea? Again, as per above… it’s a definite maybe.

Meanwhile, New Brunswick has administered around 8,000 doses, but 2,000 have been second doses. That being said, New Brunswick today had 25 new cases and zero deaths. Quebec had 1,918 new cases and 60 deaths. A very different sense of urgency.

Today we hear the dire projections from models that imply things could get a lot worse if we don’t clamp down… and immunizing as many people as possible in that scenario is the right call. About the only thing that could mess this up is if not enough vaccine shows up for those first doses (let alone the second).

Since early 2021 hasn’t completely let go of the 2020 shitshow quite yet, today we hear that there will be vaccine delays. To be sure, don’t worry, we’ll be able to catch up in due course, a minor hiccup, etc… but of course, the issue is that we need them now. We’ve been assured that the timeline to get everyone vaccinated by the end of the year is not in jeopardy… and I believe it, especially given the quantity of vaccine Canada has procured… 10 doses for every person, specifically to mitigate this sort of situation. But it’s the bird-in-hand vs. birds-in-the-bush situation… I’d rather have one rickety old fire engine show up quickly… than five glistening bright-red new ones after everything has already burned down.

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By |2021-01-15T17:04:34-08:00January 15th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , |4 Comments
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