The genesis of the theme was a single-post essay The COVID Cup: America Will Finish at the Bottom of the Major League,
which posits a notional "Global Covid Cup" for the best pandemic response. It predicted America would do the worst of major nations in the metric of deaths-per-million.
It follows that metric, as the Covid Cup "score", gathered by worldometers.info/coronavirus.
(Copyright, Roy Brander, 2020, 2021, 2022. All non-commercial use is granted.)
It's clearly time to break the one file up into a few of them, clean the house up. It's also a good moment, if there are any, in the overall pandemic to take a short break. A sixth wave is coming to various places (the UK is getting as bad as the previous wave, already - thanks for opening soon and too much, Boris, wrong again as usual) but not yet here. In this war, it's, ah, All Quiet on the Western Front.
CCCC will return in a few days, with the morning read coming in more quickly, because two years of text isn't dragged into your browser behind it. The URL bookmarks for past posts will have to change slightly, but redirects can be provided.
Two years - and still going - when it was supposed to be one. Hah. We were going to invent vaccines in 9 months (previously impossible, but done), then vaccinate the country in 3 (barely possible and so not-done), then COVID would vanish. Alas, not so fast.
It started with much talk about everything being different now, stuff I rolled my eyes at, mostly, because I'd heard it before after 9/11. Societies change, but they resist doing so, the whole time they're changing - and the ambitions of those who can see where it's going are usually frustrated by how slowly it happens.
Sometimes, great stresses just reveal who you really are, and you have to live with that. 9/11 showed that "torture is not who we are" was simply untrue for Americans. Their noble forces immediately resorted to it, the public and press made noises, but none when their president decided to "look forward" (and away) from it, none when there were no charges or investigations.
I think the pandemic has shown that we really, quite genuinely, don't care about very old people warehoused in care-homes with deep dementia. They can't speak up for themselves, their relatives don't fight very hard, politically, and after horrifying revelations about their fate, we've mostly moved on to other topics, without any resolutions to spend billions more on care-homes. Haven't even heard the topic in months. Prove me wrong.
One does sense a leftward shift, but it's gradual, and not very dramatic, so far. The Great Reset has turned into a Significant Tweak.
http://brander.ca/c19#twoyears
I've shrunk the CTV News page for "Top Stories" down to illegibility, so you can just look at the relative allocation of space. The only pandemic stories are circled in red - and both are routine reports on hospitalizations, deaths.
The pandemic may not be over, as there are, certainly, a few discouraging words. Just down that page one Ontario infectious disease expert, Colin Furness, decries the re-opening. Even there, it's a little funny to hear him say "eliminated all our defenses", when it's clear they do so, because they regarded the wall of vaccinations (and infection-caused immunities) to be enough to hold the next wave down to a politically-tolerable level.
There's no real doubt any more that the more cynical politicians could care less if the medical system is subjected to round after round of retirement-causing, quitting-encouraging waves of overwork. As long as they (and CCCC) are right in predicting that next wave to not have hospital tents in the parking losts, they are done listening to Dr. Furness. (Those listening will hear the same good advice given by CCCC yesterday: those afraid should wear an N95 mask, for reassuring protection, whatever the infection level.)
There's also no doubt, to CCCC's newsreading, that people are tired of pandemic news, and not clicking on it. People don't get tired of war news, at least not near the front; people have the luxury and privilege of not reading pandemic news right now, because they feel it's about over, that they're pretty safe.
CCCC may have to cover a rising risk level, at least in a lot of places. I'm taking great heart, from the numbers in Cuba, Chile, and Portugal, that the "super-vaccinated" countries with over 90% full vaccination, may have no next Omicron wave, the one already starting in the UK, Netherlands, Germany.
It'll be interesting to see if a wave gets fairly bad in some countries - bad enough that the ICU staff are getting worried, vacations cancelled - without even talk of restrictions, just riding it out. There was a lot of talk about how restrictions must not become a "new normal", when people were protesting them. We may instead have a "new normal" where there are no restrictions, no masks required, no vaccines required - but it's normal to have twice the ICU admissions we used to have, a few hundred in most hospitals a few times a year, all that just now... normal. Some places may be in that mood, to just start living with it. Hire more ICU staff. Cultivate stoicism.
And don't click on bad news.
http://brander.ca/c19#nonewsgoodnews
Meanwhile, we're being almost inundated (if you read way too much pandemic news, like CCCC) with articles imploring us to stay masked, for the vulnerable, and the vulnerable themselves, crying out that they will practically be in house-arrest without them.
CCCC has generally been on the "hardass" side of most pandemic response issues, but not this one. That's because of my keen new box of N95 masks.
As I wrote on March 25, they were a head-smack once I got one and found it way more comfortable than the cloth masks, because they were face-shaped. The thing about N95 is, that doctors wear them in "hot zones", in the actual infectious disease wards where the all the air is infected.
Other people may take their masks off, but if you're in N95, your risk is still very, very low. This doesn't work in a restaurant, where you have to take it off, but your restaurant wasn't much safer, when people had to wear masks for one minute to their table, then take them off anyway for an hour. You could wear an N95 right through a movie, no problem. You could wear one in a gym, except for the aerobics.
My box of N95s was at Canadian Tire, 25 masks for $29, and if you just wear them to stores and movies, I'd say each would last a good week. If you're vulnerable, go N95, be at peace, and let things at least look a little more "normal".
http://brander.ca/c19#n95
The Guardian analyst touts it strongly, even as it fails for South Korea, New Zealand, China. "The Lesson from Hong Kong is not that elimination doesn't work, it's that you need a plan B", when the context changes.
What gets to me, is that we now have a lot of information by which to design lockdowns, restrictions, rules that work. Instead of just letting our pandemic response dribble away - and guess at the best response next time - we could stop and develop a new "pandemic playbook" - preferably before the details leave the memories of the people and institutions that just navigated this one.
And that next one - might be next month. Literally.
http://brander.ca/c19#0covid
Basically no post today, except to recommend the Guardian article by Thomas Hale, an Oxford professor of public policy. So crucial.
CCCC has been coming around to the belief, watching the Omicron wave, that there's something more mysterious, and hard to see: a cultural difference, a set of attitudes. Well, Oxford has a single word for it: trust. Not between people and government or other institutions: trust between each other.
The polls ask if you trust your neighbours, trust strangers on the street. Would they trouble themselves for you, do something extra, for a total stranger? Those nations where more people answer 'yes' to those kinds of questions, are the ones with the lower death rates.
It's not about whether there are rules for masking: it's whether people mask, distance, test and trace, voluntarily and whole-heartedly, or just reluctantly when others are watching. Everything else is a symptom of that: whether people vaccinate, whether they stay home from work, whether they isolate from family.
There's good news and bad news: trust in institutions, and "people in general" is down. But trust in co-workers and neighbours - the same people, of course, but the ones you lay eyes on - that trust is up.
I've just been getting through sections in the book, Blowout, about the Russian oil industry and how it's behind the war in Ukraine - the sections about cyberattacks on discourse. That's the word for them, "cyberattacks", not so much "disinformation"; they're attacks on our brains and emotions. Attacks on our trust between each other. It's crucial for good politics, and for good pandemics.
http://brander.ca/c19#trust
The data for the chart at left comes from Dr. Bonnie's own "BC COVID Dashboard", the page that comes in so slowly because the ArcGIS maps software is used for all of it, not just the map part, (and it's awful). I thought to look it up because the graphic links to an article at The Tyee, by Amanda Hosgood, their "Northern BC Reporter", about COVID and work camps.
I doubt that the Northern Health Region is hated in Victoria; they're just thinly-spread, only 300,000 people in an area larger than all the other health regions put together. So challenged, they kind of fell down on contact-tracing where people went home from those work-camps, back to their communities.
Much of the article, too, is saddening and infuriating that they tried their best to cover up, by mistreating FOI requests, giving reporters the runaround, dodging the question. It's not pretty.
Finally, though, they admitted that they just didn't look for "in-community transmissions associated with the work camps/sites as part of our process".
There are other places to lay blame than lack of government services. The camps themselves are pretty suspect as compliant work places. Anybody who's worked any kind of construction or heavy labour knows the culture; you could see it on construction sites all around Vancouver. Heck, my career, starting with surveying in 1977, covered the decades it took to get outdoor workers to reliably wear hard hat and boots, other PPE. Masks would have been for weaklings on many sites.
Since the area is so small, the casualties are minor, on the larger scale: a hundred fewer deaths would have put them down in the same rate as the Fraser area, our second-worst and by far most-populous.
The combination of different attitudes, and stretched-thin medical resources, explains it all; there was no reason for Northern Health to disgrace themselves by dodging journalism.
One can certainly re-litigate whether the camps and projects should all have been closed down; as Fosgood's article notes, Bonnie's boys in Victoria somehow found reasons to designate Site C, Coastal Gaslink, and the Kitimate LNG terminal, as "essential" services, which is true only for some investors. An outbreak for the Wet'suwet'en was directly traced to CG workers bringing it home.
It's strange for Dr. Bonnie's department to embarrass itself with the lying, and avoidance of the journos; she herself tried hard to be forthcoming and open, was exemplary at gaining public trust.
One hopes for investigations, new rules for transparency, will also come from the, ahem, post-mortem.
http://brander.ca/c19#negnorth
Because they have almost precisely a third of a billion population, it was just the day after Worldometers reckoned their dead an a million even. I waited an extra day for the "3000" to come up in the "Deaths/1M Pop" column, because that is the metric that CCCC uses to score the COVID Cup.
It had been looking, back in January, as if Canada would hit an even 1000 dead/M at the same time, and have real precision on that "one-third as bad" number that is well-known by now. But, our higher vaccinations pulled us out of Omicron sooner, our death-rate fell faster, and we are still a good month away from hitting the round number. If our rate keeps falling, it might even be delayed to May. Or, the re-opening could send the statistics climbing again, as both cases and deaths/day have now doubled in the UK since the start of March.
The predecessor single-essay to this blog predicted that "The US Military Kills a Million Americans", exactly two years back. Misplaced priorities, where the US gave the public health budget $12B/year, and the Pentagon $780B/year, can certainly account for a large fraction of American deaths - maybe even the whole two-thirds by which they exceeded Canada's.
Nobody sees America getting to another half-million dead, save by a very slow trickle that is hard to separate from the way flu and other pneumonias kill the very old every year. A really honest accounting of these million would admit that:
All told, I doubt I could hang even half that million deaths on low public spending caused by military competition.
Or less: Canada's worst sins were also low public spending - on care-homes, on jails, on remote communities - and we have no military-spending excuse for the cheapness.
Time to admit it, I just hate military spending. I'd just finished a Harper's column by Andrew Cockburn, as my essay notes; and just weeks ago, finished his book on that subject. It's a terrible problem, and the worst thing about recent news, is that every war provides excellent arguments for more military spending, related to the current problem, or not. So, I'm still grumpy, two years later.
The news media, following more-official sources, will be doing all the "One Million" stories in another week, or so, and I'll leave it to them to break it down into waves, and variants, and screw-ups.
I'd recommend just taking a moment to marvel, in a bad way, at the sheer number, itself. More than any one war, far more than the worst terrorist attack we could imagine (even the "smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud" fearmongers never dared claim more than a few hundred thousand).
And it happened while we watched, and warned, and begged people to protect themselves, as we did up web pages for dead anti-vaxxers, and arrested people for anti-mask freedom-fighting. America earned this "exceptional" distinction, one day at a time, for 750 straight days, averaging over 1300 dead per day.
http://brander.ca/c19#3000
Not to disparage the Ukraine War, or anything, but COVID-19 is still killing 4700 people per day, world-wide (that we know of), and was killing 10,000 per day as recently as February 11, a number to which it could return any time.
The map links to the article at BBC, which has a lot more material, and it's an active map, clickable for more information. It's a rare page on the coronavirus beat: nearly every other dashboard is focused only on one nation, upon a local battle in a global war.
The dropping number of deaths right now, across the world, probably heralds a six-month warm season for the northern hemisphere, where we have a shot to get a shot into a billion arms, and if we don't want to be losing 10,000 per day all next fall and winter, we need to get at it.
This is an easy, obvious chance for a Canadian win. The Ukraine War is going to upend a number of trading relationships. While things are up in the air, it's a chance to increase our position in the world, make some friends, establish fertile ground for new trade deals, new partners, new sales.
A lot of the world's poorer nations that are struggling to vaccinate, are not going to be poor much longer. That includes a lot of Eastern Europe, as tough as that world has it just now. Given their development, it's surprising how poorly vaccinated Poland, Slovakia, Romania are at this point. And Africa, is simply wide-open for help, even her most-developed nations.
Nigeria has developed to the point where there is "Nellywood", a Nigerian film industry - but they're at 4% vaccination. Botswana is at the other end of the spectrum, as African nations go - peaceful, only a little below Italy on the world corruption index, (and well above Greece), is at just 53%.
If we can't send the Canadian army out to save lives in Ukraine, we can send out Canadian doctors to save lives across a world - and make some friends. We need them badly if the world level of corruption and kleptocracy is to be replaced with a better one.
Naturally, the WHO are very worried about the whole pandemic fill the refugees with COVID, and send them across Europe, and the world, to spread it far and wide, that's their nightmare.
The thing is, the war's been going on long enough to see effects in the statistics, if we had statistics. Ukraine, of course, has none, though, amazingly, they are still vaccinating, a little, in the hospitals still running. It's almost stopped, but the Ukrainian fighters never give up - the COVID fighters, in their hospitals.
I wouldn't trust a Russian weather report, so we're stuck with Poland. Having taken most of the refugees for four straight weeks, you'd think their stats would show something. The only thing you can see is that the plummeting case-rate for Omicron stopped plummeting on March 6th, and has declined more-slowly since, from 11,000 cases/day to 9,000 yesterday.
There's just no sign of a Polish New Wave. (Or Moldova or Czechia, Hungary or Romania).
Maybe there's so many holes in the buildings that ventilation is excellent. I'm just reporting what I see; it's not there. It's kind of funny to see all the masks in the nice, safe EU meeting, and cases going up in UK, France, and Germany; but not where controls have been stressed and failed. Perhaps Eastern Europe just has a lot of sick people, and old people dying, and, well, nobody is noticing on top of all their other problems.
I suppose that's one way for a plague to "end": something even worse takes away all attention from what's suddenly the comparatively minor risk.
http://brander.ca/c19#nopolandc19
With South Korea, everything now depends on whether they vaccinated the old, or inexplicably skipped them, like Hong Kong, and, CCCC suspects, China. With the UK, it's more predictable. They've been through multiple waves already, we know their vaccinations are 8% behind Canada's, but very good on the old. The deaths are not going up exponentially, like the new cases; they're slowly rising. Yesterday, I noted that Ontario might have a worse time than BC, because of a half-percent less vaccination; UK is far more vulnerable still, but it's in patches, (places that also voted for Johnson); and those places have been hit hardest by all the previous waves. The UK has just over four times Ontario's population, but 13 times the deaths. BoJo never got his "herd immunity", obviously, but his extra hundred thousand dead have purchased some immunity for the extra ten million that caught it.
Doubling down on yesterday's bet about Canada, CCCC is predicting that the new Omicron wave in UK will peak much lower than the peak around New Year's, will straggle on longer, will have even less dying.
It's not just the gradually building immune population, leaving fewer to have serious cases; it's all those treatments, like Paxlovid, Molnupiravir, and plain 'ol Prozac (still blinking at that one), keep lowering the death rate, per case, as the medical system improves. COVID ain't the only thing that can evolve and get "smarter". So can we.
While confident we have only a blip coming, I've taken the advice to heart, where so many of our doctors are saying that the end of mask mandates doesn't mean you have to, or should, drop your own. After switching to an N95, it was a bit of a head-smack: they may cost a buck or so, but they're face-shaped, and more comfortable. If I can soften that coming wave a little more, protect my loved ones (particularly the "me" member of "loved ones"), I can mask in busier indoor spaces a few more months. Catching it would still be unpleasant; spreading it would be shameful.
http://brander.ca/c19#skukblip
My guess predicted that this next wave, the one from the re-opening itself, would "fizzle", letting us get over our fear of further opening. Canada's health care workers are considerably more worried about it.
So are some journalists watching cases in Korea, UK, and Germany, and even hospitalizations in UK are going back up.
Some of our own public health experts are saying the re-opening is too soon.
However, call me Zelenskyy, because I'm going to stick by my guns: yes, there's another wave coming; no, it won't crush the hospitals. I'm just optimistic on that. My remarks may be confined to BC, however, and the Maritimes, probably Quebec, for all Quebec's older demographic. Call it faith in having reached over 90% vaccination for over-5s, 99% for everybody over 70. I left Ontario off the list, even though they've made it to 90.3%, just a bit under 90.8% for BC.
It's not the vaccination itself, it's what the vaccination reveals about behaviours: the CCCC motto, "There are only safe behaviours, not safe places". Even BC has an issue there, where there are less-safe behaviours amoung younger workers in the interior, than in the coastal health regions. In Ontario, it shows up through rural Ontario. There may be lower vaccination rates, combined with a lot more contact, in pockets.
Alas, the trouble with "pockets" are that it's like having just the one hole in a boat: even a rural area can generate enough bad cases to be filling up their own hospitals, sending people to cities, causing headlines and fear.
So, there may be some troubles, but I think the larger story is that this next wave will be the first to not (mostly) overload the medical system, or require more new restrictions than some masking.
My money's on the table, where no actual journalist will lay any down, and the doctors are professionally required to be very conservative and discreet. You heard it here first.
http://brander.ca/c19#blipnext
Peru has had the worst pandemic of anybody; the single lowest rank on the CCCC scoreboard, 6276 dead/million, nearly two-thirds of a percent of the whole population. They were far worse than even the next-worst nation: Bulgaria, at 5,290 (that phenomenon covered the other day, that Eastern Europe is generally the worst-hit nations.
Peru is almost Canada's size, at 33 million, but one-eighth of our GDP; only 40% of houses have refrigerators to store food, more of the economy is informal than anywhere, everybody had to keep working. So they were hit hard.
But also, they vaccinated like champions. And,dead opposite to the astonishing mistake of Hong Kong, they prioritized the elderly and vulnerable.
That article is from March, 2021, and as you can see from the cases/death graph at left, they continued to have a massive wave of death for the next four months, through July, by which time they were still only at 12% vaccinated; progress was slow. But summer 2021 gave them a break from cases, and by fall, they were hitting 40%, over 65% in December when Omicron hit.
And fizzled.
The contrast could hardly be more dramatic, which is why I showed it with the two graphs flipping back and forth. Before vaccination, the much-shorter wave of cases caused the massive wave of deaths. After vaccination, Omicron caused its usual massively high, mercifully brief spike in cases - but the wave of deaths was tiny by comparison to their early waves.
Viewed as an animation, it consists of short hills of cases becoming high mountains of deaths, on the left, whereas on the right, a repeating movie of a high peak of cases only becoming a little hill of deaths. Nothing more dramatic than an opposite outcome.
It's the same story in Portugal, congratulated here last October, before Omicron. Checking in with Portugal, we find just about the same experience between Canada, Europe's least-rich country, and a country far poorer again, Peru: all three of us lost about one citizen in 5,000 to Omicron.
Canada, with 38 million, some 7500; Peru with 85% the population at 33 million, lost 9,000; and Portugal, just 11 million, lost 2,000. All pretty comparable, because our vaccination levels, especially of our elderly, were comparable.
If you have enough money to vaccinate, and your economy can stand a lockdown, it doesn't take riches to beat COVID. Peru came back from the absolute worst situation in the world, to join the ranks of the CCCC podium champions. It's all about getting those vaccines out, and people to trust them.
http://brander.ca/c19#peruvax
At left, a link to the Herald story on it taking multiple arrests and tickets just to crowbar the Calgary protesters out of torturing the Beltline, and a little north to torture City Hall, as protesters should.
People are puzzled that they're still protesting, with many mandates being dropped; they've been clear that they will be out in perpetuity until the very last excuse to protest has been lost. I phrase it that way, because they clearly like protesting.
Most protesters do!
I've seen this at every ongoing protest camp in my life, certainly since the Gulf War protests in 1991. People have found like-minded people; those who also care about a topic, when they have so much trouble rousing their friends to care as much. They've found people who sit around agreeing that (1) they are all right; (2) their enemies are terrible; and (3) they are all noble for standing against it. Who would want to leave that kind of validation, that sense of meaning, that hope?
And, of course, that community, all those warm new friends.
The Calgary protest community has nothing on Milk River. Milk River? Tiny town about 15km north of Coutts, has a little more infrastructure to accomodate visitors (pop. 824 instead of 224), and is where some remnant of the Coutts protest is still encamped. As the very chilly, gray photo at right says, people come and go from the camp as their own schedules allow. They come back to join the community there as often as possible.
Now, that one just has to be for the community; nobody knows they are there, the linked article is the only journalistic attention they've gotten. I suppose they have protest signs up along the highway for the traffic to read. I doubt any of them say "We'd be ruining your day right now if the cops would let us".
I can only look at that picture, try to imagine driving for some hours to get there. All to spend a weekend or whatever, standing around in the snow, looking at gray skies over empty, white prairie ... and yakking about the awfulness of Justin Trudeau, and everybody like him. I'm failing. These guys have committment. Or community; they miss the gang by Friday and want to go catch up.
The massive irony in it all, for me, is that "community spirit" is what we all wish these guys actually had - spirit for the larger community of Canada, for the community that includes old people, and organ-transplant people. We needed them to participate in our community, and their community has gathered to say "We claim a right to continue breathing danger on you; you have no right to exclude us from the larger community for being a danger to some of it".
Which is where CCCC must leave the issue. There's not a thing we can do about it, save for the Bonnie Henry treatment. Bonnie offered only soft words of fact; humble pleas to follow the science - and adamant, iron committment to the earlierst and most-stringent vaccine mandates in the nation. We don't have to be mean or offensive, but we don't have to accept danger, either; we have a right to protect ourselves.
Because we believe in "community", too. More so, we think.
http://brander.ca/c19#community
The graphic links to the CBC story on the Angus Reid poll that went for extra divisiveness by asking not, "How did the federal government do with the pandemic?", or even "How did the Liberals do?", but asked about Justin Trudeau specifically.
I don't know why people get more upset at the figurehead than the government employees that actually do the work. The whole suite of elected officials in cabinet can hardly more than tweak the direction the permanent employees take; the leader has even less control. I think our feds did about the job you'd expect, except, as always, they meddled too often and too much in the air-travel openings and closings, and quarantine rules, when they just had to ask for firm rules at the outset (all travelers quarantine for X days when cases/day hit Y) and follow them.
Other than that, the actual "pandemic performance", to me, is how many people live and die - and nearly all of that was up to your provincial health system, and you, your cultural attitudes.
That was a factor of five difference, from under 40 deaths/100k in most Atlantic provinces, to over 160 in Quebec. It's Quebec and Manitoba that ruin my original theory, the one sketched in by the pink line: that your own province's failures would be blamed on the hated Trudeau.
Manitoba liking Trudeau so much, despite their right-wing provincial voting, and their second-worst pandemic, is inexplicable. Quebec is always an outlier. There, despite an apalling provincial performance that you really can blame on their government's care-home policies, they give Mr. Legault their highest marks and praise. Cultural values that say "we understand care-homes got such awful service, because that's our culture, that's on all of us, not on Legault or Trudeau"?? I don't know; people usually prefer to blame somebody.
Except for the two outliers, I do believe I have something here, though. I don't think it's that people are transferring their anger at provincial response to the feds. I think both are symptoms of a common cause. The Atlantic provinces are some of our smallest, have the oldest and most socially-cohesive cultures; both the small size and the culture helped them do very well, vaccinate very well. Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan elected our most-right-wing governments, with a social ethos of independence, and lack of social cohesiveness: "Your problems are not my problems" runs pretty deep.
And that ethos also causes you to vote against Liberals, and NDP.
Your pandemic odds don't come from whether the government is liberal, I'm afraid. It's whether you are.
http://brander.ca/c19#jtpoll
I've got no proof, but I'm increasingly suspicious that the reason that China is doing those massive, otherwise inexplicable lockdowns, is that, they, too, like Hong Kong, didn't vaccinate elders.
We celebrated St. Patrick's Day by crowding into bars to sing into each other's faces. Hong Kong passed the event by running out of coffins.
As that story notes, they didn't vaccinate their elders during the whole last year, when they could have. Omicron hit them with barely a third of them protected, and they're frantically jabbing, too late. Here's the May, 2021 story on them having to throw out vaccines. From it: "Observers have blamed factors including community mistrust in the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, disinformation and misinformation and a lack of urgency from authorities. ".
I suspect that "lack of trust in the government" is even worse in China, itself. I'm not sure why the elders are even more untrusting, or is it that they felt safer because retired people don't have to go in to work? Since there's no data on that "why", the post is kind of over, hammering home for the Nth time that pandemic fighting requires societal cohesion, including trust in government itself. Future posts will be looking at Canadian provinces, and their outcomes, and how I think BC did very well because Bonnie Henry inspired trust.
Lack of trust is not a "right wing thing". You'd think you'd find it more-often on the left, and in our culture, you also have those who have suffered under government, Black and Indigenous, mistrusting government. There was some of that in Canada, but our Indigenous communities were good vaccinators. In China, I'm not sure whether government-distrusters should be called "right wing" or left; but here, it's become so synonymous with "right".
However, here's another link for your morning reading, which seems to switch the topic back to Ukraine, because that's the point: both are about trust.
The article calls them "contrarians", as they oppose whatever they consider to be "the narrative" that they see coming from "the elites" or "establishment". COVID? Hoax. Serious? Just a flu. Masks? Don't work. Vaccines? Ditto. Ukraine? Hoax. Serious? Not to us.
Journalist David French notes, however, it's one-directional: they applied the most-stringent skepticism to vaccines, and none whatsoever to horse dewormer. They are only contrarian about information from "established", otherwise-respected, sources. (Unless they're being sold the Iraq War. French didn't explain that credulity.)
Maybe when the government, like China's is relentlessly never truthful, about almost anything, about any product safety, any foreign policy, any dissent, any crime and punishment for the upper classes, you become that kind of "contrarian" - and more contrarian with age, as you see more lies. China's elders now date back to when Communism itself was still a belief system; they watched that torn down piece-by-piece, by their own government, which claimed to still be communist, the whole time.
It's a pandemic vulnerability that certainly did not effect the actually-still-a-bit communist government of Cuba, which is a pandemic, and vaccination, superstar. I'm sure that Cubans can't trust their human-rights-nightmare government about dissidents; their public health department must have been delivering actual results, even to the poor, for some time, to be so diametrically opposite to China's sad results.
Let's take moment to pity those very poor nations that have a poverty of trust.
http://brander.ca/c19#chinahk
A mixed-language headline that's pretty meaningless; I was trying to say "Ireland Did Well", in the pandemic - at least compared to the UK.
The graphs at left are the story of that. Ireland has the same population as BC, just over 5 million; the UK some 13 times as many. Throughout the pandemic, Ireland has played BC to the UK's Alberta - half as many dead, per capita.
I've done something silly for fun (St. Pat's Day!). The worldometers Y-axis for UK is 5X as large as the one for Ireland, so the 13:1 population ratio is shown by squashing down the UK graph to under half size. Now the two graphs can be compared.
This is more data for my growing contention that almost "invisible" differences in culture, in personal behaviour patterns, have as much to do with pandemic performance. Ireland has better vaccination than UK (81% vs 77%), but, same as BC vs AB, notice that the wave of dead is half as high in 2020, before we had vaccinations. It's behaviour. The higher vaccination rate and the lower death rate are both symptoms of the same thing, though the vaccination of course redoubles the effect.
http://brander.ca/c19#erin
They're doing these massive, superhard lockdowns where even the takeout restaurants have to close - no takeout! They seem to think they can tighten up enough to prevent Omicron getting in, which nobody else has been able to do. If you can keep out Omicron, is the price worth it? If only our Freeedom Fighters could try out the China lockdowns.
Funny thing is, you see, they claim 88% of the total population is vaccinated, 86% fully, 3.2 billion doses in total. Is it that they don't trust their Sinovac, the way lots of others don't? The WHO says it is 51% effective against symptoms, 100% against hospitalization, so why aren't they just letting the wave roll? I'd give you some stats from China, but I don't trust them.
http://brander.ca/c19#chinawtf
But the high probability says that Omicron is the last for a fair while, unless there are outbreaks large enough to make a new evolution possible; and as a news item, as a political crisis, the pandemic is probably winding down, rapidly. We can start asking "who won"?
Yes, lots of rows on the worldometers list of polities have zero deaths. But CCCC doesn't consider Samoa or even Western Sahara (2 deaths) to be in the competition; you have to have managed the pandemic while running a large, industrial society with a lot of people movement you can't just freeze. And inveterate liars like Russia and North Korea, are exempt, plus China, who might not be lying about 3 deaths/million, but are disqualified for starting the damn pandemic.
Nope, CCCC is minded to hand the COVID Cup to Bhutan, the little kingdom of less than a million, with seven deaths (9/million). CCCC previously covered their exemplary lockdown and tracing, where COVID was stamped out with massive, effective contact-tracing within hours, repeatedly.
I just found a story about that first case. It was crazy, the effort they went to, to get that one American tourist treated; he was flown home in a Gulfstream.
Unlike Hong Kong, Bhutan vaccinated to high levels, as soon as they could, despite their poverty and isolation. When Omicron finally came for them, their immune systems were ready.
Bhutan shows as 74% population-vaccinated, but that's 93% of the over-12 population, so they have a lot of young people. And 98% of vulnerable people, all the elders and care-workers - are fully vaxed and boosted.
The results have been incredible, so far: Omicron finally broke through their awesome contact-tracing speed in just after New Year's; they've had over 18,000 cases since, in a country with ONE ventilator - and they've had seven deaths, a case-fatality rate of 0.04%. It's as if the whole country were age 22.
I'm not sure if the incredibly low rate is also due to hospitals that had bought some ventilators, gotten supplies of Paxlovid, that's possible; but the heart of it was the vaccination and the effective health measures.
There's nothing more to say, because while all dysfunctional pandemic responses have been dysfunctional in their own way, all the good pandemic responses are the same: true public committment to the recommended masks, distances, closures; fast, full contact-tracing; and maximalist vaccination, with priority to the old.
Not sure when I'll finalize, but my bet's on Bhutan, For The Win!
http://brander.ca/c19#bhutanftw
Belarus has such a low number, it's highly suspicious. I've always put a private question mark besides Russia itself, the lies have been so thick from that place. Accepting it, then Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, all better than the USA, are the standouts in the region, coming in under 3000.
I used to make maps and infographics for a living, and the good ones tell their own story, as the eye wanders around. I'll leave you with the story, but warning, it's a tale of woe. The whole area needs much better government, 'he said, with the famous Canadian understatement'.
http://brander.ca/c19#euromap
Margaret Atwood, 83, and a cautious soul when not writing, will be one of the last to take off her mask, I bet. I kept a count of masks/no-masks in No Frills yesterday, getting groceries, and I'd say it was 3:2 in favour of still-masked.
So much for masking being a strangling, hated imposition by tyrants: a solid majority still wants them, even when the tyrants themselves have decreed we're all-clear. If they'd made it totally voluntary six weeks ago, when the ICUs were packed, I suspect it would have been more like 80% voluntary masking.
"Surfacing" is more than the metaphor for taking off your mask for a deep breath; it's just going to take time to decompress our sense of fear, there are a lot of cautious souls out there right now. I predicted on New Year's Eve that Omicron would have a last bite, caused by our complete re-opening being rushed, at least a small wave. That's certainly coming true in UK and Europe, where Spain, France, and Portugal all have rising cases again; but only UK has rising deaths. Vaccination rate? The others are all higher. In Canada, or at least BC, our natural caution may turn the last wave into a ripple. Here's hoping.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, their amazing avoidance of all cases for two years was this best-possible opportunity for such a rules-following culture to get to 95% vaccination, 99% of their elders.
Inexplicably, I really can't even follow how this could be, but they have 83% vaccination overall, not bad - but only 53% vaccination of those over 80! What the hell? How could they neglect the elders, when no culture respects age so highly?
I also found the the number 43%, from February, with a comment that it had been 22% in January. They're frantically vaccinating them NOW? The same story blamed the low rate on elders refusing it. Nearly 80% of them? Seriously?
CCCC noted four days ago, that they'd lost 2000 people in three weeks; they have now doubled their cases in the last twenty-four hours, lost another thousand dead since that post four days ago. That's like Canada losing a thousand a day, or America losing 9000 a day.
Reuters reports that it is mostly sweeping through care-homes, as with us. That probably lowers the physical concentration of bodies. With under 5 million people, you can imagine dense Hong Kong having only two or three COVID hospitals, each dragging out another body every 15 minutes into the refrigerated trucks. Spreading that out among 50 care-homes holds it down to one every few hours, per home, individual hearses instead.
Canada, with 99.5% vaccination for our seniors, may see a second Omicron wave, but hardly any dying. We look down upon Hong Kong, a place of great wealth and technology, like they were a very poor one. I can't think what they imagined would happen, when the seniors refused those shots.
http://brander.ca/c19#surfacing
Russian-funded and Russian-run sites have been helping along our native anti-vaccination sites for years.
Oddly enough, it's also supported some very targeted, picky anti-vaccination, suuch as just against Pfizer products, apparently to help sell Russia's own vaccine products.
As with any use of the word "Russia" in disinformation discussions, CCCC must be clear that the word is a catch-all term for:
There's an almost-funny afterstory. Russia had to "crack down" on vaccine disinformation that blew back on Russia,lowering their vaccine uptake to a mere 53%.
And now, web sites that devoted themselves entirely to anti-vax, anti-health material are suddenly the ones venting Ukraine conspiracy theories, and will undoubtedly echo the bizarre "virus lab" charges of yesterday: they were Russian all along, just masquerading as domestic.
Multiple stories at CCCC for the last week, and coming weeks, will highlight again and again, the deaths caused by the anti-vaxxer movement. Alberta's extra dead compared to BC, America's extra dead compared to Canada, and an upcoming story on the Horrors of Hong Kong, where only 30% of the crucial over-80 demographic are vaccinated. By deliberately spreading anti-vaccine materials, even if they were popular with 7% of our number, Russia has already killed a lot of westerners, killed a lot of Canadians. Heck, they've killed a lot of Russians, from that "blowback", and a real wave of Russian dying is about to begin. Just not as big as the coming Ukrainian wave.
So, it's not wild rhetoric to say that "Russia has been at war with us for years, and in the pandemic, they've caused us many casualties." It's statistical, and double-arms-length indirect, but the effect is there.
It's so bad, I can compare it to the harm the CIA did to vaccination in Pakistan, and that's bad.
http://brander.ca/c19#russojourno
I show the graphs to clarify that I'm not comparing the same dates; I'm comparing the waves, as picked by the low points along the curve.
Let's break down these death-counts for both nations, normalized by "per million" deaths, in the table, at bottom.
The summary is that the Delta wave cost America 551 deaths/million, Canada, just 90. That's six times as bad, in the USA, as in Canada. At that time, America was going from just 56% vaccinated to 70%, while Canada was already 72% vaxed before Delta even started.
By the time Omicron was rolling, the USA achieved Canada's pre-Delta rate in the middle of it, while Canada had plateaued at a number the USA will never reach. The two nations were much closer, however. Omicron cost the USA some 542 deaths/million, about the same as Delta. Canada, with 188 deaths/million, twice as bad as Delta had been. Of course, in Canada, Omicron was three times as many cases, and that's using the known-to-be-low official case-counts. (Omicron actually was "milder" in Canada, in that over three times the cases caused only two times the deaths.)
In America, Delta and Omicron killed about the same number; Omicron, far more cases, but hitting a more-vaxed population.
The American deaths are always at least three times as bad as the Canadian numbers. The only variation is when they are worse, as with people in their thirties, or here, where you compare Canada at 70%-something vaccination to USA at under 60%.
The important comparison, though, is to only care about vaccination of the over-65 set, who do over 90% of the dying. In Canada, we were at 92% vaccination for over-70 by the start of Delta, and 99% elder-vaxed by the start of Omicron. USA, by contrast, even today is at just 86% of their over-75s fully vaxed, 91% of their 65 to 74. You read that correctly: their oldest are less-vaxed than their second-oldest. In Canada, it's 99% all the way up from 70, 95% from 60.
Lost in the numbers? The upshot is that the difference between 60% and 75% vaccinated saved about 3,500 lives in Canada, would have saved 90,000 lives in the USA.
Or, here's another upshot for you: again, and again, and again, contemplate what it means that the USA had three times the death-rate of the USA. As they approach one million dead, they approach the day when 660,000 Americans would have lived, had they had Canada's health-care, customs, and culture. That's more people than they lost in their worst war, their Civil War.
| Nation | Delta | Omicron | Now | Delt/M | Omi/M | Now/M | Delt Cost | Omi Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canada | 26,700 | 30,100 | 37,250 | 702 | 792 | 980 | 90 | 188 |
| USA | 627,000 | 811,000 | 992,000 | 1877 | 2428 | 2970 | 551 | 542 |
CCCC, being retired from the Water and Sewer business, has closely followed the merging new technique of public health monitoring from sewage samples. When the City of Ottawa started doing it regularly, CCCC jumped right on it. When my own hometown of Calgary did a few monitoring stations, CCCC printed the catchment maps of how hundreds more could be used. Most recently, automatic sewage sensors, have been developed.
The graphic above links to a new National Observer story about the monitoring having survived the pandemic itself, because it's a cheap, effective, useful way to monitor public health. Looking forward to seeing more of it for more public health problems.
National Observer updated their coverage today with an article about the lab work that comes after [Added March 11].
There's a fascinating (and horrible) difference that I just can't explain. Both had Omicron go, um, viral in late January. Both are at 83.5% vaccination. But New Zealand has just 65 deaths so far, whereas Hong Kong has had 2000 deaths in the last three weeks.
There must be some major difference in vaccination patterns. Most countries vaccinated their oldest, first, who do 90% of the dying. Getting past 95% for your over-65 seniors cuts the death rate drastically. I can only speculate that Hong Kong has way under 95% vaccination for its oldest, whereas New Zealand's must look like Canada, which is actually at 99.5% for the over-70s.
The other WHO advisory is for Thailand, which has had previous waves, has an ominously rising death rate, and at 76% vaccination, has room for a lot my dying.
It's a reminder that "The pandemic is over" applies only to highly-vaccinated countries. Most of the world still has a year or two to go.
Thing is, that was 1.3% during January, and 0.7% during February. I'd expect March to be less than half that. With the end of restrictions, visible masks in most places, it's on fewer minds. Much more important, the number of cases has vanished for weeks, the number of dying is about to crash. The wave of dying, as CCCC has been following, is a kind of "fossil" wave, baked-in by a now-gone wave of infections several weeks back. The fact that the number will only go down means the war-news has drowned them out.
CCCC did predict another possible wave, caused by early restriction-dropping, that Omicron might have one last bite. If so, there will probably be a little wave of vaccinations. But it's a low probability until fall.
A doctor called the last deaths, "the ultimate lagging indicator", but that might actually be the last vaccination clinic.
A number of nations beat Canada at vaccination, but very few by more than a couple of percent. We did very well. There's a column up at "The Line" today talking about Canadians having a low trust level in our institutions. We may tell surveyors that, but 90% of us do believe in the medical system, and almost nobody mistrusts our elections.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxdone
With a very few exceptions - the story of the smallpox blankets in America, the plague-bodies tossed into sieges - plague makes a terrible weapon of war, coming back upon the attacker almost inevitably. But it has certainly happened as "collateral damage", when you destroy civilian infrastructure for clean water. That includes all power plants.
I've given the URL once or twice on this blog, mention it where I can. I've told friends about it, and they invariably say "Wow, I never knew that". One followed with "That's just germ-warfare, by proxy." I'd never heard of it, either, when I ran across it a few years ago, from Jon Schwarz at The Intercept, mentioning it in passing. And that's part of the story. 170,000 kids under age 5, dead, horribly, of cholera and typhus, in a formerly-wealthy, developing nation with hospitals - and we shrugged and turned to the sports pages.
We must have done so, in June 1991, when Barton Gellman of the Washington Post wrote the story. If the Washington Post link, from the first excerpt above, dies, try clicking on the next excerpt, below. The story has been archived.
That justification was kind of new, at the time. When they still had dreams of the Iraqi people rising up against Saddam, (has that ever worked on a dictatorship?) before they gave up on that, they were only talking about winning the war by attacking the Iraqi military. The whole story had to be ferreted out from the "air tasking orders" that targeted all of Iraq's civilian power plants. The comments about that revealed they were already thinking of making life miserable - which, for the vulnerable old and very young, means "impossible" - in the postwar.
Note the "especially late in the war"; they were thinking about no power, no water for civilians, after they'd basically already won. Recall that the ground war was four days, the aerial bombardment ran 43 - five weeks of bombs before the tanks left Kuwait. The war in Ukraine, power mostly still on, is a dramatic contrast. It's not that the Pentagon planners actually wanted to kill 170,000 little kids with plague, and I doubt if the Russians care to see a lot of extra Ukrainians, mostly old, die of COVID: it's just that nobody cares, either way, enough to even think about it.
That is one of the horrors of war: "collateral" damage where your leg, or your mom, or your life, is wiped away, pretty much as a minor "oopsie" by somebody who was doing something else; somebody who really didn't care about the oopsie more than you care about hitting a spider with your lawnmower. Dick Cheney stood by all his decisions - of course, that's knowing he'd never be arrested.
With torture, at least we faced up to it in the media: had the panel discussions, wrote the anguished columns, put out a few books, and a very depressing Adam Driver movie. But they don't even have to admit it, much less ever be arrested. That story is four days old; the US Supreme Court supports the torture being kept secret. The 170,000, I think, was so much worse that we couldn't even admit who we are, tacitly, by omission of any arrests.
This blog is a joke, in the face of war, the way our convoy became a joke when we saw a genuinely menacing convoy. The blog is about a fight against a plague, which requires hard work from professionals, and some minor sacrifices from the rest. When events come along where 170,000 dead are a minor story, only found a year later, and instantly dropped as a topic, the couple of hundred that will die of COVID today in Ukraine, are simply not news.
http://brander.ca/c19#collateral
Fiji, of course, is economically devastated, because the pandemic mostly hurt the hospitality economy, not the other 90% of it, but, in Fiji, the "hospitality economy" - tourism - is huge.
Then there was a giant earthquake in 2022, and an Omicron wave. You'd think this was to be an unhappy post. The Omicron wave, as you can see from the graph, was not like other countries' Omicron waves, which were the biggest of all; in Fiji, it was much smaller that Delta. So the dying with Omicron was a fraction, too, it's down to zero or one person per day, just now.
As the previous post noted, Fiji vaccinated frantically, and though their rate is still a mere 70%, it's basically everybody on the one large island where the outbreak occurred. It's been enough to squash Omicron almost flat. And the pandemic is over. They've removed all restrictions. Tourists are coming back; the rebuilding is beginning. Fiji won.
Such victory stories are going to be coming thick and fast, as the last waves fade away around the world. (The waves in Poland and Moldova, the main recipient countries of refugees, are continuing to plummet, no sign of a refugee-induced wave of illness that CCCC worried about yesterday. Yet.)
Man, I needed that. Last night's pandemic TV was "Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine". That link to the IMDB page has a link to watch it through some free streamer caled "Tubi", that you can sign into with a google account; also to Apple TV, which carries it. I was able to stream it through the Vancouver Public Library having an arrangement with another free streamer called "Kaloopy", so search around.
It was informative, briefly touching on the long history, then jumps to 1991 for several minutes, then on to events since 2013, and the war. It was horrifying; and it was very, very inspiring. I needed a vacation to Fiji today, but not because of the documentary: because of the newscasts.
http://brander.ca/c19#fijidone
Ukraine, needless to say, isn't reporting COVID stats just now. They stopped on Feb 23, when they had 20,000 cases per day. They had just 36% vaccinated. Those millions of human bodies harbour another invader into the receiving countries; a wolf in the fold that will quickly spread through all the places the refugees are sent.
Well, the COVID deaths of the old people who stay behind in Ukraine, afraid to go to a failing hospital with no oxygen in any event, (and a few young people), will just be "lost in the shuffle", as with the Doonesbury cartoon history of the Panama Canal, at right, below. People who can't walk for four hours are being left behind - and actually, hiding in basements, may be safer than they were during peacetime - or be killed by bombardment, dying with healthy lungs.
Not that many will die in their refuges, despite the massive spread of covid that is simply guaranteed by the crowding of the bomb shelters, train stations, trains, and platforms. There will be literally a million people feverish and coughing, but they'll pull through Omicron, mostly; they're young.
The largest number of victims (that we ever become aware of) may be older people in the refuge-recipient countries; the revived Omicron wave may reach further, last longer, get a bunch of their over-60 population. The countries east of Germany have at most 60% vaccination; Germany itself, at least, 75%, won't be too bad.
It's funny that nobody is even mentioning COVID, as we look at those thousands packed shoulder-to-shoulder, and I think it's not oblivious, just prioritized. This pandemic has always been mostly about the old, and when millions of young people, millions of children, are at risk of bloody death, it's just human to push the elders to the back. Most of the elders would volunteer for it.
There's a lot of people volunteering to take terrible risks, today, and while the pandemic hasn't changed, we have. The pandemic is simply lost in the shuffle.
http://brander.ca/c19#refugees
Russia's oxygen is the natural gas they're selling, every minute; the payments for it clear every day. We know we need to cut off that "oxygen" that's funding the crime. That's a pretty tortured excuse for bringing war measures into a pandemic blog, but since nobody would read it, today, without a Ukraine hook, here's another: this is war-fighting as a "collective action problem", like getting everybody to wear a mask, or vaccinate. Can we get everybody in Germany to minimize their Russian consumption?
A look at the flow diagram on the right indicates I should stop saying "Germany" and start saying "Western Europe". Notice the exports are 75% again the domestic consumption. The "exports" are of course, just Russian natural gas flowing through Germany, and on to Austria, Italy, France, across the continent.
East of Germany, there's less chance of much action: Czech Republic is 100% dependent on Russia for gas supplies, Hungary 95%. But Western Europe can, and should, make some sacrifices.
Normally, war is when you get collective action with no cranky convoy conniptions: everybody pitches in. Look at Ukraine. Do you think the Ukrainians would have trouble turning down thermostats today? They'd burn furniture to do it.
So I was frankly shocked by the weak-kneed, faint-hearted call to turn down thermostats by 1C, said the IEA.
They're the International Energy Agency, though, and you have to wonder if their hearts are in a call to stop buying their product. It's easy, today, to find a calculation of how much gas it saves to turn down the temperature, given 5C as an average outside, which is about right for Berlin this week. The calc says that a 3 degree reduction saves a quarter of your furnace consumption.
Three degrees is getting into all-day indoor sweater-wearing, some sacrifice I guess, but can't people look to 15C in the house, a heavy sweater, and save a third?
Heck, what I'd like to see for the next week or so, is a real show of solidarity, willingness to sacrifice, show tangible support: 10C in the house, news shots of families watching the news in their parkas, and over half the gas consumption removed. Combined with similar sacrifices of reduction in electrical consumption, particularly peak consumption where the gas plants are at their best.
Industrial consumption is hard to cut by more than ten percent, or so: a lot of large, bulk-production processes (fertilizer, concrete, steel) go broke if they aren't running pretty near 100% all the time. But that 10% can be used, and the next few weeks are the time to endure it, and heavily publicize the losses, inspire others. A combination of carrot (money comes back) and stick (Ukrainian resistance, which should be inspiring us all) might just halt this before whole cities are leveled - which is what happened in Chechnya 23 years ago. Don't doubt it will happen to Ukraine.
I really think that, for a week or so, anyway, collective action could just halve Russia's gas exports, allow for storage to be pushed to the maximum, and pressure applied - for no price greater than some inconvenience and discomfort. When you see those huge explosions in the streets, understand that they, obviously, of course, blow up the street's gas main, a few feet down. Somebody has to come and shut off the gas to the block, and nobody in that block has any more heating at all. Lets show some solidarity with them.
What can you call this parka-wearing sacrifice, but, "The Cold War"?
There are just so many articles today with titles about "things changing fast", and "decades are happening in just days". We could practically turn Germany's power turbines with the spinning heads of pundits who only thought they were "savvy", and "looped-in", and world-wise. Can it be like the first pandemic days, two years ago, when they were all talking about major changes to the world, a Great Reset? The Greatest Reset of them all is to change your mind about what's "normal". And maybe our new normal should be eating dinner in parkas, until we can get heat that is clean. Clean the blood out of it, now, and the carbon out of it, by 2035. Preferably sooner. Much.
http://brander.ca/c19#cutoffoxy
I noticed a funny fact, yesterday: after a day or so with no deaths, BC had 10 deaths. And the ICU number went from 83 to 73, in one day. Pardon me for making an assumption.
It's great news that the dying in South Africa finally seems to be dropping off, two months after their cases peaked. They're down to a few dozen a day, most days, like Canada.
I'm thinking that's why the "wave of dying" goes on so long after the "wave of infections" has ended. A patient in the documentary "The First Wave" is shown taking months to come back from COVID, before he can even go home, and spend many more months getting back to his life (with luck).
It's a good sign: if your health-care system can handle people taking months to live or die, can spend months fighting almost-certainly-doomed battles, you're doing well. The health-care systems in Ukraine, of course, are simply losing a lot of battles, these next weeks, and their losses should be called casualties of war.
We've gotten very good at ignoring those death-tolls. By Worldometers count, NATO took 2,912 casualties...yesterday. Simply not news. But I think they have a psychological component, people are still aware of them. When the ICUs have emptied their last losses into the graveyards, and the deaths from COVID fall into numbers we are really good at ignoring, like 3,000 traffic deaths per year in Canada (9/day), I think we'll see the last step taken towards people "feeling normal".
Biden packed 'em in, unmasked. The House dropped the mask requirement, hours before the speech, and the Democrats all went maskless, too.
Also, his speech contained the word "pandemic" eight times, which you'd expect in a nation that is still losing over 1500 people, every day; 40,000 will probably die in March - probably more will die, under the age of 50, than were lost on 9/11. But all eight mentions treated it as a thing that has passed.
Biden never said the pandemic was over, but all eight mentions were of things the pandemic did to America (not saying it had stopped, but "did", past tense), mostly to the economy, that his policies would fix up. Every pandemic mention was about recovery from it, not anything more needed to fight it. The fight is in progress in the medical system, but the top sees no more need for any more changes, any restrictions, any measures, any more resources. Just repairs.
Here in Canada, of course one province after another dropped restrictions yesterday, even BC's Bonnie Henry, perhaps the most cautious (and successful) of them all, at least indicated we were just a few more weeks away.
The pandemic continues around the world, of course, and that's where most of the blog posts will be going, for the next month. The pandemic in North America may not be over, the scientific work goes on, but most of the news about what people are doing, will be news about social recovery.
Well, except this. Can we go back to the pandemic now? Funny, how even I, who've posted for a couple of days that the pandemic is still killing more people, can say that. War just fills us with more horror, than disease does.
It's wonderful how many in Russia are protesting; it keeps us remembering they're human, not to be demonized, their suffering and death wished for.
It's a day to bring up how terrible and immoral it was for for the CIA to use a vaccination program to spy on Pakistan, as part of the search for bin Laden. It's led directly to a doctor being jailed for 33 years, health workers assaulted, the vaccination rate in their "tribal areas" declined by tens of percent. Barely 1% of Pakistan got vaccinated for COVID.
The CIA, blundering about like oxen in a flower stall, have gotten thousands and thousands of innocent people killed by disease. Their damage was trickled out over a decade, will continue for another.
I'd join a vaccination team going into Russia, tomorrow. I'd also use my time there to proselytize, unless they said I couldn't stay and vaccinate Russians if I didn't shut up; then I'd shut up and vaccinate.
It's a time for clear priorities. Your country comes before your fortune, democracy comes before your commercial opportunities. The human fight against disease must come before all; anything less, during warfare, is germ-warfare by proxy, like George HW Bush in Iraq, 1991.
Never again.
http://brander.ca/c19#russiavax
Ukraine is running out of oxygen, of course. It's a medical supply that doesn't last long, you can only store so much, unlike, say, bottles of antibiotics. If your supply line (the road to a larger city) is cut, or the larger city is in lockdown, nobody at work at the oxygen plant, because they're hiding in their basements. We say "cut off their oxygen" as such a phrase, but for pneumonia patients of a hundred kinds, it's literal. The serious cases will all just die within hours.
If news reports are reliable, the sheer number of blown-up vehicles and buildings convince us that thousands have died by now from violence, thousands are dying daily; young people, with lives ahead.
The covid victims will run into the thousands themselves, however. Ukraine was losing 250/day, a number that was swinging up, probably way up, when the war started. But the loss-rate without oxygen available will probably triple overnight, when it runs out. Visions of India.
The deaths will not be telegenic, or dramatic; we're all familiar with people dying of covid, with some countries having higher rates. Ukraine's 250/day was already bad by Canadian standards, nearly as bad as America.
So, it will be mostly ignored, like most deaths in war that have the proximate cause of "disease" - disease that couldn't be fought, because of war. America killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with disease, (The Pentagon admitted to 170,000 children, under the age of 5), and it surprises nearly everybody to hear that. Half the deaths in WW1 were just disease, a lot of the deaths in death camps, like Anne Frank's.
When we fight each other, our real enemy kills at will.
http://brander.ca/c19#ukraineoxy
Alas, Twitter defends its ability to drag you off to Twitter, by making it impossible to download images that are shown on Twitter pages. So, in effect, an evolutionary biologist named Michael Worobey, University of Arizona, has provided that much-hated company with some wonderful free content to sell, and my graphic links you over there, reluctantly.
I shan't bother providing links to the New York Times article on two separate studies just released, that seem to nail down the Wuhan food market as indeed the start of the pandemic. (NYT is paywalled anyway.)
For those who have gotten a trifle weary, of pandemic origin theory, the animated GIF on Twitter is perfect: it cycles through several slides that tell their story with as few words, and your time, as possible.
Even more briefly: its where the early cases are, it's the centre-point of cases that came soon after, radiating out - that first slide shows. But there are several other points made about positive tests in the market itself.
What CCCC can add, is some excellent points made in the Slashdot discussion about the article.
There was a logic error made by those, like Jon Stewart, who pointed out that if you heard about a chocolate spill in Hershey, Pennsylvania, you'd look to the chocolate factory; so you look to the coronavirus lab, when there's an outbreak in Wuhan. The error was that they put the lab there, because that's where nature spills a lot of coronaviruses into humans.
Or, as a responder put it, "Playing basketball doesn't make you tall". The attributed cause, was itself an effect.
http://brander.ca/c19#wuhangif
We sang "pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag and smile, smile, smile!", in elementary school. The WW1 marching song was 50 years old then, in 1965. I doubt schools sing it any more.
Pretty hard to write about the pandemic, with war in the news. Heck, it's hard to find pandemic news, though CCCC has been writing about that, anyway - death-tolls and hankie-wringing stories of people dying young, lives on hold from long covid, we're almost worn out of it, looking forward.
We aren't actually that sure how many people have died in Russia from the pandemic. Their mortality numbers are, ah, suspiciously low, and they attribute them to their fine health-care system, how Russian patients see their doctor very promptly on symptoms. Thing is, that's also true in France, pretty much the planet's most-admired health-care system.
Just going by what they admit to, 750 Russians will die of the plague, today, and 250 Ukrainians; those 1000 dead will probably exceed the casualties of battle.
But that dying, we're all used to, we don't talk about our own. We've packed up our pandemic troubles in our old kit-bag, and started to smile, smile, smile, about the imminent end of the pandemic.
So, those wanting to react "normally" to war news, where hundreds dying in a single day is a huge news event (say, the ooopsie bombing of a Baghdad air raid shelter in 1991, killing 400 civilians), have a problem.
They have to continue shrugging at 250 dying in Ukraine's hospitals today, not news, while beating their breasts over 100 dying when a shell hits an apartment.
Are deaths from poor public services and poor plague-fighting less-bad than deaths by violence? Well, all our laws and customs say yes. You absolutely do more time for sins of commission than omission. Gross medical negligence can result in actual criminal penalties, but even then, rarely anything like doing the same damage with a kitchen knife.
Perhaps that is something the pandemic will do a "Great Reset" on, as we watch the two death tolls in Ukraine - war and plague - rise together, we'll see some commonality.
But probably not.
PS: About the "use less oil" I scribbled on my graphic. Am I the only one who can see that a cool symbolic - but also real - way to support Ukraine is simply to turn down the thermostat? Particularly in Germany, where it's actually real; every bit of gas they buy makes Russia richer. I'd be watching the war in a thick sweater.
http://brander.ca/c19#kitbag
Wars cause plagues, plagues may cause wars, and, for certain, war goes on in spite of a plague. Our WW1 continued for several months after the 1918 flu was identified in Spring 1918. Nearly half of the casualties in that war were to disease, and only some of that was that flu: John McCrae died in January 1918, of pneumonia from meningitis. Mostly, it was cholera in the stinking trenches.
So, don't hope for some wave of Omicron to put the Russian Army into coughing lockdown: war reveals how care for the old is a peacetime privilege, and 95% of this pandemic has not been happening to those under 55, that is, everybody in an army.
The interaction of War and Plague, this time, isn't going to hobble any armies, on either side. It'll just kill extra old people, and some middle-aged people, in failing hospitals.
It's not like Ukraine or Russia have good hospitals to start with.
Here's the epidemiology, right now. Dividing by population (Russia is three times larger, 150M vs 45M, Ukraine has fewer cases, more deaths (or just, more honesty in reporting - I've ignored the Russian pandemic because I don't trust a word I hear about it).
Both are so similar in their Omicron wave: it didn't hit them until the start of 2022, peaked just a few weeks ago, and the death-toll is just starting to rise.
That is, more and more people, every day, in both countries, are showing up at hospitals, needing them to work. That number will triple and more in the next few weeks. Both countries are poorly vaccinated - Russia, just over 50%, Ukraine, under 40%. So their Omicron waves will peak higher than their Delta wave did, like America, only worse - and even that assumes their hospitals don't break.
Unless Russia is gratuitously murderous of civilians in these attacks - when their stated intentions are just to kill soldiers - the pandemic dying will be much larger than the military deaths, hitting several hundred per day in Ukraine, over a thousand per day in Russia.
But, that's just for CCCC to monitor. Everybody else will be watching the war, where the dying is more dramatic than in the ICU.
http://brander.ca/c19#warplague
But, as a Vancouver Sun columnist quoted a property developer this morning, about producing enough homes to lower the cost of homes: it's ridiculous to expect private business to perform socially-good tasks, against their profit imperative, without government forcing them to.
And there it rests.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaccinevictory
Oh, we were all so eager to see South Africa prove that Omicron was over, the pandemic over. This January 18 CBS article was on the exact day of "peak dying". We at CCCC noted that four days later, when the rate had declined.
It made sense; I'd been waiting for it; the CCCC post notes that "peak dying" had tended to be 3-4 weeks after peak cases, which had been December 18. The CBS report might have been triggered by the one-month anniversary.
Very wrongly! Big mistake.
The cases-chart at right is just a repeat of January 22, but with another month of data - cases did keep going down, though the rate of decline much slowed. It's far lower than Canada's, today - to the extent that any Omicron case-numbers can be believed, of course.
But the death-rate, at left, that "peak" was false. It started going back up again just a few days after my post, and is still going up.
This all proves nothing about Omicron - the experience of the rest of the world with Omicron is also six weeks old now, we know it, too - and everything about South African health care. They're dying because South Africa doesn't have as much as we do. You're seeing what our pandemic would have looked like if the hospitals had ever been truly overwhelmed.
The UK was just behind South Africa on the Omicron wave, Netherlands similar; both have the death-rates far down and continuing to decline. Boris is tossing out all UK restrictions early, but not very early. He might even get away with it.
But, in South Africa, we're seeing how the pandemic will go across the world that has less health care, across most of Africa, half of Asia.
It should only firm our resolve to get the world vaccinated. What I'm seeing instead is that South Africa has simply dropped from the news, altogether. They got a brief burst of attention; found, and warned us against, Omicron. Were promptly blamed for it, punished for it, travel closed off. Then they got a backpat for the wave fading, and were forgotten, as the dying continued.
That's how we look at all the poor countries of the world, frankly. It's why we aren't talking about the "World Vaccination Project", daily. It's why I had to invent that term, just now.
http://brander.ca/c19#zadyingstill
My population figures are from PopulationPyramid.net,which lets you download a spreadsheet, bless them.
The age-related mortality figures are from my very first post, 22 months back, using original Wuhan data. They changed, up for Delta, back down again for Omicron, but what did not change for any variant was the exponential relationship between age and mortality rate. Your odds of dying of covid roughly double for every 7-8 years of age. Twenty years older is eight-fold the chance of dying.
The adjusted mortality figures for vaccinated people over 50 are from this article from just a month back, from London. The vaccinated of most ages can divide their odds by 20 after full vaccination.
Canada has no meaningful population that are both over 70, and unvaccinated; they're over 99.5% done, nearly all of them boosted, too. But we can find significant numbers of unvaccinated if we go under age 50, and the percentage unvaccinated are shown as part of the column title at bottom.
I haven't done the final calculation, where we'd assume this entire pile of over six million people all caught covid, multiply mortality by bar-height, see how many would die. There's no point; the mortality percentages are for "covid original", not delta or omicron, so only the relationship between the age-groups is consistent.
The lessons here, are, first, that vaccination may not add 30 years to your life if you're 70+, but it takes about 30 years off your age. A vaccinated 75-year-old has the same odds of dying of covid as an unvaccinated 45-year-old. And second we have a lot more vaccinated old people than we have unvaccinated middle-aged people. (There was no point in showing bars under age 30; almost zero dying even for the unvaccinated.)
I don't have to do the final calculations, because the answer is visually obvious, if you just stare at the chart for another minute. So I'll shut up now, save for this:
Fun fact, middle-agers: you can cut those small death-odds by a factor of 20, yourselves. I had to vaccinate just to get my risk down to that of an unvaccinated 35-year-old. But this is just risk of death! Think of your risk of long covid, a terrible misery. Or just your risk of two weeks on your back feeling rotten. Who wants that?
The longer you wait, the more clinics close, and the more inconvenient it gets.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxedunvaxed
The image links to a CTV story about the approval of the Novavax, which CCCC has been awaiting since last June; but also, to a story about the guy who will only now get vaccinated.
Novavax is not a new, experimental type of vaccine. It's much older than the mRNA types, the adenovirus types like Astrazenaca, the new "SpFN" type invented by the US Army.
The "protein-subunit" vaccines have been in development for sixty years, and they were specifically developed to have fewer side-effects and dangers than the original "whole virus" vaccines that beat polio and smallpox (the age of "vaccine glory"...a memory now...we hardly knew ye).
In Germany, where vaccination flatlined at 75%, they have hopes it will re-start the program.
Australia has similar high hopes. In Canada's most anti-intellectual, sociologically primitive reaches (Manitoba), there are similar fingers-crossed. Frankly, I'm doubtful. The Novavax hopes are based on the notion that more than a small minority of Canada's 11% (over age 5) that are not vaccinated, are mostly just critics of vaccinology.
I think they're mostly critics of the whole world order, don't trust governments, scientists, or their neighbours and families, for that matter. A billion people have taken the vaccines they're rejecting, most of us several months ago. If those were "population-level" experiments, they were hugely successful.
About 7% of the population are actual anti-vaxxers; against any vaccination technology at all. That leaves only 4% to reach. I will be astonished if more than 1% of Canadians over 5 have Novavax in their arms a year from now.
Not that it matters, except to that 1%. Vaccines are probably not going to be a significant factor in preventing transmission, going forward. Well-vaccinated populations will have smaller (and less-deadly) waves, but the wave size won't be changed that much by the difference between 90% and 93% (where we've jabbed every single person not a determined anti-vaxxer) wouldn't be large.
Vaccination has won a partial, and good-enough victory for Canada, with our situation versus the United States proving it with brutal clarity. Over the coming waves, every additional percent of Canada we can vaccinate (390,000 people) will probably save a hundred of their lives, and lengthen the remaining time for a hundred more very old or ill people that they might pass it to. Of that latter, only the most-vulnerable will be injured or killed: up at those age levels, we are basically past 99% vaccination by now.
Novavax is part of the mopping-up after the war, for Canada; our war is over. The war for the third world is hardly begun, and Novavax, because it's cheap and more shippable, will soon have its finest hour.
http://brander.ca/c19#novanono
I could and should be doing a bunch of work, to visually compare Peru and Bulgaria. (They have important similarities, and huge differences.) Peru, along with Cuba, of course, is a remarkable testament to the power of vaccination. But, it's Sunday, I wanted a quick post, the usual, "Hey, gang, here's a great article", and I'm done.
Well, I really, really, didn't want to cover the protesters any more, but I was surprised by how bad it has been in Calgary's Beltline, for four weekends, with the truck horns deafening locals.
But that's it. I searched around for COVID stories, and while I'm sure there are some good ones ((Novavax approved! Yay!), mostly it was all protests; Queen Elizabeth is fine; and a lot of re-opening stories and discussions.
I could have looked harder, but maybe the news today is that there's no really pressing news, though, again, that's because we're comfortably numb with death-tolls that used to horrify us, see last post.
The pandemic is ending in our heads, when we don't feel ill-at-ease in a packed, loud restaurant, it's ending in our news stories: the Free Market is speaking, because news organizations now monitor clicks, the way hens monitor their chicks; there are fewer stories because fewer are selling.
This, with the case-counts still a ways to go down, the ICUs still about 90% as full as they were three weeks ago - and it's still winter. We are, however, a convienient month away from the first day of Spring. In those four weeks, straight-line predictions from the past four suggest case-counts down to summer 2020 levels, a lot of restrictions lifted, one last percent vaccinated, multiple percents brought to second- and third-dose levels.
All good news; I'm just going to revel in it, rather than looking for bad.
http://brander.ca/c19#goodnews
We went out the other night, on the first night that restaurant restrictions were lifted. The place was packed, hardly a table not full. We had to lean forward and talk right into each other's faces to be heard. Damn, it was a great time.
Which was almost surreal, both the crowd, and the moistly-speaking. We're all boosted, recently. We've done all we can; the risk is not zero, but it is acceptable. We've become "comfortably numb" to a certain amount of risk that felt higher, two years ago. BC still has 600 cases per day, when the first wave peaked at less than 100. Hey, the Americans have become comfortably numb to 2000 deaths per day, remember when that was a horror-headline? It's been well over 2000/day for the whole last month - over 100,000 dead since New Year's.
Everybody's re-opening anyway. We were always numb to the reaping of the very old, be it from the seasonal flu or their own infirmities, and of course unfortunates with rare conditions die daily, always accepted. The only thing you need to become newly numb to, are the deaths of the unvaccinated.
The unvaccinated have come in for a lot of social pressures, which they bitterly protest, acting out as a suffering minority, beleaguered by bigotry.
But the absolute worst thing we've ever done to the unvaccinated, is what we're just starting to do now. It's the thing they wanted! Only, of course, because they didn't believe it was real: we've become comfortably numb to their pointless deaths. We've done all we can, thrown up our hands.
Keep in mind: over 13,000 Canadians joined us, yesterday, got their first vaccination shot at long last. Just like every day this year. For every single day of the protests, more Canadians joined the vaccinated, than ever attended one of the protests. 29,000 graduated to "fully vaccinated" and 53,000 got their booster. Yesterday.
The unvaccinated can join that line up any time. Or they can risk death, to which we've become Comfortably Numb.
http://brander.ca/c19#comfynumb
Partly, I wanted to use the word "pusillanimous" just once in my life. It means cowardly, basically. Hard to imagine saying it to a protester of any sort, for any cause: they have more energy than people who just vote, who are better than those who don't vote at all.
Most protests, historically, are people in a bad way; they're poor, jobless, or civil rights brutalized, maybe losing their land. (If they had money, their problem usually wouldn't be happening.) "Freezing their bank accounts" would merely crack them up: they're frozen anyway, by lack of money, for a week every month before the paycheque.
When Black Lives Matter protested, in the middle of a pandemic, it was a bit brave simply to walk in the crowd; CCCC reported, with extensive photographs, that it was the BLM marches that showed us all outdoors infection was insignificant. Those protests were all about a history of police violence, and were accompanied by talk of "crack their skulls" and "shoot them". A Senator got an editorial in the NYT, "Send in the Troops".
The BLM protesters came out, anyway, continued when many of them were injured.
I wouldn't have written this, just because I was sent a long essay by a friend, from a guy who really thought that freezing bank accounts was terrible; I'm writing because there are TWO right-wing professional trolls in the WaPo this morning decrying the "go for their money" tactic. (The graphics don't link; it's paywalled anyway.)
It must be a thing. People with some sense can convince themselves that the ultimate "#whitepersonproblem" is bad. They already watched on TV while the government paid men with clubs to kettle people, beat them, tear-gas them and then arrest them, costing them, in fines and legal fees, money which is gone permanently, not frozen temporarily.
I'm just cringing in embarrassment at the cowardice it takes to complain about that. The government using physical force is much more authoritarian. The "White Superpower", is money; but government always had the Red Kryptonite for that superpower.
Withdrawing the service of "money" is the government actually reminding them what the civil society, the one they don't really believe in, does for them. Money doesn't exist without civil society. Your bank account is just the sum of debts that "all society as a whole" agrees it owes you, for past work done. When you call for dissolution of Parliament, fiat rule, you're attacking the concept of democracy, and our civil society; you're attacking the very ideas that make money exist.
If you need more lectures, talk to any crypto guy. They'll go on and on about the fictitious nature of money.
I would be very, very, fearful of this government power if it were long-term, if it were like the "USAPATRIOT" act that is an apparently permanent loss of civil liberties.
As long as it's temporary, recorded, and investigated later, it could be a good way to avoid violence. The notion that this will stimulate further resistance, out of anger at the high-handedness, strikes me as ludicrous. Again, and again, it's the cracked-skulls response that brings out an even larger, angrier crowd next time. The temporary 'attack' on an abstraction just won't trigger amygdalas the same way.
http://brander.ca/c19#ppp
APPENDIX: excerpt from "My Occupy Arrest", 12/9/2011
I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA.
When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor's legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor's left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor's right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.
It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.
My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.
My name is Patrick Meighan, and I'm a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom 'Family Guy', and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.
Call me when you have THAT to complain about; because Occupy got just about zero sympathy for that stuff.
Venceremos! is a Chilean song about Allende, but most of Latin America sings it the way Americans sing "We Shall Overcome", with similar meaning.
Cuba has won victory over COVID, like no other country I can name. They've beaten the virus, with vaccines alone. Their vaunted health care is fairly distributed, but so poor, they can run out of oxygen, much less ventilators. If they hadn't controlled tranmission sharply and heavy-handedly for a year, they'd have had multiple-percent mortality, instead of under 1%
When Delta hit, they were just getting their vaccination program rolling, and the time-pressure must have been staggering: the cases skyrocketing, the virus more deadly, 7500 dead in six months, of 11 million people. By August, they must have been frantic - and also well-set-up, because they vaccinated 1% of the population per day, 100,000 people, every day for two months.
And Delta was broken, defeated, shrank away to nothing. The dying stopped. Entirely.
By the time Omicron hit, later than for the rest of us, about the New Year, they were past 90% vaccinated, down to age two. Omicron hit the rest of the world with atomic force, nobody able to do enough testing, wild guesses as to the actual case-count, the known case-count double Delta's worst numbers.
Except in Cuba.
Where Omicron was a piddly litte wave compared to Delta, a quarter as high and wide, an eighth the total cases...and one-fifth the mortality. 0.2% mortality is still worse than "the flu", but one can imagine Cuba living with all subsequent waves of COVID-19 that respond to Cuba's old-fashioned, basic vaccines.
This is the fourth time I've written about Cuba. There's also the Real Cuban Army that is spreading their help to the rest of the world.
They've also, as mentioned in previous posts, beaten Big Pharma, producing cheap, effective vaccines on their own; now they've proven them.
To sum up: Cuba beat the original and Alpha with distancing, masks, lockdowns, that were more-successful than in most countries, successful the way much richer nations like South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia were. Then Delta blew through their protections the way it did through all of ours, and for four months, they had a "typical" pandemic, for, say, Europe. This raised their total death-rate up to where Canada was already...which is still three times as good as their bete noir, the United States. And then they beat down the disease with the fastest vaccination program on Earth, given the size and area that had to be covered. They proved vaccination can do it.
It's awesome, and should be studied by future pandemic-fighters as the Golden Standard to which others should be held.
It's about the only place I'd even consider for my next overseas vacation.
http://brander.ca/c19#venceremos
It's also time for CCCC to dump the truck issue. Yesterday's post was a reaction to not seeing that photo on the front page of my paper, the top of the Post and Globe web sites. I was off-topic. Let's finish up.
The last rants: Great reading at The Guardian, where George Monbiot calls out the "sovereign citizen" aspects to the Canada protests. This has simply not been mentioned in Canadian media itself, but the resemblance is obvious. It's that "memorandum", the one that called for dissolution of Parliament, which they have now withdrawn in embarrassment, though they trumpeted it for weeks, with 320,000 (alleged) signatures.
That's not about vaccines, it's about ignoring the existence of the constitution, the elections, and the government, entirely. Some people think that "sovereign citizens" are actually crazy. No: when you review what they think they're entitled to do, personally - not pay their landlord, ignore traffic laws - they just seem blindly, childishly self-centred.
At the other end of the size spectrum, comparatively tiny event in the little town of Oliver, BC.
What caught my eye, is that there were only 20 of the anti-mask protesters that protested outside a high school on Friday. But of just 20, several yelled slurs and called kids female body parts, and one just had to ask a South Asian-background kid if she had a right to be in this country.
It only takes 20 of them to average one out-front, conscious racist. By the time you get to 2000, you've got gunmen in the mix.
CCCC can drop this issue, because it's not really about the pandemic. It's about all rule-of-law, it's about anybody obeying any societal requirements to not be a parasite on your landlord, obey traffic (and parking) rules. There's no point arguing with "sovereign citizens", or anybody who thinks even a bit like them. And you've got excellent odds of running into a racist, if you do.
I'm sorry those kids bothered to argue with them; it wasn't worth teenager's time. But it was funny when the one teen shouted out "You're literally arguing with children!" By switching "literally" to "figuratively", the kid could also have yelled it at his friends.
http://brander.ca/c19#dumptrucks
Labels added by myself.I was distressed to not see this picture on the front pages of major Canadian newspapers this morning; the television news, more visual, was not so shy. The RCMP love to stage up photos like this, and there really is need to rub the noses of the anti-vaxxers in the fact of their fellow-travelers.
No, I don't think more than a few people in the protest are even thinking like this "criminal organization", as the RCMP are calling the arrestees. But they absolutely are "adjacent", and it mixes very, very badly with all the talk of dissolving Parliament and federal rule-by-fiat over provincial jurisdictions - totally unconstitutional unless somebody has guns out to, pardon the expression, trump the Constitution itself.
What I just want to stress, is that this ultra-extreme core is surrounded, and even protected, by a still-pretty-extreme bunch that talk political crazy-talk.
And, they're getting their way. Ford is dropping vaccine mandates in Ontario, despite 70% support for them. He's bending to a minority, because a minority of that 30% are extremely loud and active, and because a minority of those, are actively threatening. They threaten the economy, they threaten the national capital, and now, we see some of them very ready for violence when their protest is legally moved.
Ford needs to be called out for cowardice. This is not a time to be irresolute in the face of threats.
http://brander.ca/c19#weapons
Before I start, I missed, two days ago, the opportunity to hype another good Canadian journalist recommending gentle measures and attitudes towards the protesters: Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee. Andrew talks to a therapist, to better understand the protesters. Most scientifically-interesting fact: A lot of the vaccine-hesitant had injurious childhood experiences. Makes it harder to be a vaccination-hardass and a "good liberal type", no?
Yes, the heart is still up in the window, getting to be about 20 months faded; and I think I know the point where we'll haul it down and declare the pandemic emotionally over.
No decision should be a political decision, if it can just be a scientific decision. All the worst things that have happened in this pandemic have happened when a politician didn't take sound scientific advice, preferring an "emotional truth", the "need" to open up. I spent a long post, about the time that heart was going up in the window, on SF author Marc Steigler, and his contention that scientists should decide when politicians are even allowed an opinion. (NB: Steigler couldn't make that idea work, even in an SF novel; it's just an idea one character wishes were true.)
Well, if only it were true, this is how you'd make all the decisions on relaxations and openings
Two infections per 100,000 people per day, that's the final tier. Or, 50 per 100,000 in a month, since with epidemics, the longer a check-period you have, the more sure the decision.
I recall that the whole system of opening/closing guidelines was actually solved, about the same time in Spring 2020, by a bunch of nurses at a care facility. (I'll never find the article now, sorry.) They worked through their epidemiology lessons, came up with an 8-tier plan for different levels of closure (masks for staff, masks for all, no common tables, no visitors, etc) and had rates of infection for all of them: at 1/100,000/day, we put on masks; at two, no visitors, and so forth.
The linked page is the CDC guidelines, which they can apply, because politicians meddle far less in rules for foreigners than their own constituents, and because it's federally regulated, a much bigger bureaucracy that's harder to push around. You just don't see this science in provincial or state decisions.
Here's your memory work: 50, 100, 500. Done. Was that hard?
These create four tiers: under 50/month; 50-100/month; 100-500; over 500. Per 100,000 people in the area affected by the decision, be it a health region, or a country.
Where is Canada right now? Nuthin' to it, let me grab the case-rates. Huge (and easily-supplied) bonus: I'll project forward down their declining-cases graph to tell you when they'll hit tier 2 (50-100). That's above the lowest level, but it's when most restrictions can be lifted.
In "per 100,000 per month" terms, BC is currently at 600, Alberta at 800, Ontario at 650, Nova Scotia about a thousand. But all of them are coming down so fast, they'll be down from high in Tier 4 (worst) to Tier 2 (mostly open) in three to six weeks. It's definitely time to plan reopening, even schedule reopening, with a tenative asterisk that cases have to keep declining.
With so many places around 600, we'll be below the 500 tier in a week or so; re-open some things. A few weeks later, it'll be below 100 - project the current graph forward and make a tentative scheduled day for that Tier. Give people some clarity.
Maybe if we turn this issue into one of Marc Steigler's scientific decisions, we can quit arguing, agree on a compromise...how Canadian.
http://brander.ca/c19#tiers
The graphic links to a collection of old protest photos, never mind that.
Indispensable. Best thing I've read on these protests, and for that matter, on American insurrectionists and right-wing trolls in general.
I can hardly exaggerate my enthusiasm. I feel physically better today, after reading it, letting it sink in. Emotionally lifted, relieved, freed. I'm not kidding.
It's a brilliant essay that has you thinking you know where it's going - criticizing others - and then turns the magnifying glass inward, upon the author, and all of us. You see, "When The Rage Came For Me" starts off about how he'd studied right-wing protests for years, across America, for a book. He'd trained himself to keep his own reaction to it at arm's-length, stay outside it, so he could relate with his interview subjects. When the protests came to his neighbourhood, though, they got to him: he reacted with irritation, outrage, got angry.
And realized, that at last, the rage had come for him: not the ragers, the rage itself. It was invading his brain, after five years of keeping it at bay. If he let it, the rage would hurt him, weaken him, sicken him. He'd watched it eat others, and knew he couldn't let it.
And then, he makes any Canadian reading it proud, and any American reading it, envious. He talks his mostly-liberal readers down from hating them back, pointing out all the ways in which these protests are better than January 6: That Canada's raging right-wingers were raising the swastika only as an insult, associating it with Trudeau, not holding it up as their emblem. Not Charlottesville. There's many points more, please read, but to sum up, he notes the whole protest had the emotional feel of a tailgate-party, not an ugly mob.
Those of us - like myself, yesterday - who harp on the tiny minority of really awful people in their midst, are increasing emotional reactions. Like the protests itself, versus vaccination popularity: "It's not helping!"
I would add something to his points: our protests do not feature AR-15s. Nobody will be shot because a teenager used a pandemic bonus to buy an automatic weapon that "looks cool".
We can choose to give no victory to the American forces that tried to spread their hate to Canada: we can just not do any hating back. We can remove these protesters as gently as possible, fine them as little as needed to make a point, dissuade a repeat - but not rub it in. We can de-escalate this with respect, tolerance, and kindness.
These folks are so, so wrong. They are wrong on the facts, wrong on what democracy is, wrong on decency and respect. They are also our neighbours, our wacky uncles, our co-workers. So let's just back down on making them even madder, and not let ourselves be tricked and manipulated into becoming them.
We can beat American values with Canadian values.
Read the essay, and feel better.
http://brander.ca/c19#hate4me
The image at left links to a paper I'd never heard of, the "Jewish Telegraphic Agency", though it dates to 1917. The other top link was Jerusalem Post, when you look for "ottawa swastikas". Some folks sure are sensitive about swastikas, for some reason.
Yes, CCCC is down to Convoy Comments, the lowest level of pandemic coverage. I've done some proud number-crunching, lately, exposed that American 30-somethings are at nearly 14 times the risk of equivalent Canadians, I'm taking Saturday off. "Dumping on swastikas" is a day off, as easy as breathing.
The swastikas all disappeared very quickly, the Confederate Battle Flags are barely seen now...which is odd! This whole group is passionately devoted to FREEDOM!!, most especially, Freedom of Speech! How could they have suppressed those who wished to use their legal, constitutional right to wave a Confederate Battle Flag? The police wouldn't have done that, couldn't have done that!
Oh, how could they tell their fellow protestors, their allies, to go away, or at least, furl up that particular speech, and Shut Up? Sure, they'd want to: Canadians hate racists, and those who truck with them. So to speak. But didn't holy Freedom of Speech overcome that? No.
Obviously, the Convoy leaders don't want people in their company who put them at risk, want them to stay away. Or at least take measures to ensure they don't hurt the message, risk the Convoy.
Which, of course, is the exact philosophy of a vaccine mandate. The flags have been masked!
As I write, the Bridge is being cleared, and I suspect that Ottawa will fold-up under the threat of arrest, property confiscation, huge fines. Why did Trudeau delay and look weak there, for a whole extra week longer than was needed to show that he was the reasonable, slow-to-anger side?
Don Braid of The Calgary Herald nailed it, I think, yesterday:
Even the pathetically passive Trudeau government, which appears to be waiting for the protesters to thoroughly discredit themselves, may be moved to quick action.It's a funny line, in a way: Braid's whole article, about government "finally waking up" because auto plants are closing, takes the tack that they were just slow and passive. But that line, which starts off slagging Trudeau, also credits him with very sharp political instincts. If the delay has cost Trudeau a few points of popularity, but the Convoy several, it's a relative win, particularly since some Conservatives foolishly gave them support.
Trudeau's strategy didn't bring huge results: support has stayed at 29% for over two weeks, but five percent moved from "somewhat oppose" to "strongly oppose". That bumps up "strongly oppose" to 32%, more than "strongly support" and "somewhat support", put together.
But, it brought some results. The Convoy has damaged the anti-vaxxer, anti-public-health philosophy in Canada, not helped it. Rallies are to gather support; this one has failed utterly.
Except they mandated-away, or at least masked, the swastika guys. Thanks for that.
http://brander.ca/c19#ottawastikas
Yup! Joe was right. Unvaccinated adults are dying down there at 9.74/100,000 per week, fully boosted at 0.1. Ninety-seven times more likely to die.
That's not much news, only nitwits figured that Joe Biden would be engaged in loose trash talk. What caught my eye was the graph, and the lack of waves, for the vaccinated.
The high values on the big black line for the unvaxxed, show both the high rate of dying during the last week of the Delta Wave, in September, how it bottoms out at the end of October, and starts rising again, as Omicron starts killing them.
All of which is invisible, for the vaccinated. There is simply no pandemic, for us, not for a long time now. The "vaccinated pandemic" consists of:
But, those darn medicos and their oaths, they won't do that, of course, and we'd probably feel bad about it, so we have to endure a few more weeks, to protect people we're very angry at.
Sigh.
http://brander.ca/c19#rush2reopen
Horrified by Jason Kenney dropping pandemic controls with the ICUs all still packed with customers? Ah, take it easy: you've already accepted thousands dead without lynching him. Thousands, who'd be alive right now, if they'd had NDP's John Horgan for a Premier, (or perhaps NDP's Rachel Notley).
As always, CCCC will show its work.
For starters, Alberta has just 4.07 million people, BC 4.65 million. BC would have 15% more deaths than Alberta, given the same deaths-per-million.
But, as my family can tell you, as another of the four guys who retired with me can tell you, as two more of the 18 suites in our building can tell you, Albertans retire to BC: we have way more old people.
The image at right, is your standard "demographic pyramid", showing what percentage of your population is age 1, age 2...up to age 99. The blue line is the Alberta mix of old and young: a lot more 20-30-somethings, a lot less seniors.
The notations on the graph are for age 70 and age 80. That's the group that does nearly all the dying in the pandemic, about 90% of it. (Because Canada has a tiny "youth pandemic" under age 50, see yesterday's post and others it links.)
The ratio is sharp up in the 70s: the ratios for age 70, (0.95% / 0.66%) and age 80, (0.5% / 0.35%) are about 1.4. There should be nearly 1.4 times as many COVID deaths in British Columbia, per million population, because Albertans kindly remove themselves from the Alberta medical system just when we get expensive, and dump our aging bodies on BC to provide our eldercare.
So, deaths in BC should be 15% higher just because of population, but then another 40% higher, because of age. But, these are loose numbers, and my comparison of ages used only two data-points, so let's round-down 1.15 X 1.4 = 1.6, to a mere 1.5. So, in this model: for every 1000 deaths in Alberta, BC would have had around 1500, if we had equal pandemic responses.
Oh, boy, we did not.
The data are from covid-19canada.com, and the graphic links to my little spreadsheet. The ratio of dead in Alberta to BC is almost exactly the reverse of what it should be, and the ratio is getting worse. Rising from 1.2 in early 2020, to 1.4 recently, with just the deaths since last June 30 at a ratio of 1.45, Kenney is on-track to soon be killing 3 Albertans for every 2 that die in BC. His new "drop the defenses" strategy should get him there.
Alberta should have 70% of BC's death-toll, instead it has 140%. Jason Kenney is losing TWO Albertans for every comparable citizen that John Horgan is. It's twice as deadly to live in Alberta, today, as it is to live in BC.
No wonder we old people move to BC; it's not just the weather, apparently, it's a deep, almost telepathic reading-of-the-room, that Alberta would rather have open bars than living seniors.
Which brings me around to letting Jason off, just a little. A lot of "pandemic response" is actually reflective of culture: how many people shrug off the warnings and visit family anyway; how many mask up grudgingly and minimally, rather than whole-heartedly. The deaths and Jason Kenney's popularity may both be correlations of a common-cause, rather than one being causation of the other.
That's Jason's only kind paragraph. Whether he was elected by a certain mentality or not, he had the choice to be Rob Ford, who's been equally eager to open-up, but more cautious about doing it. Jason could have used his position to hold back and calm his most-radical supporters; instead, he's pandering to people who held his border hostage.
Alberta could have had as few as 1700 dead by now, had they the performance of BC; they have 3700. Jason Kenney, his supporters, and his philosophy, have killed an extra 2000 Albertans that should be alive today.
I was going to put off this column until May 13, so we could add up "How Many Albertans Jason Killed by Friday the 13th", compared to BC. But, Jason dropping the restrictions about a month early, with the ICU still full, the cases higher than their 2020 peak, will probably cost an extra hundred lives or so; Alberta is currently losing 20/day (BC, 16 - see?) and that just has to be extended an extra five days to kill a hundred.
I hope his improved popularity with the border-blockers is worth it.
http://brander.ca/c19#jasonbutcher
Hey, it's thirty-something years since "thirtysomething" left the air in 1991, when I was thirty-something...and never watched it. Good riddance.
It's the American thirtysomethings of today that shocked me a bit, just now, as I ran their numbers. They are the absolute worst-hit by the difference between Canadian and American pandemic-fighting.
In the "main pandemic" of those over 65, Canada beats Team USA by 3:1; the one journalistic scoop that seems to remain unique to CCCC, is my coverage of the "youth" pandemic, for those under the age of 50; repeated just last January 18, with similar figures.
For the twentysomethings, it's 5.7 times as bad to be American; thirtysomethings, over seven times, and by fortysomethings, it's over 8:1.
That's for the overall pandemic, the grand sum total of bodybags since March 2020.
Today's post gives you the current rates of dying in the Youth Pandemic comparison of Team Canada to Team USA. I could hardly believe the numbers as I worked them, so I'll lay out the calculations in a table, check my work.
The figures for Jan 18 are those on my Jan 18 post. The figures for today, are from the same two very official sources, the
CDC: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex-and-Age/9bhg-hcku
Canada.ca: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html
| Age Group | US Dead Jan 18 | US Dead Feb 9 | Can. Dead Jan 18 | Can. Dead Feb 9 | Can Deaths 3-weeks | Can. Deaths X8.75 | US Deaths 3-weeks | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18-29 | 5119 | 5581 | 103 | 109 | 6 | 53 | 462 | 8.7 |
| 30-39 | 15015 | 16343 | 234 | 243 | 11 | 96 | 1328 | 13.8 |
| 40-49 | 36305 | 39166 | 499 | 549 | 50 | 438 | 2861 | 6.5 |
The second last column subtracts the American losses by today, from those of January 18, coming up with 4651 American dead in that time, (462+1328+2861).
The ratio assumes that the population ratio is 8.75:1 between the nations.
My earliest post, "Dying Young" just added up the 7:1 ratio for overall younger people. The second one broke it out by decade, and this does the same just for 3 weeks of the Omicron Wave.
For the American "Thirtysomethings", the ratio is becoming astonishing. It's nearly fourteen times as dangerous, to be a 30-something American, than 30-something Canadian, right now. We are losing one every other day; they're losing 63 every day.
I promised a mathematical meditation, but I didn't promise answers. Why are the 30-somethings in so much more danger than both the 20s and the 40s? I'll take a tentative stab at "by 40, you've gotten out of your service or labour job, and into an office", but I'm guessing.
The real epidemiologists will be figuring out things like that for years to come. I'm just glad to have highlighted that it is happening, at all, when nobody else is.
http://brander.ca/c19#30something
There I was, cranking up a nice mathematics meditation on death-rates, when I realized I have to put it off a day or so, as more data is due tomorrow. Meanwhile, I was getting multiple backpats from other commentators at "The Line", on the Ottawa Protest Backlash, by Jen Gerson.
Suddenly deprived of material, why not recycle that, as the protests are certainly a pandemic topic. With a few edits to make it stand-alone, rather than a reply to Jen, here it is:
The crucial differences, between this protest and previous examples, are that the BLM march was over in a day, the rail blockades only inconvenienced money, not people (the same reason Ottawa is getting 4X the attention as the border blockades), and the Occupations didn't have air-horns going 7x24.
A word on "critical" infrastructure: if there's any other way to move the same cargo, it isn't "critical", it's merely a large financial inconvenience. BC was cut off from the rest of the country for weeks by Mom Nature; nobody died, so it wasn't "vital" infrastructure. It was "critical" to some businesses, but not society itself, not over a mere week.
The air-horns are the thing. I've never forgotten a great point in Maclean's story on the Incel Truck Mass Murderer, and how proud I was of Constable Ken Lam, who declined to give him a suicide-by-cop. After the guy had made several false draws of a nonexistent gun, Lam reached into his cop car, and turned off the siren. Maclean's noted, "with the effect of a crying baby falling silent, in a room full of family tension". Lam talked him down. Air-horns, 7x24, would make absolutely anybody start ugly talk about calling in the Army. I'd be calling in air-strikes by day 3, myself.
Stripped of the air-horn-driven emotions, Canadians would mostly shrug at this. Let 'em yap, and give them nothing, is how it goes for everybody else. The BLM marchers got zero police reform; Occupy got no financial reforms; the Wet'suwet'en got nothing.
Jen Gerson wrote a surprising comment:
I will note that the prime minister doesn't seem eager to de-escalate, either. No "understanding" from the Liberals for this crowd: they're a bunch of fringe deplorables with "unacceptable views." Did anyone expect a gentler tone after the last election? The Liberals only need the support of roughly 30 per cent of the population to govern, and that 30 per cent neatly aligns with the population who would love to see these truckers, the very personification of the anti-vax movement, get their heads cracked in, or at least hauled off in irons. This occupation is an opportunity for Trudeau. This is his "just watch me" moment. The prime minister isn't going to resign.
I'm not sure where "resign" came from, as the "just watch me" moment was when Dad Trudeau called for troops on the streets. Son will not.
I can't imagine why Gerson thinks that Canadians, of all the peoples of the Earth, would be striving towards conflict, focusing on the 30% that would support air-strikes, rather than the 60% that voted for parties supporting mandates, just a few months ago. Trudeau will of course pursue the 60%, not the 30%; he will find the most-moderate solution to this mess that he can find, not the most dramatic, chest-puffing, self-aggrandizing, I-am-a-war-leader-who-alone-can-fix-it solution he could find, as Trump would. Yes, JT is a bullshitter and performative politician, but he's a Canadian one. He wants to be loved as the Good Guy, not feared as the Tough Guy.
My money just hit the table: the protests will be resolved peacefully. The protesters will get nothing, save that if they stretch it out to the end of the month, then changes coming anyway, as infections fall, can be claimed as their "victory", and Trudeau will let them have it, to save face all around.
It's the Canadian Way.
http://brander.ca/c19#ottawa
Late to the party, but at least I found it. I have to give the shout-out to The Tyee story "Most Disagree with Convoy Truckers", which covered the actual public opinion. Hardly necessary, as every bit of coverage of the convoy keeps
repeating that we are 90% vaccinated and 70% supportive of mandates.
The story mentions the COVID-19 Monitor, also linked from the graphics. If you check the Monitor for "restrictions", and ask for the time-series, you get the graph I have shrunk to illegibility, above. It shows the very, very, slowly sinking popularity of various restrictions, from playgrounds to bars - I can shrink it like that because you can see, across 23 months, nearly horizontal lines showing that restrictions support has only sunk about 10% or so, from very high, to high, for most places like bars and theatres. Touch your mouse to any survey period, and you get the list to the left of it, which is for the current time.
What has sunk below 50% - save for "playgrounds", which was always stupid - is schools, down to 40%. Hair places and gyms are barely over 50%; everything else is over 60% support. Even now. It's not just the dying, guys, nobody likes getting really sick for weeks. Nobody wants a 10%-15% chance of "long covid" and maybe months of misery.
The Tyee link explains The Monitor better than I can, here, but it's legitimately scientific polling, a joint effort of McMaster University and a research-polling organization.
Their work shows that the 70% is an overall support for mandates, but it rises to 75% for teachers and other government workers, 80% for health-care worker mandates.
It doesn't actually drop to 50% until you ask about mandates for kids under 5(!)
The Monitor also has figures for you on how concerned people really are about the economy, paying their bills, and job security. "Access to Food and Supplies" is the absolute bottom concern, so the politicians can please stop tweeting empty-shelves pictures? Nobody believes you.
http://brander.ca/c19#monitor
What can I say, sometimes I just think of something infuriating, and it's my only topic. I could provide a hundred links, graphics, jokes, but don't need any.
There was a time when the government really restricted your actions, to protect your health. They even had arguments about how your poor health might hurt others, at least by taking you away from job and family.
This danger was endlessly exaggerated, with complete misinformation. Scientists wrote how they were wrong in academic journals, and some small-audience, left-wing press. But the scientists were forbidden to study the danger any further, denied research materials and funding to prove that all the government advertising of misinformation, was wrong.
The misinformation was used to justify laws that forbade you to smoke leaves from a plant you'd grown in your own garden, never leaving your property.
The Drug War cost America many billions of dollars per year, directly, and of course with some 28,000 people serving time for cannabis offenses at any point, you had 28,000 people not earning money.
Our right wing, Defenders of Our Freedoms Against Government Tyranny, were not, alas, anywhere to be seen. They were, of course, in the government cheering section, demanding further restrictions and punishments on those menaces, the dope smokers.
Rant done, but it reminds me of another thing: people grumped, but shrugged and folded when bars all wouldn't let you in if you were smoking, and exhaling unpleasant substances into the common air. It was popular! The laws to end smoking in bars, only came after a number of bars had gone no-smoking, and found that their business went up, even as bar-owners predicted it would lead to financial doom.
What's the diff between smoke particles and COVID particles, except that death is far more likely and imminent?
Enjoy your Sunday.
http://brander.ca/c19#cannabisera
"But, Uncle Roy, that can't be. You're Canadians", said my niece Maria, over Zoom from Madrid. I had been trying to explain to her about the Ottawa Convoy, and our Conservative party being torn apart by whether to support them, or ask them to leave (or at least stop honking).
America, she understands, is so different. But there are few Canada-is-better chauvinists in Canada itself, quite as much as my niece in Madrid. She hangs quite a bit of pride on being "totally Spanish, but also half-Canadian". (She is a professor of translation at the ancient University of Salamanca, a mom of two, and a great source of family pride in her own right).
I finally got it through to her that the American conservatism is not unknown in Canada, if too weak to get elected. And that our Conservatives are tortured by the need to not lose about 25% of their party, and the greater need to not disgust the other 75%. (The graphic at left is not a link to the Washington Post, where I no longer have an account; I was just caught by the headline.)
That, if the Brits can just get on with it on Monday, we might see two major Conservative leaders thrown from their jobs in one week: Johnson for not taking is own pandemic seriously, O'Toole for taking it too seriously for the anti-vax guys.
It's completely new for a pandemic, and public health measures in general, to cause political strife that breaks up parties. This didn't happen in 1918, or with Polio.
Your story link for the day, goes back, where else, to America, where the problem is at the most intense. The American GOP may be showing cracks under the stress, at long last. The eye-grabbing headline in
The Guardian is "'Trump is not my God': how the former president's only vaccine victory turned sour".
Pandemic news-junkies don't need to be told that Trump can't brag about "Operation Warp Speed" for vaccine delivery, without getting booed any more. But the story goes on to note all the GOP that were not booing.
I've put in a long quote as a graphic, at right. It was kind of a catharsis to read it, far better than the sad, ugly feeling that accompanies hearing of an anti-vaxxer dying of COVID. It was the happy case of a mind changing, because they were confronted with inescapable facts. Now that the great majority of American COVID deaths are unvaccinated, and the Democrats are 90% vaccinated, the Republicans, 60%, so Republicans are dying three times as fast as Democrats just now. It might be sinking in. But not enough! The article concludes with the flat statement that vaccination-supporters cannot win a GOP primary, now, period.
Maria summed it up for me, when I remarked that, because Franco proudly called himself a fascist, it was OK to call yourself "a proud fascist" in Spain, up through most of the 1970s, and the Spanish Left, to this day, simply call fascists, fascists.
"I call them the fascist party, and I have to tell you, Spain's fascist party is on-side with vaccination. A new party sprang up, ultra-right-wing, to the right of the fascists, to provide a home for our anti-vaxxers".
Spain has one of the highest vaccination rates on Earth. My niece's 35 students are all vaccinated, lucky since 15 of them currently have Omicron! They have far more infections than Canada, still, but only a little higher death rate.
It's the land where you have to go to the right of the sons of the old fascists, to find an anti-vaxxer.
http://brander.ca/c19#provaxfascists
In South Africa, the early-adopter for Omicron, that the rest of us look to for hints as to our future, the decline in Omicron cases has halted for over a week. The "wave of dying" that's a month behind the cases-curve, has actually ticked up the last few days.
The UK was also a little ahead of us on Omicron, has slowed their case-decline in recent weeks, and their death-rates have been level for a while.
All of which has CCCC glumly betting that BC, which may have passed "peak hospital", and "peak ICU", is only getting to the week(s) of "peak dying" - and they may go on a while.
The pandemic seems to have re-wired us to think a month into the future, as we look at the statistics; as soon as cases started going down, the talk of the pandemic being just-about-over started - a month ago, now.
Bonnie and other public health officials started talking about "peak hospital" being over, when the numbers were still basically at the peak. Maybe the worn-out staff needed the ray of sunshine.
I'd been thinking that Canada might get up to 200 dead/day, am relieved to see it heading down already from an apparent peak at 163. But the South Africa uptick, and the UK levelling, hint that we may stay well above 100/day for weeks on end, yet.
Canada's hit 34,329 dead, on worldometers, as I write; a few weeks at a thousand a week, and we'll hit the "1000 Club", of nations with over 1000 dead/million, about 13 months after we hit the "500 Club", last year. We might have missed it, might have stayed under 900 (we hit 900, today!), if it weren't for "mild" Omicron, which will have "mildly" killed twice as many Canadians as die in traffic accidents in a year.
http://brander.ca/c19#peakdying
Ah, those horns. Scientifically designed to annoy the hell out of your ears.
Those horns are now tightly associated with anti-vaxxers, as are Ottawa gridlock, sleepless residents, and humiliated police. The graphic links to a story about the residents.
I actually understand the Ottawa police; they're right. They know full-well that a place with 10 TV cameras upon it, is the opposite of a construction site, or forestry road, deep in the BC woods: a single physical finger laid upon just one of these protesters would bring two protesters back, of the thousands that have left. The police want them bored.
Police specialize in fast, complete operations when the cameras are off, of course, as with the clean-out of Zucotti Park at 1AM, November 15, 2011. There was some light brutality in that, but the cameras didn't catch it.
But, let's not: as a lefty-type, I'm happy to see it go on as long as possible, with all sympathies to the Ottawa residents. As a pro-vaxxer, I'm ecstatic! Oh, Lord, grant me stupid enemies that make themselves into arrogant, petulant, incoherent villains on camera!
If you want a short, serious analysis of all the things they're doing wrong, The Tyee hired a professor to break it down in detail. A great, short read.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to watch the noon news out of Ottawa. They're still playing my song.
http://brander.ca/c19#hornmusic
Canadian Conservatives Can't Count on White Evangelicals. The Anti-Vaxxer Protesters (call them what they are) just got what the Anti-Vaxxer politicians got, in the last election. They bounced off the Canadian electorate like a tennis ball hitting a brick wall. They more they act up as who they are, the less they are liked, the worse for their cause.
The graphic at left is from the same source as informs my September 21 election blog-post, linked above: Michael Adams of Environics, and his cultural-values polling. Canadians are just different.
If I had to put it to one demographic distinction, we have only a few percent White Evangelicals. That group, in the USA, not only has very strong cultural positions on various issues (gays, Blacks, immigrants), but a certain willingness to believe astonishing things from authority figures. Right down, infamously, to the size of a crowd in a photograph. Such people are easy marks for anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy theorists. (All anti-vaxxers are conspiracy theorists: you can't be one if you don't believe that thousands of physicians, scientists, and public health officials, are conspiring to lie to you.)
There are two things that conspiracy theorists are not: good planners, or good citizens. The latter is obvious: you can't be a good citizen if you are generally distrustful of society itself. "Conspiracy theorist Red Cross volunteer" is a small Venn-diagram space indeed. (Indeed, some believe the Red Cross is a "front" for pedophiles...of course.)
As for "planning", the thing that our protesters and the January-Sixth gang have in common is that the Jansixers wandered the halls when they took the capital, as our "truckers" are now wandering Ottawa, no messaging, no eye-catching performance art, not even nine million dollars worth of food and hotel rooms. What kind of idiot wastes that much money?
Black Lives Matter had a tiny fraction of their budget, but Sunset Park in Vancouver had 20 portapotties, a stage with an amazing singer, an atmosphere of "party" that drew people in, not frightened them away.
The anti-vaxxers (I won't again call them "truckers", and insult the 90% of truckers) are even driving away the National Post, at this point, though Carson Jerema there is still trying to legitimize them:
"...there weren't just hundreds, but thousands of people headed to the capital, hardly the fringe minority they were being dismissed as..."Sorry, National Post, but you know 7,000 BLM marchers in Ottawa got exactly nothing, 19 months ago. No RCMP reform, no major police department reform. Because 7,000 turns out to be a "fringe minority", I guess. There are 39 million Canadians. And their conspiracy-theory - that police departments, police unions, prosecutors, and politicians all tend (if not actually "conspire") to look the other way at police misconduct towards, um, fringe minorities... that conspiracy theory has a lot of support.
But they got nothing. We're a conservative country in the simplest sense of that word: we don't change societal institutions, like "police", or "public health", quickly or easily. Look at the last election: same Parliament.
And that is the room that the Conservatives need to read, today: a room too conservative for radical ideas like anti-vaxxers, anti-immigrants, and pro-militarism. Those ideas are radical to the Canadian culture. Read the polls. Read the fate of the PPC. Read the room.
http://brander.ca/c19#antivaxprotests
Welcome to new reader, Laurence Seton! Your warm words are really appreciated. I just told Laurence that I had no idea what I was about to write for today, but that didn't last long. The first article tossed at me today by David Sirota's "The Daily Poster" which brings "progressive news" (Dave was big in the Bernie Sanders campaigns) to his fans.
The link is to their story, covered further here, at CNET, about the remarkable vaccine developed by the US Army. It's a whole new kind of vaccination: a, deep breath, "spike ferritin nanoparticle" (SpFN) vaccine. It should be "pan-coronavirus", offering immunity to all coronaviruses! They've only done animal trials so far, we're maybe a year from any human application, but, wow - talk about a game-changer.
At this point, CCCC owes at least a partial apology, to the last entity on the planet I thought I'd have to apologize to, the US Military.
CCCC was preceded, not just by a longer blog post about the "COVID Cup", but one the week before about how "The US Military Kills a Million Americans", (mostly grandparents). The argument there was that the military gets a far bigger raise, every year than the CDC gets as budget. By spending all on guns, not butter, the US had left itself likely to have the worst pandemic in the developed world. It's not about the vaccines, it's the hospitals, the public health-care system, the tests and treatments.
Well, partial apologies are due, because parts of the US military do indeed, fight this war. They have an extensive medical research capability, and it has swung into action. Normally only concerned with the troops, their research does, this time, have civilian applications.
But the organization they work for, is still sucking America dry; that a few crumbs from their lavish table have happened to sprout into mighty oaks, is no credit to the generals who lied for 20 years straight about Afghanistan.
Did Dave Sirota and Bernie Sanders needed any proof that Big Pharma is not actually necessary to provide the new pharma developments? These Army officers, who will not become billionaires, despite doing more than Pfizer and Moderna put together, have just supplied it. The "Nationalize Big Pharma" movement just got a booster shot.
Back to the important topic, the pandemic is clearly going to be looked back upon in 10 years as the Golden Age of Vaccination progress. We employed three (!!) new kinds of vaccines: the "adenovirus" type, like Astrazeneca, the mRNA type, and now this. The possibilities are almost breathtaking.
http://brander.ca/c19#armyvax
And, by the way, Canada's average is up to 170/day, so four dead in Canada, too,though "just" three of the four were because of non-vaccination. And, yes, that's the 12 million of Ohio with a higher unvaccinated death rate than total death rate of Canada's 40 million.
I guess that last is a "fun fact" if you're Canadian, but these are the tidbits that I, for all my pandemic reading, had missed until this morning:
The January 18 post linked above noted that it took a month, an extra week, to reach "peak dying"; apparently it spends an extra week or more at "peak dying", as well.
http://brander.ca/c19#funfacts
Most protesters get nothing.
This was the protest our street, the other day. The West End of Vancouver managed to drum up somewhat fewer people than walked their dogs past our house yesterday morning. But, of course, the protests across the country were much larger, clearly comparable to the ruckus stirred up by Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Which, when you stop to think of it, got exactly nothing. No RCMP reform, no police reforms at all, that I can think of.
It'll be about the same with the protest efforts of Canadians Neil Young (from Toronto) and Joni Mitchell (Ft. Macleod) against Spotify's anti-vaxxer.
I knew, when Neil announced, that it would fail. It would only succeed if Taylor Swift and Beyonce joined in. When fellow Canadian rock oldster Joni was the only one to join in, I felt a rush of both sentiment, nostalgia - still at it, guys, 55 years after the Summer of Love - and pity. Beyonce will remain as silent as she did in 2010, when her husband tried to make money off of "Occupy Wall Street", and backed away when criticized...but never donated a dime.
Very little of Rock'N'Roll was about protest. Most 1960s songs were about cars and girls. Entertainers are afraid to offend half their customers, so they only get on-side with motherhood statements. Give up on Taylor Swift.
(Funny factoid about the Occupy embarrassment: Jay-Z attempted to sound all tough and radical with this "Occupy All Streets" T-shirts for $22, despite zero action to actually support the protest, no statements condemning banks, and certainly no shifting of his then-$400M fortune to ethical funds. And, when you think of it, "Occupy All Streets" is an instruction to break up the crowd and go home. That's the only time when we "Occupy All Streets", is when we spread out to our homes.)
Neil's greatest protest song, of course, was "Ohio", with that bottom-line cost as the refrain: Four Dead in Ohio.
So I checked the numbers, to see if how Ohio is doing. It's one of the lower Amercan states at vaccination, just 56%. And it had 194 dead, January 28. A few weeks ago, a Cleveland clinic added up that 75% of the patients were unvaccinated. 87% of those in the ICU. 91% of those on ventilators.
I'm going to make the leap from ventilators to coffins, and assume that 90% of Ohio's dead were "vaccine resistant", if not COVID-resistant.
So, multiplying by point nine, it was 174 Dead in Ohio. Just yesterday. From not vaccinating.
You know, Mary Ann Vecchio, the "kneeling girl" in the famous photograph, is retired in Florida. She said in interviews how she feels a need to do good things in her life; perhaps if she got down on one knee and simply begged.
It's worth a try. At 174 unvaccinated deaths per day, there is one every eight minutes, in Ohio. I've been working on this post for just over half an hour.
During which time, there were Four Dead in Ohio.
http://brander.ca/c19#4deadinohio
To be "anti-mandate", in a situation where we sadly need them to make the vaccination program effective at holding down infections going exponential, is to be "anti-vax". You aren't really "pro-vax" unless you support the larger program of stopping the disease. If you were really only just "anti-mandate", you'd prevent the need for mandates by vaccination, and strong promotion of vaccination to everybody you know. So, you're anti-vax, whatever you say.
And, summing up: bite me.
http://brander.ca/c19#nothing
I can't even engage with the pandemic, proper, today. This is just a long rant. (I'm sorry. It doesn't happen often any more.)
As the "Freedom Convoy" rolls towards Ottawa, blithering about the Governor General taking power, and the feds dictating provincial law, I wake up to Frank Luntz lecturing the British about "Be Thankful You Don't Have Our Poison", of lying politicians, and voters screaming conspiracy theories at frightened pollsters like himself.
Except Frank Luntz is the poison. So is, or was, Canadian David Frum (suitably old picture, below Frank, in the linked images at left), who joins Frank in being (a little bit) frank about how wrong they were.
David's up there, today, because Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! (and only her, I'm sure), reminded her news viewers that today is the 20th anniversary of David Frum's "Axis of Evil" line. He wrote it for GW Bush's State of the Union speech, that was the start of the year-long sales pitch for the Iraq War.
Frank Luntz would now like to be seen, as just a pollster who surveyed what Republicans were thinking. Not even half his job. He was a market-tester who found which phrases got what reactions. That "climate change" would push less action than "global warming"; that "government health care" would frighten, while "public health care" was positive, so must never be mentioned. Frank really helped America keep their health-care system as bad and unequal as possible for 20 years before the pandemic hit. He tested lines that writers like David invented, he found out which lies would sell.
The connection? Their Iraq War was sold with a conspiracy theory, not just with ordinary political lies. I mean, the previous war in Iraq had been sold with a scurrilous, bald-faced lie about babies thrown from incubators, concocted by the Hill and Knowlton PR firm. They coached the Kuwaiti Ambassador's daughter to pretend to be an escaped nurse.
That was quite the incredible lie, swallowed whole by the newspapers - but it wasn't a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are separate animals in that they are very hard to falsify, to prove untrue. Who can prove that Jews don't control the global financial system? Nobody can prove a negative, though a good journalist could have proven that the "nurse" was fake.
But could journalism falsify the story that Saddam Hussein, Iraqi dictator who didn't trust his own family out of the country, was going to build a nuclear bomb in jig time, then conspire with Saudi religious fanatics, trusting them with his precious ultimate weapon? There's a whole movie, "Shock and Awe" about how nutty the intelligence and security journalism communities thought it was. But you can't prove a conspiracy theory is impossible.
The conspiracy theory story was tested. Probably by Frank Luntz. White House Chief of Staff Andy Card later called the story about WMDs "The New Product". It was just like a civilian marketing campaign for a new slogan.
Frank and David are upset now, that the trend they helped start, pushed along, and profited from enormously, has Gone Too Far (for them). But they deserve no pity. Too many dead bodies piled up.
We can take heart that truth will probably be restored, eventually - at least in history classes, and maybe in the common understanding. At right, an image I ran across months ago, (and neglected to note the source, many apologies), which is a six-year-old survey...possibly run by Frank Luntz, come to think of it. What Evangelicals cared about on the Eve of the 2016 election, with "gay marriage" already dead last.
If you were there, you know how crazy that made evangelicals all through the 1990s and 2000s. Joe Biden actually had the nerve to support gay marriage first, shaming a nervous Obama into doing so. But, when conservatives lost that one, it promptly vanished as an issue. Haven't heard of it in years.
Gay marriage had never really been an issue. It was created with public relations, just like the babies in incubators, just like the WMD "product", only they stoked the "Gay Agenda" fears for decades. They were coming for your children. Gays teaching school would be on a "flesh hunt". For your helpless kids. The "Gay Agenda" had conspiracy-theory aspects, too: how to falsify? Impossible.
The lies about vaccination will be the same. CCCC noted just 12 days back that conservatives were pro-vaccine just a few years ago. They'll be back to the pro-vaccine side next time it is advantageous. What David Frum is on about today (no, no link, but its in The Atlantic) is that the GOP has mysteriously flipped on Russia, to the opposite of the Russia-demonization it championed for sixty straight years.
When you follow the truth, it's hard to flip, save where the situation itself changes. When you work via lies, and even conspiracy theories, American Republicans be championing transgender doctors giving you fetal-tissue-based vaccines as quick as you can say, "We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia". A year later, Canadians will see their slogan on the side of a truck, headed for Ottawa to demand those vaccines.
http://brander.ca/c19#liars
I just have to steal this one, from Canadaland, who are linked from the image at left. Who else could have come up with the perfect description of the convoy, for their show this week: "Truck Nutz".
The newspapers are kind of torn by the convoy. They love to hype up drama, conflict, and danger at every turn, so the headline is "Freedom Convoy plans to gridlock Ottawa", but on the other hand, there's another article about how it won't end well, making fun of their "historic and profound document" as something 14-year-olds would write, and pointing out that their claims of 50,000 trucks are ludicrous.
Well, they are ludicrous.
Yes, there are hundreds out to greet them, and there are hundreds of trucks, if you include all the half-tons. How does that compare to the vaccine lineup? Just about everybody who got vaccinated, was willing to take an hour, half of it spent in a lineup. And that would be thirty-four million people, supported our lineup.
70% of Canadians support the vaccine mandates the truck-nutz so loudly oppose. We are quieter, but we mandate-supporting adults are 70% of 80% of the population, so twenty-one million people. And we must own about 10 million trucks.
Some of the articles are going on about how this shows America's mental illnesses are creeping northward, that we'll soon have their problems. I tried a long search effort this morning for articles about hate and threats directed at Dr. Thresa Tam, Dr. Deena Henshaw, Dr. Bonnie Henry. Despite women being the more-frequent targets of such attacks in the States, I found absolutely nothing to compare with the Villainization of Dr. Anthony Fauci. The man has had to have a protective detail, his family protected. The linked article mentions the stress on his wife and family.
I linked to how different Canada is, from my September 21st post about our election, and the anti-vaxxer politicians. We're just different. We have the same problems, but of such lesser degree as to be a difference in kind.
In their country, this political wing owns one of two parties. In our country, the same philosophical bent garnered the PPC 5.1% in the last election - and even that made us nervous.
The Truck Nutz will be welcome to have their say, and go home, with Canada left unmarked by their passion.
http://brander.ca/c19#trucknutz
Mind you, it was a small sample size that showed Moderna with fewer deaths than Pfizer in Singapore on January 11. Most of that article was about how Pfizer had about 6 deaths/100,000, versus the Chinese Sinopharm at nearly double that. Nobody knew what to make of Moderna being at just 1/100,000. It's surely not SIX times better than Pfizer, so that was put down to low-sample-size, ignored.
But nobody can ignore the large study in the Las Angeles Times, September 17, that shows Pfizer drops from 91% to 77% efficacy at keeping you out of hospital after 120 days, but Moderna stays up at 92% the whole time.
That study also called booster shots for healthy people questionable.
My wife and I both chose Moderna for ours, more out of sympathy for the disparaged product, which we believed equally good at the time. It's a smug pleasure to find out it's a little better.
The differences are hardly worth arguing about, unless you're quite vulnerable, and need every extra percentage point you can get. For most of us, even the really-disparaged, good-old-fashioned "inactivated virus" vaccines would have done the job we needed.
In a world of anti-vaxxer nuts, some in charge, we pro-vax people need to stick together.
http://brander.ca/c19#pfools
I think even the ICU staff, nerving themselves up for a few bad weeks to come, have a little sense of anticipation, like I'm feeling this week.
The news itself is relentlessly downbeat, even as it concedes that Omicron peaked across Canada weeks ago. The hospitals are filling up, the ICUs getting busy.
Yesterday, I crossed my fingers that the Monday report for BC wouldn't show our ICUs already maxed with 180 or more patients, beating previous waves and humiliating my blog post. I was pleasantly (not just four journalistic reasons, of course) surprised to find that they had the same load on Monday that they had on Friday, 130. That's not echoing the near-vertical trajectory of the cases four weeks earlier. More like three weeks earlier, when cases peaked and headed down.
No, I'm not sticking my neck out again, by predicting that ICU load will now start to decline. Not when all those weary-looking doctors are predicting two or three weeks of worse. The Omicron "dying waves" are much wider and rounder than the spiky case graphs. I'd be unsurprised if the ICUs of BC did go up higher.
But I do anticipate, just from that ICU number yesterday, that in highly-vaxxed BC, we pro-vaxxers have already won the war, even as we take our last casualties in this battle. These last weeks will be bad, not so much because of the absolute ICU numbers (in well-vaxxed places), but because the staff are at the end of their rope. Even they, though, I think can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.
What will be worth some blogging in the next few weeks, is whether the vaccination rate shows up in the duration and height of the Omicron hospital, ICU, and death statistics. Vaccination basically doesn't prevent Omicron cases, but it prevents everything else. BC, one of our most-vaxxed provinces, and Alberta/Saskatchewan, our vaccination Black Sheep provinces, should provide a valuable contrast. If we can't see the difference between 89% (5+) and 85%, I shouldn't be bragging about vaccination. (Four percent not much? Think of it as the difference between 15 vulnerable people and 11, in every hundred; there should be a quarter less pain. Of course, Alberta's unvaxxed are mostly young, so it won't be a quarter less ICU. Maybe 10% less.)
Sure, you can always say "what if there's another variant that's way deadly"...but that's no different than saying "what if we have a surprise pandemic" in 2018. It could happen, but you can't plan your life around it.
I'm planning my spring around a re-opening that starts about Valentine's Day. There will be restaurants, burgers, and ketchup poured. Oh, the anticipation.
http://brander.ca/c19#anticipation
I shouldn't do posts based on statistics on a Monday morning. This afternoon, they'll release three days of BC statistics at once, possibly ruining my claims.
But, over two weeks after BC passed its peak-Omicron-infection on January 5th, the ICU numbers have risen to "just" 130 on Friday. If they've soared, in three days, up past 157 to 179, they'll have equalled the worst that Alpha could do last April. But I don't think so.
The hospital numbers are a new game, artificially inflated, compared to old ones, by a new accounting system. (A guy with a broken leg and an asymptomatic COVID positive, is now a hospitalized COVID case. Despite the fact that he'll now be treated in the broken-leg ward, anyway. Go figure.)
But the ICU numbers have been increasing surprisingly slowly, when you compare to that vertical cliff of the case-counts going up four weeks ago, now.
Yes, there's no indication of this yet from South Africa or Denmark, but it could happen that this afternoon's figures will be a jump, then they'll shoot up over the next week or so to a Hospital Horror.
But CCCC is about a notional "game" of fighting COVID, and CCCC would put money down, on this one. I think Omicron, for all its soaring cases, is not going to beat Alpha's 179, nor much-press Delta's 157. Not in BC, where we're pretty good, if not champion, vaccinators.
It's not that Omicron couldn't have done it; it's that we got in ahead of its appearance with a lot of vaccine.
That's the bet, and the next step is to declare the pandemic psychologically over. But that's for another day. (After those stats come in.)
http://brander.ca/c19#peakbcicu
Other stories are about it becoming "endemic", the "flu-ization of COVID", and "learning to live with it".
Well, except for the people who are going to die from it.
Screw them. That's the new policy.
I'm not against it, though I mourn the unvaccinated who really have busy lives, difficult logistics, and maybe fell for the notion it wasn't that needed; and I mourn for the over-80 vaccinated (or "effectively over-80" from being past middle age, and having diabetes, heart condition, etc).
Bonnie has decided the few remaining in those categories cannot be saved by much that we can do anyway, and for so little gain, we are paying a high price, no longer worth it. So the unvaccinated and a few oldsters will go under the bus.
The Omicron wave is not the flu. It will cost Canada around 5,000 lives, I suspect, before it peters out in a month. But most of those are unvaccinated, most of those really had their chance, and the rest, are those people we've had from the start, the ones that were down to a few years left from age and infirmity in any event.
So, we move forward, though those few will not. Protect yourself and your loved ones, the government is letting go. There's still time to vaccinate.
http://brander.ca/c19#underbus
It's usually three weeks.
Over and over, throughout the pandemic, you'd look at the graph of daily case-counts, daily hospitalizations, and daily deaths, and you'd see the same exponential-wave shape, with the same quirks if any. If dropping case-counts stopped dropping for a bit, lingered on a "knee" at 500/day somewhere, for an extra week, before declining further, then the hospitalization curve and the death curve would also have a "knee".
The hospitalization curve displaced about 10-14 days after the cases, the death curve almost exactly 3 weeks after the cases.
Omicron, in South Africa at least, seems to stretch out the dying a little longer. CCCC first looked at the curves on December 29, heartened that there were few deaths increasing at the 2 week mark after cases peaked there about December 15.
Well, it started late, and will be ending late - and, as we all know at this point, the dying wave was small, "mild dying", as the bitter joke had it.
The South African hospitalization curve, is very difficult to offer. The public health there doesn't seem to report that well or clearly. Indeed, their death reports go up and down, because sometimes it takes a few days for the news to go in, so there are low-count days and high-counts. The 7-day average has finally agreed that they have indeed been in decline the last week(ish), and we can pick a peak-death day at January 18, exactly a 31-day month after their peak cases.
Will Omicron also hang on an extra week or so, in Canada? Our "death curve" started taking off exactly two weeks after our cases did, unlike South Africa. But if it keeps rising for a whole month, that's until about February 5th, for both BC and Canada as a whole. Canadian dying might peak at over 200/day, perhaps well over, and not be way down again until late February.
Canada has lost 2,000 people since the Omicron "dying wave" started, almost exactly on New Year's Day, just three weeks. We're going to lose well more than that in the next four. "Mild" Omicron will be charging us 5,000 lives for our spring and summer immunity.
That's all supposition, but pretty educated and informed. There's a lot of data, now.
What's sure is that we are still a week away from peak hospitalizations, peak ICU. It's going to be a bad few weeks, Canada will lose thousands more lives (most, unvaccinated or very old).
We're all eager to see that bright future we imagine after it's over. But it ain't over.
http://brander.ca/c19#zapeakdeath
Is a 49-year-old "young"? Ask a 63-year-old like me, and the answer is a kind-of "yes". They say it's at 15 years difference where you call people "young" or "old". (45 is "old" to a 30-year old; 60 is "young" if you're 75.)
So, when I checked whether people under 50 "even remembered Vietnam", the thing that stuck with me is not just that they couldn't remember it, the oldest of them being just 3 when the troops pulled out, but that they weren't old enough to see "Rambo" (1985), or "Platoon" (1986), or "Full Metal Jacket" and "Hamburger Hill" (1987), when Hollywood went to Vietnam in the late 1980s. All four films were restricted, and they were just mid-teens.
Have I buried the lead? Those numbers at left add up to 58,438. The United States of America has lost more people under the age of 50, to COVID, than the 58,220 they lost in the Vietnam War - and not one of the dead was old enough to remember it.
It's been the pandemic of the old, of course, and people this age were the last to vaccinate, confident of their safety. Even here, the majority were in the last decade, the "70s kids" as I call them at right. I'm sure they paid as little attention to Vietnam history as possible, since this is that "Gen-X" bunch, that the "Gen-X" novel said hated us Boomers, and our endless nostalgia for our youth, of Vietnam, civil rights, and hippies.
The 80s kids, in their 30s when COVID took over fifteen thousand of them, maybe didn't feel that way about Boomers, maybe they caught the Vietnam movies on VHS.
The 90s kids not only don't remember "VHS", they were too young to die in the Iraq War. They were just hitting 18 when people were no longer being sent there. But more of them died than if they'd been old enough to go.
They probably didn't see Vietnam movies, either - they would want to watch cooler, up-to-date war movies about Iraq and Afghanistan. HBO's "Generation Kill" was a big hit with them.
There's not much more to say, I'm just relating a simple statistic. It's the context that highlights the meaning, though. A sufficiently-large "pandemic of the old" is still a war-sized disaster for the young. My generation thinks of these people as "kids", certainly the Millenials born after 1980, and America's lost over 20,000 of them.
That was the kind of death-toll that the Iraq War was supposed to prevent, by stopping all those terrorists from ever setting off a "dirty bomb" or "anthrax attack". We got our disease attack, all right, and it's killed more Americans than could have died from any one "dirty bomb", or even an actual nuke.
I did all those posts comparing the losses to war. Now, I can do it again, this time with those young enough, that nobody can dismiss them as "unworthy victims" with just a few years left.
Canada's grand total under 50 today is 875, which would be 7656, if we had America's population. (13% as bad as America, per capita.) Same age profile, where over half of ours (518) were in their 40s. Our figures are sobering. Theirs are devastating and practically criminal. We know that the number of younger dead has been higher in 2022, because it's the younger ones that don't vaccinate, egged on by politicians who actually want more death. The under-50 crowd has been losing 800 and 900 each week I watched that web page for the previous month. Then last week was 1200 dead, all under 50.
That's the same as their Iraq War casualties for all of 2004 and half of 2005.
The 16 months of Iraq War casualties got a lot more coverage, than "those under 50 who died of COVID-19 last week", I have to say.
http://brander.ca/c19#vietnam3
http://brander.ca/c19#powerout
Worldometers is the official pandemic dashboard of CCCC, and it uses news stories, not health authority reports, so it runs thousands of deaths (in America) ahead of the official announcements. Johns Hopkins and CDC and so on won't say America has hit 875,000 dead for several days yet.
But last night was the point where worldometers proclaimed that America's COVID-19 death toll had hit the 875,000 mark. It's hardly a round number, so it won't be news when it is passed. I don't recall any stories at 750,000, or 800,000, for that matter. They're just so numb to it, at this point.
But, 875,000 in America is a round number in Canada, because they have almost exactly 8.75 times as much population, so yesterday was the day the 100,000th Canadian would have died of COVID-19...if our country were run by Americans.
Or, I guess, contained only Americans. Have Americans got over three times our infection rate entirely because of their government messages? Or is it just more inherent in their national character to resist advice, limit their freedoms out of community spirit, endure some inconvenience for others?
We seem so similar, love the same foods and movies, work together so well. But then you read about torture chambers, and you can't imagine how they think. I can't imagine their current politics coming to Canada, and neither can Canada's foremost cultural pollster. Michael Adams has the statistical proof that we are actually so very different, in crucial psychological ways.
Our culture has done pretty well in the COVID Cup. The "rough figure", of Canada doing three times as well, turns out to be 31.8% as many dead (31,825/100,000) as America. Our number stacks up very well against all but the best (South Korea, New Zealand, Australia) though we have a handicap they don't: we are on the border of the industrial world's worst pandemic performer and they are 75% of our trade! More proof of the CCCC motto that safety is not a place, but a set of behaviours! We should be celebrating those 68,000 Canadians who are alive and with us in 2022.
Another round number is imminent, this one for the Americans. When you take the inverse of that 31.8% death-rate, you find that, if American had Canada's death statistics, some 596,000 Americans would still be alive. And so, three days from now, on January 22nd, the 600,000th American will die, who would have lived, had they been Canadian.
Weirdly, as a wave crests and breaks upon our poor hospital staff, today can be a day to give thanks. That we are Canadian.
http://brander.ca/c19#can100000
This post won't add much to the "Dying Young" post of nearly a year ago. I just wanted to check in, and oh, lord, the numbers have just gotten way more awful.
You couldn't even see the Canadian columns if I didn't first multiply them by 8.75 to allow for population size difference.
The interesting bit here is that the ratio between the two health-care outcomes actually gets worse with age, even though the overall outcome is "just", "merely", 3:1, because our care-homes lost so many, the outcome for the very old is much closer. (It's still a 3:1 ratio, even for 80-somethings; the overall outcome is a little worse than 3:1, because of these staggering differences under age 50.)
It's nearly six times worse to be an American under 30 than to be a Canadian, but that rises to more than 8 times worse to live in America if you're 40-49.
Is this about them having worse hospitals, sicker people? Their hospitals are at least as good. They are almost as healthy, though the obesity difference (A third of them, only a quarter of us) accounts for some of it. But mostly America just has 2.75 times as many cases as Canada has, per population. More of them died because more of them got sick in the first place. End of story.
But the "more" was a pretty consistent 3:1 throughout age groups, so the higher death rate for the 30-49 decades comes back to poorer access to health care, the obesity and hypertension. It's a real condemnation of their system, a fantastic failure at the COVID Cup: suppose the game to decide the winner for the medal for the "Age 30-49 Middle of Life Years" (where you have kids, make your career, pay off your home)... was a basketball game where Canada beat America 83-to-10.
I have to bring it up again, because nobody else is. I haven't seen this mentioned in any news, written or televised.
http://brander.ca/c19#dyingyoung2
It's not a week since CCCC linked to my post of last year, showing how vaccination rates perfectly track your risk of death, but let's do it again: the older a group of people, the more of them got vaccinated.
Canadians with a first-dose are almost exactly 90% of all those aged 40-60. The anti-vaxxer-friendly National Post is relentless in claiming that 10% of Canada are being "marginalized".
For age 60-69, however, the number of unvaccinated is abruptly cut in half. 95% vaccination rates, so we're down to only 5% of the 60-69 gang being "marginalized".
Then, past age 70, it's all over. The 70-79 group are at 99%. Apparently, the believabilty of all the many anti-vaxxer arguments drops a further 80% when the big seven-zero rolls up. So only 1% of the Canadians over 70 are being "marginalized". (Of course, the big jump downward around 70 may relate to "over 70" being the age at which you remember polio.)
Even at 90%, of course, it's one of the largest majorities you can imagine for a political issue. Our massive majority is being incredibly kind to not just steam-roll over the tiny, immoral minority that care so little for other's lives. It's amazing the calls aren't to charge them every penny of what they are costing us, deprive them of any privileges whatsoever. We are so nice.
The National Post article, above, pleads for the anti-vaxxers, but admits that cracking down on anti-vaxxers is among the "most popular political issues in the country, right now, according to polls."
A new Atlantic article calls us "The Silent Vaccinated, Impatient Majority". It leads off with Macron's declared intent to piss off the unvaccinated. (This is widely assumed to be the source of Legault's wondering-aloud-about-taxing.) The Joke-ovick tennis mess is another indication of a public tired of pandering to arrogant voodoo believers.
The Atlantic has fun facts about how massive this moral majority really is: "being vaccinated is more common than drinking coffee, owning a television..."
Why is Macron confident? France always wins for "best health care system", where government-paid doctors make house calls. But nearly half of them want the unvaccinated to pay for their own health care(!) Sacre bleu! Previously unthinkable. So Macron is actually picking a fight with them, as an election looms. The article finds similar sentiments in Italy.
The article points out how we are the Moral Majority in every way of considering the lives of others. Despite needing them less, we mask more. And concludes with remarks like "Begging is not a strategy." and "Sorry. Time's up."
It allows that we must consider their feelings; but it has to be admitted: they don't give a crap about our feelings of wanting to school safely, work safely, travel safely. Considering their feelings is asking a lot.
http://brander.ca/c19#mmm
The one at left, is from the next year, spurred by a measles outbreak at Disneyland, a Magic Kingdom with obviously limited magical powers. There wasn't really much debate, either, about who was responsible: hippy-dippy liberals, of which Jordan Klepper of Daily Show fame, made fun of the other month. Yes, the liberal anti-vaxxers are still around, but they were just about the only anti-vaxxers in the news, back in 2015.
Speaking of The Daily Show, then-host Jon Stewart mocked "science-denying affluent California liberals", who'd presumably been listening to Jenny McCarthy the last year, for the outbreak. "They practice a mindful stupidity", Stewart grated.
For all these links, I'm indebted to Adam Serwer, at The Atlantic, who was writing about the Supreme Court now on-board with the Brand-New Conservative Doctrine that Vaccines Are Bad. (Serwer's particular issue is that the Court arguments often pre-supposed the notion that vaccines are some kind of significant risk to ask an employee to accept.)
The WSJ article he linked to, at left, also quotes none other than Ted Cruz, giving an impassioned defense of vaccination, how it had done so much for MMR and polio: "...why would we go backwards?" Why, indeed, Ted? Something to do with pleasing the man who insulted your wife, I'm thinking.
It also links to a 2015 survey by Pew that has young people the more likely to say "vaccinating kids should be a parental choice", a not-terrible proxy for it being the more-liberal position. You'd think so, with those old enough to remember polio being, surely, the most pro-vax people in society.
But, alas, you have to be over 70 to really remember polio. How well do those oldsters vax? A new topic for tomorrow.
http://brander.ca/c19#conservax
The BBC article is actually about "The Puzzle of America's Record COVID Hospital Rate".
America's is so much higher than those of other countries, the article moans. (The absolute figures are all higher today, 3 days after it was written, but the relative situation is the same.) The USA then had over 400/million in hospital, rather than 300 in Italy and the UK. The article digs in to the USA having higher rates of obesity and hypertension, but homes in on the 63% vaccination rate, compared to numbers in the 70s for the other two.
And compared to 78% full-vaccination, 83% partial, for Canada.
And that's the funny thing about the article: look again at that graph. Canada is as far below the three European examples, as America is above them. Just 200/million, half of America's rate. A completely legitimate article to write, after looking at that graph, is "The Puzzle of Canada's Low Hospitalization Rate".
Canada is better at obesity than the USA: about 24% of our population vs 34% of theirs. You can guess hypertension is about the same, both diet-and-exercise related.
But France's is a smidge lower than ours, at 22%, so that's not all of the explanation. Is it really our vaccination being about 4% higher than France's?
Nope.
Look at the rest of the graph, look at how the red line for Canada is always lower than all the rest. Right through the pandemic, back to when there was no vaccination at all. The UK and Italy have dipped down to where Canada is a few times, but "we own the podium" of being on the bottom of that graph.
Is it our generally-healthy, young population? UK, Italy, France, are all a bit older than us, and age is cruical in COVID. And then their hospitals might just be more welcoming, too, more likely to take in a marginal case. But, look at last Fall: we were half the hospitalizations of Europe, never mind the huge wave that hit American hospitals, but barely touched ours.
Our news media have a "good news is no news" policy, you won't hear it there, only that our hospitals are stressed and breaking. But other countries have it worse. The USA, much worse, literally twice as bad.
http://brander.ca/c19#bbchospital
The "journalism" is the most-amateur effort possible, by non-journalists. It's our friends at PopBC, that is, "Protect our Province", which CCCC has relied on before, and has some excellent online lectures.
ProtectBC did something that the "real" journalists didn't even think of: just put the missing voices right out there, for all to read. They asked the front-line people, all the doctors, nurses, caregivers, what they felt like telling people about their careers recently, and it's all just devastating.
The page leads off with a few statistics. 58% thinking of leaving.
"Working short, under high stress and with more acute patients has become the new norm. There are higher emotions as we all live under more stressful conditions."...I picked those out of the top 10% of the page. It goes on. And on. And on."I stopped seeing all my friends and family, and hardly go out besides groceries. Used to do gym, run, ski and dine out frequently. My mother died of dementia and I couldn't touch her for the last 6 months of her life until on her deathbed as LTC locked down. I also do exams on anti mask pts and am doing them on active COVID pts. I'm struggling to keep working & recognize the mental impact on my wellbeing."
"I was an introvert before, now I am almost reclusive. I want nothing to do with restaurants or crowds. I am saddened by people's selfishness and every time I see our PHO at a sporting event I am angry. It's like being kicked in the face. I can't believe that the government values healthcare workers so little that we have to fight for the right to protect ourselves and our families. With n95s and vaccine access and adequate break rooms. I can't believe that there have not been safe zones established around hospitals to prevent protestors."
"Impacted every aspect of my personal life. Shown me the best and the worst of human behaviour. Made me more guarded in my interactions. Made me more committed to beat this virus."
"Covid has made everything worse. Everything is so much harder. It's made me too exhausted to care about so many things."
"I am fearful of being around people"
"...there is a new level of scientific illiteracy/paranoia/craziness/nastiness here that has really made me lose my hope in humanity to a degree"
I kept coming back to it, all day. I'd take several of those, be worn out, do something else for a while. But I just couldn't ignore those people. They all had their story, and such hard-won stories.
Confession, this has been sitting at the ProtectBC web site since last November, I didn't notice it. But bringing it up now, while the ICUs hit 100% and the staff are facing their worst crisis yet.
We should start banging pots again. Let them know that so many of us do care.
And after we've banged some pots, we need to tell our politicians that they need more resources, and we are willing to sacrifice to pay for them, as they have sacrificed for us.
http://brander.ca/c19#nursesvoices
The stories are all over, this one in The Daily Wire is nice.
So somebody put cannabinoids and covid cells together, and A killed B.
No, it was not a joke. It was very serious, and indeed might be medically valuable. The paper is at the Nationl Library of Medicine, is published in a real journal.
Super briefly, certain cannabinoid acids turn out to bind themselves onto those darn cell-invading spike proteins, gumming them up, and preventing their infectious cell-wall-poking. (Well, I did say, "super-briefly".)
There's just the two problems with it all. Both were identified by the commenters on Slashdot.
The very first Slashdot post was just a link to the XKCD cartoon at right, which I've shrunk here, because it's a one-panel cartoon: I'm stealing the whole thing, and you should just click through to XKCD, read it all, buy his books and his swag. XKCD is the best. Again, here, he points out that this is just a lab test, not in-vivo. You'd have to expose a bunch of people to cannabinoid acids, see how many fewer are infected. It may also have power as a therapy after infection, preventing replication in the body. You can absolutely count on people taking a bunch of edibles with their symptoms, starting today, so we'll hear how that goes, I guess.
Secondly, as noted, we can't smoke our way out of this, because another knowledgeable Slashdot commenter noted that smoking destroys the acid forms of the cannabinoids: you'll have to rely upon edibles.
More seriously, they may find some cannabinoids that cause relatively little intoxication, have a useful therapeutic effect, and generally make this disease a little easier. It's progress.
And that's no joke.
http://brander.ca/c19#cannabis
Best "joke" of the last day does come up. A physician in South Africa remarking bitterly about how everybody tried to make the best of Omicron, that it was "mild". He wrote, "After a wave of 'mild' infections, we are now seeing a wave of 'mild' deaths, I guess."
That's the physicians' perspective, of course: they fight for our lives retail, one at a time, every loss a tragedy. But, in statistical terms, you have to call the size of the wave of dying, right now in South Africa, "mild", in that it's going to peak at a daily death-count a quarter the size of the previous one.
The dead are just as dead, but those who survived, don't know they might not have. Our failures are easy to see, our successes, invisible.
http://brander.ca/c19#nonews
I checked the change in the graph most carefully. Blowing it up a bit, you can see the change in slope of the vaccination tracker, it hits right at the end of November.
In one month, almost a three percent jump in total vaccinations, which is sure to be more by the time people get less scared again. The dry figures are that total age-5+ vaccination went from 83.1% to 84.5% in the 40 days before December 1, a gain of just 1.4 percent. In the 40 days since December 1, it went up to 88.7%, a gain of 4.2!
CCCC noted, where the rest of the world never did, that vaccination rates almost precisely track the recipient's risk of death. Of course, that risk is proportional to all other risks, of ICU, hospital, just having two bad weeks. It's the overall risk, IF PERCEIVED, that gets people out to the clinics to take the jab.
Fears of Omicron started rising in November, but by December, two things had happened: huge waves had hit in South Africa, and the variant had reached every other country. The clinics started getting busy immediately after that, so much so that public health was caught off-guard and had to ramp them up.
Connie got her booster yesterday, and I was impressed by the speed and efficiency of the clinic at Canada Place. They were in the news for a 2-hour lineup a few days ago, so they really smartened up. Watching the crowd just flow through the place, for an hour, impressed me that they were clearly vaccinating somebody about every ten seconds. Surely over 3,000 a day at that site alone.
CCCC can only more firmly stand behind the prediction that vaccination will dry up in just a few weeks, when people's perceived risk levels drop, of course. It cuts both ways: vaccination benefits from the fear people have of those full ICUs right now, and when the wave has clearly crested, the hospitalization declining, even people with vaccine appointments will suddenly lose interest in showing up.
But, we got our three percent, and it might go to four or even five in these last few weeks. Every bit helps.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxboost
It's becoming a game: do I skip the blog entirely today, for lack of data, projections worth beans, clarity itself? It's been some short posts, lately. Today, I abased myself, foolishly, shouting into the endless wind of the National Post Comments Section.
More news sources are just giving up on comments, and the National Post should. They're worthless, just an ocean of arch-right-wing, and currently, anti-vaxxer ranters that are way, way off the Canadian mainstream of thought, not at all a cross-section of Canada.
My own contribution (in red box, left) was just to remind them what outliers they are. Should you be pandemic-bored enough to ever look at newspaper comments, keep in mind they have become a place strictly for the fringe.
The other comments visible are literally randomly-chosen, by being the ones next to mine in the stream. As you can see, the other five, no exceptions, are not suff you'd likely hear from an actual random sample of Canadians.
Which allows me to rest my case. Why participate at all? Well, boredom is a factor, but so is irritation that this is our biggest national newspaper, this is the audience their paid performers pander to, this is how Canadians look to curious onlookers, the world 'round.
But, in fairness to the National Post Comments section, I also copied off this note from a physician in Nova Scotia, which I then screwed up by not copying his name...and you can never again find a comment in the National Post Comments Section. So, this is without attribution, but, while right off the topic of vaccination, I want to save it as a comment on medicine, and bureaucracy, and the modern world. I don't think his complaint is limited to Nova Scotia, Canada, or the medical profession.
Can I bore everyone one more time? When I came to Canada in 1985 from the UK, to be a rural physician in a post no Canadian had been willing to fill for the two years it had been advertised, I ran, with one other doctor, a 29 bed rural hospital, with 24 hour ER, lab and X-ray. We had one administrator, the board in charge were local worthies (unpaid) and the budget was just over 1mCDN/year....that, that was worth reading. No additions needed, that speaks for itself. Will there ever be reforms of this problem, will our many bureaucracies ever turn around and become more efficient over time, instead of ever less-so? Not in our time, I'm sure.How the mighty are fallen! Now it has eight beds, the 'urgent care' is open 7 hours a day, but not every day, it has no lab and X-ray availability is sporadic. And it's run by five docs, two NPs and we were up to 14 administrators when I quit in 2015. Goodness knows what the budget is now, but it's whatever is spared us by the large and greedy regional hospital (75 beds and 4 admins in 1985, 50 beds and 70 admins when I quit). They also make all decisions for us and there is no local control.
Seems to me the old ways, before the government decided to reign in health care spending by appointing managers for everything, were cheaper and far more effective. But I'm just a dinosaur, apparently, so don't listen to me.
So, point taken, there are a few people putting in useful, non-nutty comments at The Post. But so, so few. It's such a terrible habit of mine, going there, like a guy who can't stop turning into the bar, and always regrets it.
http://brander.ca/c19#natpost
It's a topic I've just avoided, partly from squeamishness. Being sentenced to awful, immiserating symptoms, with little idea what's going on, and no idea when it will get better - maybe never - is my idea of minor hell. And most people's.
Better to just cross your fingers. Life is full of dangers, if you can't avoid them, best not to obsess on them. But avoiding "Long COVID", can be done by just avoiding COVID, and by getting vaccinated, so that if you catch it, the symptoms will be mildest.
Vaccination doesn't just prevent Long COVID, it can actually alleviate Long COVID if administered after it develops; it's the only way in which vaccines are ever a therapy.
You can have COVID, develop Long COVID, and be almost disabled - without ever needing a hospital. Making our medical system almost blind to it. We know that Omicron is less-likely to hospitalize, and we can project it is less-likely to cause Long COVID, but we just don't know. It might specialize in Long COVID. It's too new to be sure.
I'm eager to get back out there - once we are both boosted. But, while there's any chance of Long COVID - and that is obviously much more likely than hospitalization and death - I just don't want to take that chance.
The article says up to a third of COVID cases qualify, by having symptoms after the 3-month mark. Probably only half of those are serious, debilitating, really long-lasting.
But, "One in six" is "Russian Roulette" numbers. The only winning move is not to play.
http://brander.ca/c19#longhaul
I'll spare you the links that would lead to proof there was none. A dashboard for South Africa was up-to-date on every statistic - except current hospitalizations, gone dead for a month. Denmark's was still running, but running over a week behind, shows hospitalizations still soaring.
News from Denmark is all about how hospitals are filling slowly, ICUs even more so, and they have yet to hit their peak from the previous waves. Their doctors sound pretty confident in interviews, though, while our doctors (at least the ones the news shows like) are filled with trepidation.
We just don't know right now. That's the story this morning.
Everybody is certainly fingers-crossed that hospitalizations are bearable, that this wave innoculates most who don't have vaccinations, and that this is the Beginning of the End.
But, we just don't know. Not for sure.
I'm still hunkering down. I'm sure we will know, in about two more weeks. Patience is a scientific virtue.
http://brander.ca/c19#noinfo
Coming out, I groaned that I'd forgotten a few things, but the risk seemed so low, I went on to the other grocery store, No Frills (Superstore). This one had often had lineups in the early morning, back in early 2020, but this morning, was so quiet only one till was running. I could shop at leisure, not coming within four metres of anybody, much less two.
So, I filled up on non-necessities as well, and we're set for a few weeks, save for one vital outing on Monday - Connie has her booster appointment!
I'm not sure why people are much more casual now than when a fraction as many cases had everybody frantically washing hands. (Remember washing hands all the time? Remember sanitizer every where you turned? Ah, early-pandemic nostalgia...). Does everybody simultaneously think that Omicron will be just a bit of sniffles for them, even as hospitals fill up?
Well...actually...if you're double-vaccinated, your odds of hospital are terrible, and even your odds of two-weeks-on-your-back-groaning are pretty bad. There's obviously not just a lot of Omicron going around, but a lot of Omicron stories, "I got it, and it was just a cold".
That's not actually wise to believe - anybody can roll snake eyes and be in the few percent that have a bad, bad, Omicron week or more - but it is the start of a new psychology about the pandemic. Psychologically, I think it will soon be over, if 20,000 cases per day isn't making people go early to the stores.
http://brander.ca/c19#storesfree
We are at last at the classic epidemic problem (can happen with any epidemic, doesn't need to be a pandemic): everybody is off sick at once.
This is the flu epidemic scenario that the emergency services train for. In 2006, I got to go to a conference mostly attended by City Mayors. (I was a presenter.) In idle time, I was able to go to various presentations I normally wouldn't: how a city can handle gang violence. And this one, about the flu-pandemic planning.
As you can see, they were very well warned about a flu that might put ten million Americans in hospital. The slide shows "1957-like" with under a million, and "1918-like" with nearly ten. And a need for 745,500 ventilators!
Much of the discussion, though, was how we in the essential services would keep the roads open, the sewers flowing, the water and power on, with half our staff either off sick, or nursing somebody who is.
Now we'll find out who had buddy systems, who had office staff identified to take over the real work, who has to just close. If the essential services have kept up their planning - which you'd think would be heavily over-planned by now, with 22 months of warning - the lights will stay on.
Other products may run dry, though. Hope you stocked up on toilet paper.
http://brander.ca/c19#hoarding
The news that Israel is going to go for a fourth vaccine dose, for those that want it, because they all got boosted months ago now, rocketed around a world scrambling to get third shots.
Oddly, Israel didn't vaccinate all that well: just 71%, so far; Turkmenistan did better. Nobody beat Israel at making vaccines available, but they turned out to have an actual higher rate of vaccine-refusers than America (74%), much less Canada (84%). Talk of "herd immunity" through a fourth shot was insane to read; that's not about how many shots, but how many arms take it.
But it raised the question of how many first-shots they offered to Palestine, before they went on to their own third shots. We're all guilty of taking our own vaccines before sharing much with the third world, but Israel actually has a third world nation under its direct control and occupation.
And, now, Palestine is at 39% first-doses; one can only hope its all their health-care people and their oldest. That's at least something.
But the sheer self-regard and prejudice needed to not vaccinate the people next door, that you have under your thumb, while making sure your own have fourth doses, it's just sickening, and I don't understand how good and decent Israelis can stand it.
I know there are still a number of them, from reading Larry Derfner's "No Country for Jewish Liberals". But they sure have been quiet lately.
http://brander.ca/c19#israelsick
I was caught yesterday by an estimate made by Vaccine Hero, Dr. Peter Hotez, yesterday on Democracy Now!. (below) Dr. H simply tossed off the figure that anti-vaccination propaganda, by raising the American rate of vaccine refusal, had cost 200,000 lives that need not have died.
Wow.
Earlier in the pandemic, as we marvelled, in a bad way, over the sheer body count, CCCC had posts to note when the pile exceeded, the military losses in Vietnam, or losses in multiple wars combined.
But this isn't due to "the virus", it's due to the anti-vaxxer propaganda on the news, social media, dinner tables.
I tried something I never have, before: two screen-snaps from Worldometers, overlay Canada and the USA. It took barely a minute, and the result was fascinating. At left, the Canadian graph in blue, the American in orange, for cumulative deaths over the last 22 months.
The outlines are broadly the same, the same waves hit about the same time for both - the sudden steep slope of increasing death when Delta hit late last Fall.
But, you can actually see if you peek at the left Y-axes, overlaid on each other. The Canadian axis counts 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 deaths. The American, 250,000, 500,000, 750,000, at the same intervals.
The American population is just under 9X as large as Canada's, but to superimpose so well, the American axis has to be 25X as large! Just in gross terms (it's worse if you're young!), America has had 2.8X as many deaths as Canada, per capita.
And that's up until Dr. Hotez' cut-off point for where you (very likely) didn't have to die, if you'd just gotten the vaccine, which was June 30, 2021. I believe he ascribes 85% of the total deaths after that point, to non-vaccination (compared to if all of the eligible population were protected, I assume).
Canada had its anti-vaxxers, too, so the blue line goes up higher than if we'd had perfect vaccination, for sure. The two lines part company at the beginning of September, when the USA was at about 680,000 dead, Canada at 27,000. (The USA exactly 2.8X as bad, per capita,from dividing by 9).
By now, Canada has risen to 30,200, which would be almost exactly 750,000 on the American chart. Instead, worldometers has them now at about 850,000, or an extra 100,000 dead - that's even compared to them being 2.8X as bad per capita to start with. Or, to put it another way, since June, they've gone to 6.3X as deadly as Canada, from 2.8X.
That's what their higher anti-vaxxer beliefs have led them to. Dr. Hotez' estimate is confirmed by CCCC. They could have saved 200,000 with world-beating vaccination, or saved 100,000 if they'd just toned down their anti-vax hysteria to merely Canadian levels. Sorry, their added, extra, 2021 hysteria, no doubt resulting from sheer anger at being saved by Joe Biden's government; they were already losing hundreds of thousands, compared to Canada, to their already-worse performance.
Dr. Hotez would presumably estimate our anti-vaxxer-caused deaths at about half as bad. Perhaps half of the 3,000 Canadians lost since June 30 could have lived, if we could have promoted vaccination better. But that extra 1,500, we already knew about - the news stories recounted their deaths, and often their regrets. Dr. Hotez' 200,000 is so mind-boggling - the anti-vaxxers have killed more Americans than WW1, plus the Pacific-side of WW2. In just months - it's probably not in the news because nobody could accept it.
Sigh, it's just hard to express how badly America is performing. Dr. Hotez' interview yesterday was an emotional balm, reminding me that he, too, is America - place with so very many very good people. You can only wish her well, to get better soon.
http://brander.ca/c19#usaworse
I'm a (free) subscriber to "Democracy Now!", a daily YouTube news broadcast by Amy Goodman, who's been bringing the news, that others don't, for a quarter-century.
It's not just a "left wing view", as I'm sure anybody on the right wing would say. It's not about the editorial viewpoint, but whether certain kinds of news are covered at all.
Amy has been interviewing Dr. Peter Hotez throughout the pandemic. He's a vaccine resarcher and developer, and the image at left links to her short piece on the triumph of his project. They've developed a good vaccine for COVID-19, it's patent-free to the whole world, cheap, stable, and "old-school" vaccine technology, that factories all over the world can make.
This guy is in the real pandemic fight. Not the fight just for "our population", but for the world, to finally end the pandemic itself.
Democracy Now! covers the news that the larger news systems don't: the poor. I notice, every time I scan the New York Times, the Washington Post, our own big papers, that most of the people discussed above-the-fold are all rich. When the giant US bill was shut down a few weeks ago, the Post headline was "Bill's Defeat Causes Problems for Biden". Never mind all those poor people that were actually going to get the help. Biden is the only player of real interest.
It's like watching a Marvel movie. The mere policemen, much less the citizens cowering on the sidewalks, are not characters of interest; only the superheroes (of Congress and White House) get lines. Heck, Cabinet Secretaries are bit-players, most of their names unknown, except for State and Defense; they merely execute policy. Only the Struggle for Power is really interesting.
Vaccines for poor foreigners? Not 1% of the screen-time devoted to following billionaires into space.
Peter gives a short, but fascinating talk, digging into the Why of the lack of vaccination around the world. At one point, he congratulates Joe Biden on the vaccines he's already sent around the world, enough for a few percent of the world's population - then almost casually notes that his own project has already done just as much, (with a fraction of the budget).
His comments on the technicalities of his own product, and how he estimates that 200,000 Americans died because they believed disinformation about vaccines, ("anti-science aggression", his term), are badly needed.
And leave it running. The next "Democracy Now!" article to come up after that is the one about Irene Bosch, who developed a cheap rapid test in March 2020, and was ignored.
We didn't have to have the absolute latest in vaccines. We could have rushed some into production, followed up by the cheaper ones as they became available. And of course, we could have made enough to share, and the developers didn't have to become billionaires on the backs of public research. As the pandemic peaks and winds down, some, ahem, post-mortem will be in order.
http://brander.ca/c19#hotez
Today, I avoided getting out of bed by just mentally running the numbers on the dreaded "hospital overflow", despite Omicron being so hospital-averse.
We certainly know that we've got "double and more" the 4,000 cases we were able to count, the other day. So, round it to 10,000/day, and cheerfully guess that it will top out at twice that, 20,000/day. (Even exponential waves have limits, as South Africa and Norway show.)
So, 20,000/day is 140,000 per week, you'd hit 500,000 in just over 3 weeks: let's say that January has 500,000 infections, to pick a round number. It's 10% of the whole province.
South Africa, had 1.7% hospitalization rates. We're so vaccinated, let's roll that down to a round 1% : 5000 hospitalizations. Omicron hospitalizations are only 3 days, average: 15,000 bed-days.
In 30 days of time! That's 500 beds, which is just our peak bed-usage during the third wave. Yay!
But, the peak will probably be double the average: a week or so where you need 1000 beds, and we don't have them. Even this conservative napkin-calc says the hospitals will be jamming them into corridors.
So, have some sympathy for them, (if not yourself) and take care to get Omicron as late as possible, if you have to get it at some point. Don't "get it over with", at the worst possible time for your doctor.
http://brander.ca/c19#whyscared
I just read through this up-to-the-moment news from Alberta, with recent infection and hospitalization numbers.
The numbers it offers are these:
Alberta is barely 85% vaccinated, maybe a little over that for the adults who are nearly all the hospitalizations. But if 80% of cases are vaccinated, then vaccination indeeds provide but a slight edge against infection at all. Just 15%, from recent figures.
The key thing here is even double-vaccination is significant protection from hospital, though you now need a booster to get the old, reassuring, "way under 1% odds of hospital" that we used to have from double-vaccination... before Omicron.
Consider 1000 Alberta cases, 800 vaccinated, 200 not. Suppose that Omicron, being so nice, sends only 20 to hospital, instead of 100-150, like Delta.
To get the Alberta hospitalization ratio (38% vaccinated), there must be seven are fully vaccinated (35%), 13 unvaccinated.
So, how much did vaccination help? The hospitalization odds of the vaccinated 800 cases were: 7/800, or "just under 1%". For the unvaccinated 200 cases: 13/200 = 6%+ of them had to go to hospital. Seven times better knowing you're vaccinated, when the sniffles start.
Double-vaccination is still very good, though vaccinated-in-hospital numbers will actually rise. But you want that booster. Nobody would get on a plane that had a 1% chance of crashing, and your odds of getting Omicron in the next few months, without total isolation, are "nearly certain". And 1% odds of hospitalization mean 2% or 3% odds of "really bad case at home, maybe Long COVID", since those cases will be much more frequent than hospitalizations.
If you're old enough to remember a non-Internet world, definitely get your booster.
http://brander.ca/c19#whybooster
Right on, Sherlock Holmes! And I have tried to avoid guessing, even when the temptation is high. Always go with the data, and don't, ah, extrapolate very far from the data. Utterly non-linear things like human behaviour, exponential growth, and how the two interact, will ruin your "extrapolation" (guess) every time.
Jason Kenney guessed it would be the "Greatest Summer Ever", and hats bearing that now-infamous slogan, are going to be a top collectors' item for sheer irony, in 2022.
Certainly, governments and businesses are not guessing. They're all just assuming that Omicron will be bad, if not by itself, then by sheer weight of numbers, and everybody is cancelling, and closing. But, of course, the evidence is rising that Omicron is what the CCCC post of South African data the other day indicates: a quarter, a fifth, maybe a sixth as hospital-filling as Delta.
So these guesses are pretty much based on the hoped-for, is-it-too-good-to-be-true outcome, where Omicron immunizes the population against COVID-19s, at very little cost in hospitals and death.
Here's the timeline for 2022, your SWAG (Stupid, Wild-Assed Guess) to be used for laughs at New Year's Eve Parties. (i.e. "Entertainment Purposes Only")
But commercial re-opening is the news item, all about business. Psychological re-opening has probably never happened since summer 2020. So many people reduced visiting, going to clubs, hanging out with friends at the coffee shop, and stays with relatives. The ones wanting back in the bar were a loud minority. A lot of these people have been fairly isolated for some time - which to the virus means an untapped population to invade. When the cases go way down (February?), and they emerge, there will probably be a wave worthy of the name.
So, if the Last Wave peaks at under 1000/day in the States, and 35/day in Canada, causing Canada a few hundred more deaths, the USA ten-thousand-odd, it will be declared a "fizzle", nothing to worry about, the hospitals never quite filled, only a few dozen nurses broke down crying in corridors.
My guess places this around mid-April through May, the second anniversary of the terrible First Wave - comparisons will be drawn, emphasizing how relatively better it is. This wave should also find the medical system finally caught up with Omicron, ready with Paxlovid, monoclonal antibodies - and experience.
Keep in mind, "a million deaths" is a quarter of what we're pretty sure died in India, without it even being acknowledged. Bad, indeed - but we will have not just 2022 standards about the death-counts, we will have our usual indifference to the dying of poor foreigners that we had to a million dying in the Middle East in recent years.
If we could even race about getting all the health-care workers a shot, some of their older people, it would be great. But we probably won't, not in time, and that failure will, I hope, hang over us for a generation of shame and dedication to improvement.
So, here it is, I'm pulling the Jason Kenney (for entertainment purposes only): this will be realized by June 21, and
Summer 2022 Will Be The Best Summer Ever!
http://brander.ca/c19#guess
I was about to put in a one-sentence entry that there wasn't any real data to blog about, see you in a few days. (The vaccination rate of BC may be irrelevant now, but I liked watching it rise - and they haven't reported it since Christmas. The case-rate numbers are all wild underestimates, and I just wrote about the hospitalization, so, not much data.)
Then, I remembered that the last days of the year are good days to clean up stuff you forgot to mention. I'm indebted to a Canadaland panellist (I think it was Jaskaran Sandhu) the other week for reminding me to dump on Scott Moe, the premier of Saskatchewan. He's one of the two pictures at right. One Moe played a goofy moron in movies; the other in a government.
Jason Kenney was more flamboyant, Sandhu notes, got the press, but Moe did every stupid thing Kenney did: lowest vaccination rates, highest Delta wave, kept pretending he could open up at will. And dumb sabre-rattling? Who has the nerve to call Saskatchewan, of all provinces, a "nation within a nation"?
That's all I got. I just didn't want Moe to get away entirely with 2021.
http://brander.ca/c19#nomoe
"Murder will out", goes the saying. Unlike so many other crimes, unlike an assault the victim can cover up with make-up and claim to have walked into a door, murder produces a body, a hole in society, wondering relatives and friends.
"Cases" are uncertain, how bad a sickness is can be debated - unless it produces a body. We can't really be sure what's going on in places with broken, or half-there medical systems, until the bodies are counted. Not even then, in India, where we had to estimate from numbers floating in the Ganges, the plumes from the cremation fields.
South Africa is not that bad. Their medical systems aren't at our levels, but I'm highly-confident that their death-counts from COVID are reasonably accurate.
And they're small. There's no longer any doubt about it - whether crushed by immunity, or people getting scared and distancing, the last wave in South Africa has now been declining sharply for two weeks, despite being less than six weeks old. The fourth wave, at right, started November 24, when cases jumped from the 500s to the 700s in one day, and the 7-day average is now down to the 13,000s from the 21,000s on December 18th.
The death rate is still rising, the presumably is a week or so away from peaking, three weeks behind the case-rate peak. And it's small. The case-rate peaked a little higher than their third-wave peak on July 5. But where that wave was followed by a wave of deaths that hit 388/day in late July, the latest wave is so far causing about 55 deaths/day, and the trajectory seems unlikely to reach 100.
This is still no "little flu", but on the final testing ground, the graveyard, Omicron is a quarter or a fifth as deadly. In South Africa, at least, and I can't think of any reason why their supposed natural immunity from all their suffering, should be any better than our vaccinated immunity to over 80% - and over 95% of those who do nearly all the pandemic dying.
The general public will not breathe out until the same figures do show up in UK and Denmark; but CCCC is going to make the brave call that our ICUs and hospitals are going to be OK this January. What a relief.
http://brander.ca/c19#nonmurder
At left, all of December for case-counts in BC. The red bars are "Vancouver Coastal", for the parts of Greater Vancouver that touch the coast, plus rural areas to the north, up past Whistler. The purple, are "Fraser" for the rest of Greater Vancouver, starting with Burnaby and on east, up to Hope. The two regions together are 3 million people, 60% of the population, and almost all city.
And almost all of the new cases. Omicron hasn't gotten out to the boonies yet, maybe it can't leap across the downed bridges. It's pretty boggling to see Coastal alone, my area, hit 1000 cases/day, by itself - and to know that is probably half the real number.
This is a flip from much of the rest of the pandemic, when it was the cities that had the low cases, the country, high rates. Blame assigned to fact that they do all the real work, while we city folk sit at computers, sipping latte'. I'm sure Omicron will get around to them, but as we have the majority population, the biggest wave is the one already rolling.
The wave is over two weeks in. The "elbow" on the case-chart for BC is so sharp, you can pick it precisely: December 12 was way up from December 11, so Boxing Day was the two-week mark.
Deaths usually follow cases by about three weeks, in previous waves, but hospitalization has to go up first. Ours is still flat as a pancake. 4500 active cases, 43 in hospital, or 1%.
Britain currently has 2 million active cases, and 8000 in hospital, barely half that rate. They're a week further along. However, they are starting to spike up in daily hospital admissions. While Omicron develops symptoms quicker, and you get over it quicker, that might not apply to everybody. Maybe 0.1% of Omicron victims go real bad, a month in, and 0.1% is enough to "overwhelm", because over 10,000/day are being infected in BC. This might not "be OK", we still don't know.
http://brander.ca/c19#onlyvan
I was introduced this last week to the concept of "soft lockdown", which pre-dates the pandemic, and means a strategy of self-enforced extreme caution, rather than mandated set behaviours.
A really mature society, and one not driven to take unwise risks by need for money, would need no pandemic controls at all, just information and warnings.
The link is to The Atlantic article about New York just locking itself down, despite flat statements by government that none were ordered. There's two levels of soft lockdown: people just being cautious and cancelling all their parties and restaurant reservations, going back to work-from-home, and so on. Then there's businesses closing because the staff are calling in.
That's the actual "flu epidemic scenario" that emergency and protective services teach their staff, and train for: how to keep society running when everybody is either home, groaning with flu symptoms - or sitting with a kid who is.
I decided I had to flip CCCC to full-on, crazed-libertarian mode, when I read what's at right, in The Herald, this morning. This guys knows what he's doing. He'll measure his own risks, figure if the game's worth the candle, do the right thing. A society full of Tristans would be pretty mature, and fight the pandemic pretty well.
The Vancouver Sun also had a Boxing Day Sales story this morning: that it looked like any other day in Best Buy. Open, sales happening, but the crowds are thin as a regular Monday. There are a lot of people as smart as Tristan, it turns out.
The excuse for mandates was that we had to protect ourselves from people dumber than Tristan, people who'd definitely go in - to a Quebec bar with a 2-metre ceiling from 1872, shoulders rubbing.
And, as noted, if Omicron can use the vaccinated as vectors, then vaccination no longer protects others, only the recipient. So we might as well let Libertarianism loose: if you want to run a dangerous restaurant, and can keep it open only doing business with the risk-takers, Tristan and I will just "not go in". Soft Lockdown.
The air travel industry is in that kind of soft lockdown right now, with half the flights cancelled. Sane people are avoiding airports, cancelling plans right now, anyway, after seeing photos from inside airports, as in CCCC, Christmas Day.
CCCC turns all Libertarian all of a sudden at a chosen moment: such restrictions as we've got will blunt the Omicron wave as much as they're going to. (Not much.) How little they did will be part of the reason for dropping any more.
We should, of course, "Vaccinate the world and end the pandemic", since nothing less will end it. But while we're waiting for it to end, we might as well protect ourselves, stop trying to force others to protect us, and let the virus continue to educate them.
http://brander.ca/c19#libertarian
No, really, because I already wrote the "pandemic fatigue" takedown nearly a year ago. The headline at left is WaPo, I think, but links to the first click that came up from a search on "pandemic fatigue". It produced 3 other links to major news sources, with those words in the headline, in the last 24 hours.
(The headline at right is also from the WaPo, an hour after I posted here. Just to confirm it's The Current Topic, for the big papers. No, it doesn't link to the WaPo story. Stop reading them.)
Everybody's talkin' 'bout it, talkin' 'bout it - mostly because everybody who planned to travel or party is feeling crushed by the ruination of their plans. Those of us who had no plans but to stay home, eat, and watch movie marathons, are all feeling fresh and chipper. We are not interviewed for the news.
Do jump to my Feb 23rd, first article on "what is pandemic fatigue", for the picture I found of truly fatigued soldiers in WW2. But never mind the utter exhaustion of combat, how about a recognition that my father missed five Christmases, five Easters, five summer vacations with family. There was also no Zoom, indeed no phone calls, and no telegrams except about death. They wrote letters, which took weeks to travel, not being e-letters.
At no point, did anybody voice the idea that people were just tired of fighting World War Two, so maybe we should surrender.
What would be "this point" in World War Two? Let's equate March 2020, to September 1939: that would make the current moment about June 1941. America hadn't even joined the fight, France was occupied, England had barely pulled through the Battle of Britain, Germany was still allied with Russia.
In short, things looked very grim at this point in WW2, unless you were German Army, partying in France. Everything turned around in the next few months. Hitler insanely opened a second front. (Russians killed 88% of the German Army who died in WW2. Our front was the sideshow.) America was attacked on their own territory (if not State), and joined up, more than doubling the forces on Our Side.
"Nearly two years" into war was not the time for fatigue, nor is it now.
There are signs that the Omicron Wave will indeed be much less than our worst fears; we'll get through it, and many will gain immunity. Vaccination rates will get a shot in the arm. (Sorry.) We will very likely get a breather, and we've had the strongest reason possible given us to vaccinate the world. Maybe this is where it all turns around.
http://brander.ca/c19#fatigue2
The compelling images are at "blogto.com", which I'd never heard of, not being a TO guy.
I wasn't even going to blog today, take the day off, nothing to write about, no data. But this just made me cringe and be so glad I was home.
The story adds pictures, one from last night at left, the other today, and people's social media comments on how great it makes them feel to be frog-marched through a massive infection risk.
The continued case-count explosion of yesterday - again, all reports are a day behind, now a significant delay(!), and all reports are widely agreed to be undercounts because of insufficient testing - ensures that this is superspreading.
Fun fact about Omicron - we don't know whether it spreads so fast, because it raises the number of mean spreaders, or the number of superspreaders. Recall that original COVID-19 mostly didn't infect people - except where one case in ten infected many. Suppose Omicron doesn't infect four people per person, but one or two - except one guy can infect hundreds, easily.
If that one guy is in this crowd, with the bad masks, the generally steamy indoor climate, the packing, it's going to be quite the superspreader indeed.
In a couple of days, the price of it all will be high.
http://brander.ca/c19#pearson
You keep reading "It's like March 2020" - except for the most-important thing about March, 2020, which was a total lockdown. The streets were empty at rush hour, the air went clear in cities around the world.
The two differences are that:
There's just no clue what the risk is. What we don't know, could fill a blog post:
And we have our health! Definitely a Merry Christmas.
http://brander.ca/c19#blogdown
Then the hope was that vaccination would get us there - and we weren't to 70% yet, most countries, when Delta came along, and now it was at least 90%. Before nearly anybody made it to 90% - except Singpore, which CCCC followed with interest, perhaps able to fully open, yet still crush a curve.
Now it's meaningless, twice over. Even if it did not infect the vaccinated, and make them spreaders, (if not patients), the sheer infectiousness of Omicron would have driven the herd-immunity number up past 95%, pretty hopeless to shoot for. But the greater infectiousness (it was never zero) of vaccinated people means there's just zero herd immunity.
It's nice in a way, the CCCC job just got easier: I can quit monitoring that percentage as it hits 87% in BC today, may make it to 90% in January - now pointless, but nice to know.
Now, there's no more community-protection angle. They might as well drop vaccine mandates! The excuse for mandates was not forcing people to protect themselves, but to protect the community - which it no longer does, not much. It reduces transmission, but probably not enough to be worth the societal pain and conflict.
Now, vaccination is about protecting yourself, because the Devil will take the hindmost, whom the rest of us can no longer protect.
May there be mercy upon them from above, for the virus will have none.
http://brander.ca/c19#noherd
Oh, just click on this link, never mind me.
I do not want to be a fan-boy, and relentlessly advertise everything that comes from Andrew Nikiforuk of The Tyee. But, again, I find myself with no choice. Yet again, the man lets loose with a choice blast from the plasma-cannon of his disdain, and I found myself grinning and bouncing in my chair. "You tell 'em Andrew! Both barrels!" (It must be one of those new double-barrelled plasma cannons from Stark Industries.)
First, if you were wondering how Omicron could be vastly more transmissable, and yet only call for fairly modest restrictions, theatres and restaurants still open, it isn't just you: they're wrong.
He quotes the alternate advice of epidemiologist Yaneer Bar-Yam, who champions the hardass Lancet strategy of getting to zero.
Bar-Yam: "Omicron is spreading very rapidly. The responses of many countries are insufficient. Please protect yourself and your families. In the next few weeks shelter in place, and be prepared for the shock that will occur as cases rise."
Shelter in place. Absolutely god-damn right. My Moderna reaction yesterday (and a bit of today) was significant. It kept getting worse all day, feeling fatigue and muscle aches, my temperature peaking at 38C. Maybe worse than my first shot, though my second was almost nothing. An interesting data-point, perhaps, that when you switch vaccines, you're back to the reaction to shot 1. But it only made me more glad I'd taken it, because it was such a reminder how bad actual disease is. I don't want even the mildest touch of it.
Nikiforuk's article goes on to the larger story: we are not getting away from this virus until it is beaten, world-wide, and vaccines cannot do that. They operate on a scale of a year to develop and deploy. The variants, take just weeks. It's vital that we acknowledge our technological infrastructure of world-wide cheap travel, travel that takes hours, not weeks as it used to, and our indoor spaces that are not well-ventilated enough, as the keys.
But: upgrading our standards for ventilation, and, worse, renovating our existing structures, is so expensive, nobody but scientists seeing the obvious has the courage to even suggest it. It's not even a topic. But it was the lack of ventilation in that drug store the other day, and in the waiting area, that had me stressed and worried; even a small space is safe with steady air-flow.
I had some other ideas for today, but never mind. Everybody just read The Tyee article.
http://brander.ca/c19#niktyee
Never mind whether it was such a distant place for me to have to go to, an hour's walk away on Main Street. I couldn't see any close clinics, even the ones that were all booked up already, when I booked a week or so back.
My complaint is that it was "pathologically" bad in that I don't think I've ever seen a smaller drug store. I didn't take a picture inside, quarters were so close that would have felt like invasion of privacy. Through the glass, though, you can see it's just over 4 metres wide, and a metre of that was "behind the counter". It only goes 3 metres back, too.
I sat on a chair beside the cash register, nearly rubbing the front window with my right shoulder, so there was no choice but to take it in my "good arm" (left-handed). A minor point, though the sleeping on the sore shoulder woke me up a few times. Barely two metres from me was the other medical person, vaxxing a guy in the chair opposite. A third person waited on a yellow dot, barely inside the door, that might have been 2m from both of us, in a triangle, but I doubt it.
Another person behind the counter made for six of us in about a hundred square feet.
Corner Drugs is about six blocks from the huge London Drugs on Hastings, two stories tall, much higher ceilings on each story, and with access to an indoor mall space where people could have waited out of the cold, but with four stories of atrium air circulating above them. The choice was just baffling.
All credit and thanks to the staff, mind you; the lineup moved fast, they collected my card outdoors, called me in only when they had my shot in hand, my certificate in the other, as my butt hit that chair. I was out of it in 90 seconds, out the door in 9 more. So, not much risk, probably - except for Omicron's legendary powers, of course - we just don't know how "fleeting" a contact it needs. I was glad of my new N95 mask.
Much more glad when I stepped outside and was politely requested to go into the door two feet away, which was to a staircase up to the second floor of the mini-mall, access to various rented offices. They had zero space in the store.
The "waiting room" for 15 minutes, right, was the 1m-wide corridor, low ceiling, with the chairs a minimal 2m apart. There's another person behind the lady standing, and three people in the last five metres behind me, chatting together.
I'm not sure why I stayed, rather than insisting on doing my wait out in the cold; trust in my keen new mask, perhaps, and also, of course, not wanting to be that guy, who makes a fuss, when everybody is already edgy. I'm Canadian, for God's sake.
I was offered an mRNA choice, between mRNA Coke and Pepsi, and picked Moderna, having read they're pretty sure it's good against Omicron. Today, the sore shoulder of last night is on the mend, I lost some sleep to feeling dehydrated and (a bit) head-achy. If I had a job, I could be at it.
I'm grumpy at BC Public Health because they could have done better, but they did OK, I give them a C- : "adequate pass". Mostly because of those efficient, polite, staff at Corner Drugs - not any smart moves by Public Health.
News today is indicating that Dr. B and her minions are starting to really anger the population with their lack of federally-funded "lateral" tests, still gathering dust, their lack of urgency on vaccination. (Clinics closing over the holidays? When people have time and stores are closed? Are they mad?)
But that probably deserves a whole post.
http://brander.ca/c19#vax3clinic
I talked Connie into taking a dive through that "closing window" mentioned yesterday, and getting out to see "Eternals" yesterday.
Daring action! Nerve-wracking danger! The movie was exciting, too. (It was good; don't listen to the bad reviews. A ensemble cast, all of them good at their jobs, is a relief from the Lone Hero of most superhero stories. Surely "group heroism" is the right theme for a pandemic superhero movie.)
I had my new personal protective equipment, my KN95 Christmas-themed mask from Dollarama (no longer available). I was glad of it; we looked at putting in 10 minutes in this lineup and nearly turned around. We've been watching a lot of news, and feeling the risk, feeling jumpy. But the doors at back kept opening wide a few times a minute, throwing a nice chill breeze past us all, and up the chimney of the theatre's staircase. As you can see, it's hardly the fog-causing bar crowd of my "fog and filthy air" post from Revelstoke last summer.
But, my brain is adjusting to new rules. News from UK says that the huge "official" cases are probably a fraction of the real ones, because testing is so backed up and behind. Lineups for testing have started in BC, too. And measles, to name one, could certainly have transmitted, even in that lineup. Connie and I are going to avoid others for some days. We're all snuggled up for Christmas, now; three of the Xmas movies seen, our stuff bought. A few N95-mask trips to the grocery store will see us through the next few weeks.
This is a blog, not a diary: I'm just the example of what I think is widespread mental changes, the last week in particular. Everybody's drawing comparisons to April 2020, that "yikes! Hide at home!" feeling. SNL last night didn't have to be told by any government to slash their Christmas show; they had to plan the barebones substitute show since days ago. The sports leagues didn't have to be told, either.
Well, if we show symptoms in a few days, man, Worst Christmas Present Ever; but otherwise, we'll just, ah, join the crowd ... so to speak ... by staying home through the season. And, from the news, man, I'm glad to be just 6 hours from a booster, and just that two weeks away from the extra layer of insurance I'd like before hitting more movies.
http://brander.ca/c19#movieline
And I was just getting excited about having an almost-normal crop of Xmas blockbusters to go see in the theatres!
It's not about whether they'll close the movie theatres; it's about whether we'd even want to go - soon enough, we'll have alarming numbers, too.
I'm one day away from a shot, thus two weeks away from the first sign of added protection. My two doses, not yet six months old, make me pretty safe from Delta, which is still in the majority, and give me good odds against even Omicron.
On the other hand, the big jump in cases, this last week, was concentrated in my own health region, we've spiked up from 1.7% positivity (very good) to 3.5% (still not that bad) in a few days.
It's the "still not that bad", that makes me think I'm in a closing window - still open, but just a week, or even a few days, left, to catch a show or two without getting jumpy. It wouldn't be all that risky.
It's easy enough to scare people. TV news yesterday showed a guy in a hospital bed, "early 50s, previously healthy, double-jabbed" ... and currently unable to walk 10 steps. Shiver. His case is rare, of course, but risking much of anything, just to see a movie big-screen and big-sound, is a lip-chewer.
Except that seeing "Dune" with the Big Sound was absolutely crucial. The Hans Zimmer soundscape is a huge part of the show. I think I just talked Connie into seeing "Eternals" immediately, the one likely to leave theatres soonest.
There should be a lot of calculations being done right now, around the Closing Window. Office parties should be gotten over with early this week, stores visited, family seen.
The irony of these calculations, is that in aggregate, they bring on the wave a little sooner: of all those making the calculations, some are going to gamble and lose, and either catch it, or spread it.
And, of course, all the movies that planned to just open this Wednesday or later, gambled and lost their big opening. (Matrix, King's Man - sorry, guys, maybe in two weeks, if the data on booster-protection is encouraging.) Congratulations to Spider-Man for so agilely swinging in through the window in the very nick of time.
http://brander.ca/c19#closingwindow
Omacron Has A Fraction The Hospitalization!
According to the first, third, fifth, and seventh stories I read this morning, Omacron puts only 1.7%, or 5%, or 10%, of the patients in hospital, in contrast to 15% for Delta.
We Are All Going To Die
According to the second, fourth, and sixth stories, Omicron has nearly the same hospitalization rate as Delta, the wave will hit ten times as many people, overflowing hospitals and reducing us to India of last May. War-sized death toll.
That's all she wrote, folks. I'm down to the jokes. There's no point in blogging about the previous pandemic, the one from a month ago. All the rules for that pandemic are out the window. And we still aren't sure what the rules are for this new pandemic. It was hugely respected Neil Ferguson of the UK who came out with the most recent "just as bad" evaluation, so, frankly, CCCC is preparing for the worst.
I went out today to get N95 masks, a 90 minute bus adventure to Canadian Tire, just for fun, because learned doctors are saying nothing less will do in prolonged indoor exposure, not any more.
And we're almost smug, sort of, that we made the painful call not to fly or otherwise visit family this year.
Stay tuned.
http://brander.ca/c19#omacronion
There's the other Biblical story, of Passover. Those who marked their doors with the Blood of Lamb, indicating their Faith in the God of Moses, were passed over by the Angel of Death.
And vaccination opponents of the nuttiest grade, are fond of calling vaccination scars (used to be a thing) The Mark of the Beast.
Well, all that stirs around in my brain into one stew of religious metaphors:
Hear me, O Canada! (14.3% of you over age 5)
Mark Thyselves with the Insignia of Immunity!
Hear me, O Israel! (The 30.7% of you still unjabbed)
...and the Angel of Death Shall Pass Over Thee and Thy House.
Pretty much last chance, too, gang. My booster is probably not life-saving, but could be week-on-my-back saving, and I'll take it. Three days to the shot, and three weeks to antibodies, seems very long right now. Book today.
Otherwise, for thousands of Canadians, this is going to be the Black Christmas.
http://brander.ca/c19#passover
The link is not to the 2002 movie, or to Churchill's first book about WW2, but to the "live feed" page of The Guardian for December 16. (Not sure how live-feed pages archive, I may change the link tomorrow to an article about Denmark or UK case-counts.)
I certainly felt, reading the European news in The Guardian this morning, like Churchill surveying the rising militarism in Europe in the late 1930s. Country after country reporting "highest daily cases - ever", just days after being, um, normal. It's not even clear yet that this is all Omicron, though the UK is pretty sure. One UK researcher opined that there are far more than that, that everybody who thinks they have a cold, in London today, actually has Omicron.
Denmark is the one that gave me shivers. One-seventh our population, they had ten thousand cases yesterday - and they're only 2% behind Canada at vaccination. Worse, Denmark is pretty sure that Omicron hasn't even become dominant yet - most of those cases are Delta. That's seventy-thousand cases in one day, for the Canadian population - and we had 9,000 as our maximum 7-day-average once.
If the storm does come, it's a scenario that's always been implicit in that "R" number. If it gets high enough, a pandemic is not a "war", just a slaughter. Fighting back is like "fighting" a hurricane. It happened in India, we watched it happen on TV. Oxygen tanks in our hospital parking lots, awaiting a bed, are not impossible for us, either.
75% of Denmark is double-vaccinated. 75% of their Omicron patients are double-vaccinated. I suspect that Omicron means we can drop vaccine mandates! The excuse for them wasn't forcing people to protect themselves, but to protect others from infection - and vaccines can no longer do the latter. I'm not sure what percentage of Denmark is boostered, but 9% of their Omicron patients are - it's not clear that boosting does more than protect the one recipient, as well.
So the storm will come. We can delay it, only a bit, and we can beg, perhaps on our knees or something, for the unvaccinated to jump on their absolute last chance.
The storm will come, and it will rain upon the vaxed and the unvaxed alike.
How much rain? The one South African study just done, suggests one-third less hospitalization. I'd thought one-third the hospitalization would be good, but only 30% less won't help much. We have three drugs that properly test out as reducing hospitalization, if you get them soon enough: plain 'ol Prozac. The new Paxlovil. The much-hyped Merck Molnupiravir, just approved in Denmark. I can only assume that efforts to secure huge supplies of them in every clinic are frantic right now. Together, they might knock hospitalization and death down by an order of magnitude. Treatment, rather than prevention, would become the new front.
But that's all talk about treating the unvaxed, save a very few freak cases for the vaxed. India, we are not, as long as it was mercifully wrong to fear that Omicron would hospitalize children. We are at only 82% vaccinated, but more like 90% vaccinated for those over 30, 95% for those over 50. That does let us divide the Indian experience by 10.
Between vaccination and the treatments, we might avoid India. But we might not.
http://brander.ca/c19#gathering
The graphic at left links to his article in The Atlantic, but comes from the Catholic Information Centre, where Matthew Walther is listed as editor of "The Lamp" (a Catholic literary journal), and writes for a few magazines, including The Atlantic. He's from a small-town in southwest Michigan, somewhere near Kalamazoo, and Battle Creek (a name known to all Boomer kids as where you sent your Kellog's box-tops to get your toy). His article burned up the Internet for a few days, caused a few angry readers to cancel their subscriptions.
His story is that, in his town, "No One Cares About COVID", and have been living their lives, mask-free, vaccine-indifferent, not discussing the issue with any medico throughout a pregnancy, didn't come up.
That's all possible; it's not denialism, it's risk-acceptance, like driving after drinking, knowing your increased odds of harm, just shrugging at them.
The piece raised anger about "COVID denial", however, and I must agree on some points. Walther simply shrugs off what hospital staff are going through, with a comment that these decisions are not made despite, but after considering: "... hospitalization statistics, which are always high this time of year without attracting much notice; or death reports."
Hospitalization, in Michigan, as he wrote, was described as so full that they were crowding furniture aside, shutting down the neurology unit to fill it with COVID beds; one ICU at 140% of its normal capacity.
That's some pretty industrial-strength rationalization, sir; I think "denial" is a fair word. The article already has its own reply articles. That link to Slate.com notes that Walther is both White, and white-collar, thus in the lowest risk group. Other groups do not get to shrug off the risk of COVID.
The article is deliberately trolling, in some respects: it takes a thinly-veiled tone of suggesting that, not only is the whole risk wildly exaggerated and over-hyped to start with, that only nerds and weenies go through the empty performances of safe behaviour, but that this dumbness is only found in "the professional classes" of "a few" large urban centres. (I'm not sure how many "professional classes", plural, Walther believes in.) For one thing, it's a solid majority that think this is serious, and "care about COVID"; if that is more a City thing than rural, well, city folk are 80% of the country, buddy; rural just ain't the "real America" since WW2.
I found the article very valuable, and wrote The Atlantic to thank them. Walther doesn't rant about stolen elections or ivermectin, doesn't insult public health officials, he's a good writer and expresses himself well. To shrug off COVID, you have to be willing to not look at certain things, like how much worse it is for the poor, the old, the sick; how hard it has been on the medical people; how the numbers are just far higher than for seasonal diseases. But that exercise, of not looking, is normal. Americans could never have tolerated how bad things were for the poor, the Black, the undocumented doers-of-shitwork, the foreign sweatshops making their stuff, if they weren't good at not looking. His end of the political spectrum are just much better at it, and their not-looking skills proved equal to COVID.
So far.
Matthew's Michigan, ten million people, is a quarter the population of Canada, and currently has twice as many cases per day. Their daily death-rate has been steadily increasing since September, now reaching up over 100 dead/day, seems certain to spike soon. They may race ahead of all-Canada (currently at 21 deaths/day) to have higher total pandemic deaths than our whole country by late January.
I'm sure that Mr. Walther can ignore the dying, which, again, will disproportionally happen to people he's already good at ignoring. If Michigan gets much worse, it may exceed 3000 deaths/million, while Canada stays below 800. Thing is, New York and New Jersey are past 3000 already. The only thing that might crack the bubble around them, is the upset it would cause, should hospitals really hit their wall, and start telling people to get personal oxygen like in India. It would have to be out in the streets, impossible to ignore; because if it's possible, he'll ignore it.
I think that smart people will adopt safe behaviours and crush the wave when it comes near to that bad; I think the medical profession will work its fingers to the bone to keep Matthew able to deny. So, as bad as this next wave might be, I hold out no hopes for this Catholic even eventually offering a mea culpa.
http://brander.ca/c19#walther
This is not about those who can't take a vaccine. And, certainly, of those who won't get vaccinated, there are a few who just have a sad phobia problem, or only the one concern, quirk, that they can't get rid of, and are utterly cooperative, helpful, generous people in every other way.
But on the average?
On the average, you could hardly pick a better question to ask somebody, to find out if they have dark, conspiracy-obsessed corners in their minds.
Suppose there was no pandemic, and you just wanted a test for "finding toxic employees, who think everybody else is wrong, and they are right?"
In every workplace, including farming, forever, there are risks, and employees take risks for each other, if they must. Workers themselves bend safety rules for falls, for being injured by equipment, for chemical exposure - just to help other employees, or help the place stay open and running, by cutting corners.
They shouldn't, of course, but it's normal. And you want employees that will go that extra step, "take one for the team", look out for their co-workers.
And you ask somebody to take on one more risk - a microscopic one, if they believe the truth, and a very small one by their own beliefs, since even they have to admit that bad vaccine reactions are not even one percent of cases, or everybody could point to examples in every workplace.
And, no, they won't take any risk for the team. By our standards, we're not even asking them to take a risk - but by their own beliefs, they are refusing to take a small risk to help save workmates from a larger one.
Employers around the globe should be thanking and praising public health authorities for giving them an excuse for finding these poor attitudes out, and improving the workplace for everybody.
http://brander.ca/c19#goodriddance
This all may be about to become obsolete...but I don't think so. If Omicron really just breezes past all vaccination, as far as barely-symptotic infections go, at least, then vaccination might lose all ability to slow transmission. It seems more likely that it will change the numbers shown here upwards, a few percent.
What the graph is showing for BC is that 88% seemed to be some crucial point, for a location, most of the time. There are high-case locations past 88%, but those two clusters at the lower right - places over 88% that are around 500/day, and places just barely under it that were up over 1000/day - hint that it is, if not a herd-immunity number, an inflection point.
I say only "hint", because it's just a correlation; maybe those communities were just more transmission-friendly, more blue-collar work.
But, take 88% for sake of argument, and worry that Omicron transmits twice as easily, to pick a number. If Delta starts having trouble below 12% of the population easily infected, even Omicron would have trouble at 6%, or even higher (it isn't linear). Once we "Get to Ninety", every additional percent vaccinated takes away 10% of the vectors.
So ignore the news from the UK of the vaccinated, even boostered, catching Omicron. It's all the more important to protect yourself, but you're not doing nothing to save others, either; with BC and Canada at such high levels already, each jab still counts.
Remember that whooping cough takes 93% - and before the loopies started getting away with "philosophical objections", we used to get it.
It's a worry, that Omicron's mildness (so far) will discourage young people, already feeling pretty immune to COVID, will lose interest in getting in for the shot. Bluntly, while Omicron is still a question-mark for a few more weeks, a full-court-press of publicity and incentives should be employed to get them in.
Omicron could still be a terrible wave, and we have just a few precious weeks to head it off, it's still possible. We might need a few more percent, but for 2021, I just wish we could finish that "Get to 90"; it does seem to be the crucial number.
http://brander.ca/c19#get292
I'm staying on the topic because a little coincidence on Slashdot, the nerd-news website, with a "This Day in History" feature, of a popular discussion from December 12, 2014.
The topic was "Time To Remove 'Philosophical' Exemption From Vaccine Requirements?":
Michigan has a problem. Over the past decade, the number of unvaccinated kindergartners has spiked. "Nearly half of the state's population lives in counties with kindergarten vaccination rates below the level needed for "herd immunity," the public health concept that when at least 93 percent of people are vaccinated, their immunity protects the vulnerable and prevents the most contagious diseases from spreading." Surprise, surprise, the state is now in the midst of a whooping cough outbreak. How do these kids get into public schools without being vaccinated? Well, Michigan is among the 19 U.S. states that allow "philosophical" objections to the vaccine requirements for schoolchildren. (And one of the 46 states allowing religious exemption.) A new editorial is now calling for an end to the "philosophical" exemption.
They then link to the original story, an editorial calling for an end to that exemption.
In the pandemic, of course, with 10 million dead, we don't have "exemptions", so much as "no school vaccine requirements", in most places, not even for university students. It's a painful reminder of how long we have been warned about this, how great the need has been for a decade to crack down on this "philosophy".
The Slashdot discussion is recommended, because if you look for the posts with 5 "mod points", they're the ones from knowledgable people with first-hand expertise. Well, a few are just very eloquent: "There is no vaccine for the worst diseases: Stupidity and Fear". Some are those who had a bad vaccine reaction. But more are authoritative, well-done replies, like this reply to the guy with the bad childhood experience:
I'm a pediatrician. ... Vaccines are safer than riding in a car and swimming in a pool. Antibiotics have way more adverse events than vaccines and have not saved as many child lives (look it up). The anti-vaccine parents NEVER object to antibiotics, and often ask for them unnecessarily. Only clean water is considered more important in saving lives than vaccines.
That's a great comment about the antibiotics and the eagerness of of antivaxxers to access that intrusion into their bodies. I bet if the old antibiotics don't work, and they're still in pain and fever from infection, they have no qualms about "experimental" antibiotics, either.
Also of note, is that whooping cough is so infectious, it takes a 93% vaccination level to get that "herd immunity". The first version of COVID was actually pretty easy on us, with an R of 2.8, and "only" needing 70% vaccination. Delta would be more typical for the diseases we have always vaccinated against.
Omicron might not require more than 90%, of course. I've got a cool graph about that 90% level to show, tomorrow.
http://brander.ca/c19#oldwisdom
It's just an accumulating realization that Omicron isn't the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, it's the unvaccinated. The news is sinking in that case-counts will be heading way up over December, and many families and friends will cancel parties and suppers, or shrink them.
But with the lowered severity (which South Africa becomes more sure of every day, including today's news), Omicron would be just the 2021-2022 winter flu, for the vaccinated. Spiking case-counts mean nothing without hospitalizations, and we vaccinated just wouldn't make the news on our own.
I guess it was how funny it wasn't for me, on last night's Daily Show, where correspondent Jordan Klepper walked ultra-liberal last-hippies-refuge of Venice Beach, CA, and reminded us all that the real home of anti-vaccination isn't right-wing politics: it's the "wellness industry". In Venice Beach, you can pay for breathing lessons and herbal treatments that will "strengthen your body against COVID". Unvaccinated people with bizarre "wellness talk" excuses were rife, on the street. And they were smug about their total rightness.
Yeah...that late-night smugness is what did it. So I'm not angry at any one political view. Just the unvaccinated. We, who are in no real further danger from the virus, are letting them "close society", causing hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives - yes, it's their own lives, some poetic justice there, but I don't want to see any more horribly pathetic stories of unvaccinated weeping their regrets as the ventilator goes in. I just want it over.
http://brander.ca/c19#angry
So, I clicked on the link to see if it indeed had a message about that, and was only offering me bookings in January. I fumbled around to pick a nearby clinic, was surprised so few were in the crowded West End, and there were no booking days in December, January, or February. I clicked on a few other pharmacy locations before finding any bookings. I'll have to walk two miles, to get one of the few bookings left at all.
So, yow: I'm booked for December 20, 158 days after my second shot, just over five months, so my immunity should be pretty fulsome by January 10th, a month from today.
It's possible that Omicron will be doing that exponential spike thing in BC as early as Christmas, so we might be seeing thousands of cases per day by that January 10th. The booster is a few weeks before I wanted it, originally, but, as a preparation for the worst case, it's a good idea.
I was surprised to see the clinics so booked up; my generation in particular, are advised to book now.
http://brander.ca/c19#vax3
And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast-Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows"
This war is all about fog. The Big Discovery, still not really sunk in, some places, is that COVID can infect via "fog", aerosols, travel across a room, survive a long time. Bars and restaurants still haven't upgraded ventilation enough, so I look for windows. (Which works, in Vancouver, even in winter.)
But "The Fog of War" refers to how badly wars are fought, many of the actions directly the opposite of good, because combatants can't tell what's really going on . And few wars have that kind of fog, like a pandemic.
The virus is always acting today, whereas we, the opposition, are forever acting on information that is weeks old. The best decisions are all statistical, and statistics take time.
CCCC has already reported some wrongness ('we think', he said in the fog), about Omicron hospitalizing children. No further reports of that, and one comment that kids were hospitalized in one location, "abundance of caution" thing.
Reports do continue that Omicron is crazy-infectious, one today that it infected 4.2 times as many as Delta in comparable situations, which is just wild. Also, reports continue that it seems to average milder, though Africa does have hospitalization going up. Cases went back up today, from 13,000-16,000 the last three days, to over 20,000 - which is large, but not as extreme as the first week.
The death rate continues to be about the same as Canada's, 20-ish per day, the same as 3-4 weeks ago.
The problem that the Fog of War is causing South Africa right now, is that they have long-standing protocols for infected health-care workers: ten days of isolation. The problem is, that nearly 20% of them are infected, and they'll lose care-capability.
The vaccinated workers seem to be all asymptomatic or barely symptomatic; belief is rising that with careful masking and other PPE, they could work, and they're having frantic meetings about reducing the ten-days to five, too keep staffing up. Early studies seem to indicate that Omicron might also be more short-lived; and it's been known a long time that most transmission happens early in the disease, when symptoms are still developing.
Rigidity of rules has been a problem through the whole pandemic; the stiffness of our public-health bureaucracies has been shown up painfully clear. (We still can't get Bonnie Henry to give us our rapid antigen tests like Ontario has so many of.) But you don't change rules like the isolation rule without data, and South Africa will just have to guess.
Despite all the fog, this is clearly the end-game, though. The sheer infectiousness means it will soon be everywhere on Earth, and what happens, happens.
The funniest thing in the ZA papers is probably everywhere else: "Bill Gates Predicts Pandemic End Date", which is like click-bait promising you a pretty picture, only to give you that Bill predicts: 2022. Sometime. No wonder he's a billionaire.
http://brander.ca/c19#zadox
And I'm not even excited because Omicron might be some saviour mutation, which (almost) never causes severe disease, does confer immunity to others, and out-reproduces even Delta to swoop in and save us all.
That's not impossible, but all I need to get excited is the possibility that Omicron will be (a) no worse, and even (b) just a little better. If Omicron only dropped us back down to the fatality rate of original COVID (Delta was twice as bad), that would be terrific. 10% less-bad would be good. Equally-bad would be fine.
If Omicron is merely "no worse" than all those travel bans and stock market crashes can just go reverse themselves, and will. The travel bans should be dumped right now, obviously, because we know of enough community transmission to know that just extra testing and quarantine of African travellers will do just as much good, limiting the spread for a while while we gear up.
What's my reason for breaking silence and expressing hope? This three-hour-old article, hot off the press of the Johannesburgnews.net, which I advised readers to watch four days ago. Three quotes are given. One, I'm sure is already widespread, is Dr. Fauci, not known for understating risks, that it does look encouraging. Second, Dr. Angelique Coetzee, chairwoman of the S.A. Medical Association, whose announcement triggered the bans (to her disgust), said:
This version of the virus had been circulating in southern Africa for some time ... Let me be clear: nothing I have seen about this new variant warrants the extreme action the UK government has taken in response to it. No one here in South Africa is known to have been hospitalized with the Omicron variant, nor is anyone here believed to have fallen seriously ill with it....and there were upbeat estimates (carefully phrased) from American and Russian research scientists.
Most importantly (since you can always find a headline-hungry researcher), these guys are sticking their necks out because we really are at 3 weeks since Omicron took off, today, and we should be seeing the typical 3-weeks-later rise in the death rate. And we are not. There are no lineups for hospital space yet.
Even the frighteningly-soaring infection rate seems to have slowed. Cases were literally doubling every day there for several days, but yesterday was 13,000 some cases, after it had been 16,000-some for two days in a row, not rising.
The Johannesburgnews.net pages should have been filled with stories of rising hospitalizions by now, at least. I went looking for them, and found one story about hospitalizations increased fourfold since the start of November. November? The story was ten days old. All the recent stories were like the one on Johannesburgnews.net: cautious optimism.
Let's just go with that and have a nice week while we await confirmation.
http://brander.ca/c19#risinghope
Eighty years ago this morning, the Empire of Japan attacked the United States of America's Territory of Hawaii, killing about 3,000 people. Democrats Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman led the country to victory against the attacker. Their electoral opponents in the GOP provided unstinting support the whole time.
Two years ago, SARS-COV-2 had just arrived in the United States, we now know from samples collected around December 13th, 2019. But wherever the Republican Party held sway, in a state, in the federal service for the first year, or just had a grip on the psychology of a local county, the fight only went a third as well. The GOP were effectively siding with the enemy. Their philosophy of self-reliance, and hatred of community action, be it vaccines or trains, was the worst thing for responding to a pandemic. (They really hate public transit.)
That's pretty much it. The GOP, everywhere and always, weakly echoed by many of Canada's Conservatives, and strongly echoed by our PPC party, have opposed any community action to prevent disease, from distance, closures, and masks, to the miracle of vaccines. The results are in the graphs, in the NPR story the image links to, and summarized in this Guardian article.
The summary of the summary, for the busy: you have to go down to the county level, in the USA, to see Party effects, because their states are all a mix of rural (GOP) counties and urban (Democratic) counties. You have to "control for age" so that older counties don't falsely appear worse. They did all that.
And GOP-voting counties were nearly 3 times as likely to die, since vaccines came out in May. Republicans are at 59% vaxed, Democrats at 91%. Add in more masks and distance, and you have 2.7:1 on the average. In October, mid-wave, the ratio peaked at the most-GOP 10% of America had six times the death rate of the least-GOP 10%.
Funny thing, here's another Canada comparison: the ratio between Democratic-thinking places and Republican-thinking places is just about the same as the ratio between America (just over 2400 deaths/million) and Canada (under 800 deaths/million). I'm not going to grind numbers on such a thought, just roughly estimate that the American Republican Party has gotten half of their 800,000 killed, sacrificed 400,000 of their countrymen to the Enemy.
One thinks of Republicans fighting on behalf of Japan, to hand over ports in Texas and Florida, say, and the mind boggles. Republicans would never have sided with that enemy, just to make the hated FDR of the New Deal, look bad.
This Pearl Harbor Day, they should be shamed into joining the new fight.
http://brander.ca/c19#GOPsick
It should probably go double for us AstraZeneca cases, that vaccine has always been deprecated as a bit less (if not a lot less) effective than the mRNA vaccines (or even the overlooked Novavax 'traditional' vaccine).
The most-personal reason to get a booster, one's own protection, doesn't impress me much. I still get the impression, from Delta cases around the world, that the double-vaccinated are still very safe from COVID death or injury. News that Omicron was more dangerous than Delta might change my mind, but there's zero sign of that so far, and even rising hopes that it's milder.
The other argument is that I would be less vulnerable to being turned into an asymptomatic, unknowing disease vector. For that argument, I'm a sucker, so I think I'll have to cave. It helps that there is absolutely no way to leverage my not-boosting to encourage another dose be sent to, say, South Africa or Peru. Might as well.
The optimal time for a boost, I have been told for many months, is six months after the second shot. For me, that would be about January 15. At the moment, that's my schedule, but I will be recalculating almost daily as Omicron news starts to come in this month.
As things stand, cases in BC have been in general decline with a few bumps upward. The positivity rate in my health region is under two percent. There's just no reason to think I'm at significant risk of becoming that vector.
If Omicron news coming in is that (a) it's here, (b) it's growing, and (c) quickly, I'll go for my shot almost at once, as soon as the exponential increase is confirmed.
Why? Because it'll be a race between the rising case-count around me, and the rising effects of the booster, which will take a good week to do any good, two weeks to be approaching full effects, and a third, to hit full effect.
The spike in South Africa is just hitting 3 weeks right now, and cases grew twenty-fold in that time. Positivity up ten-fold from 2% to 20%. I don't think other countries, with much more vaccination and medical systems, will grow like that, because we now know that Omicron has been around in Europe and America for weeks, and they aren't spiking that fast.
It helps that there's no sign of a rush for the vaccine clinics (DAMN!) which means that if I see case counts start to rise for more than a few days in a row, I'll be able to get that booster in a day or two.
So, for now, I'm going to keep to my six-month schedule - but on a hair-trigger to call my pharmacy the moment a couple of days of bad-news, in a row, come in.
http://brander.ca/c19#boostercalc
Besides this link, to U.S.News and World Report from the Reuters image at left, you can do a CCCC memory-lane of my Cuba coverage, their DIY Vaccine Development, their recovery from their one-and-only wave with those vaccines, and even their world-wide doctor army, from just last month.
Even doing all that coverage, I didn't connect it, somehow, to the remarks of one Friend of the Blog. He noted that the Pfizer/Moderna/AstraZeneca vaccine stories, all come up with deseperately-needed products in record time. It was THE big victory of this pandemic, and proves that global capitalist Big Pharma is actually a pretty good system: it got results.
Sure, the "system" is that governments do the unprofitable, basic-research work at public expense, then hand over these billions of dollars worth of intellectual property to the global oligopoly, for free. Government regulators practically ensure that the oligopoly makes some of the highest profits of any industry, with approvals for high prices, so that they can afford their part, the research and development of the final product.
The high profits for them, mean it's less-efficient for us customers (the human race) than a low-profit solution, but it's a quick, high-quality solution. We want that, so have agreed to their prices, their oligopoly.
But that's compartmentalizing into "I just do my job", not the big picture. The reason we want the pharma is to save lives around the world, end the pandemic - which ain't over until nearly everybody gets the shot.
And Cuba beat Global Capitalist Big Pharma to that final end goal, the real measure of success.
I'm not aware of many vaccines around the world going to waste, or idle factories. The undeveloped world is at very low vaccination rates, not just because we've hoarded them to ourselves (and we have), but because there just aren't enough vaccine factories. It wouldn't have been efficient to have had twice as many, wouldn't have allowed high profits. So we don't yet have enough vaccines for the world yet, or an end to the pandemic.
But Cuba, an island at over 90% full-population vaccination, down to age 2, may have just ended it, for themselves. The top link is to their frantic efforts to upgrade their three vaccines to beat Omicron, and while they can't develop as fast as mRNA, they will very, very likely again be a leading nation at getting that booster out to the full population. Unless their existing vaccines are "good enough" to beat it in Cuba, anyway, because of their awesome vaccination rates.
What CCCC is really praising Cuba for is not technical excellence, with their old, tried-and-tested vaccines (like our overlooked Novavax), just their willingness to spend money on self-reliance. Cuba adopted a strategy of resilience, not efficiency. Our Big Pharma bunch have to be efficient to be profitable, which means they can't be resilient. It's too expensive.
Before his TV Show "The Awful Truth" in 1999, Michael Moore had an earlier one: "TV Nation", in 1994, where he did tiny "Roger and Me"-type documentaries. He once (episode 4, August 9, 1994) did a "Health Care Olympics" contest segment, with teams filming in emergency rooms in Canada, America, and Cuba, to see which would best perform on various speed and quality metrics for basic walk-in ER. Real network anchors were charmed into providing Olympics-like "colour commentary".
Canada was declared the victor, after all three had handled some serious cases. Moore later explained that the Cuban team had actually won hands-down, as was obvious in the actual footage of their speed and work. The Cuban ER had simply been handed more staff-hours per patient than the other two, had more nurses to hover over the room. It was more resilient.
But Canada was declared the victor anyway, because NBC told the production crew that they simply could not air a TV segment claiming that Cuba had beaten America at anything. Period. Censored.
What about other nations, with Cuba's level of money and expertise? That's over half the world. Not only could the some of the Caribbean done this, so could most of Central and South America, some of Africa. Instead, they went with efficiency, too, and kept up their good relations with rich nations. Cuba has almost no bridges to burn, in that respect: but other nations can be bullied to not have their own vaccine industries, buy Big Pharma instead. Not saying they were, just that I wouldn't be surprised.
What can we say to them now, at 40% vaccination and less, but the famous line from "Animal House", when Stephen Furst's Dorfman complains that the Tim Matheson's "Otter" has destroyed his brother's car, the greatest victim-blaming chortle and mocking of all time:
http://brander.ca/c19#cubawon
"Africa's Best Read" is the motto below the "Mail and Guardian", the South African paper. Good enough for me; that makes it the world's best read for the next two weeks, as the properties of their wave of Omicron become clear. Hot competition is to be found at the aggregation site, Johannesburgnews.net
CCCC was going to avoid Omicron coverage for another week at least, there being little point in spinning our wheels with no data. But the Mail and Guardian stories indicate a few preliminary findings.
It was worth a post, just to give out the links to good news sources. It's way to early to make plans, but there's enough information to drop any plans for living in a tent in the deep forest.
http://brander.ca/c19#za
Clearly, Bonnie Henry does not watch the cartoon "Archer", where Archer is endlessly frustrated by people using the world "literally" for metaphors that are definitely just "figuratively".
With the kind assistance of Friend of the Blog, Hugh Costello, and our memories of a certain 1960s cartoon, we present what it would look like if the effort had been "Herculean", literally.
http://brander.ca/c19#herc
From the podcast "Lovett Or Leave It", November 27, 2021. I believe the credit goes to journalist Tre'vell Anderson, who did not say his name as he said "I'll take that" when "Cops Who Quit" came up on "The Rant Wheel".
The "Rant", of course, is now a recognized comedic form. Perhaps most-popularized by John Belushi on SNL's "Weekend Update" over 45 years ago, where his signature, "But, noooooooo" singsong indicated the serious ranting was to begin. The harsh words of a rant are softened, sort of, by the obviously crazed, hair-tearing, lost-it screams of the ranter. (Various speeches from the last president were actually softened by his lack of coherent sentences. Journalists began referring openly to his interview answers and rally bits as "ranting".) The podcast invites several comedians to rant about something each week, and Anderson had this to say about police who quit over vaccine mandates.
"Oh, this could be filed under 'Don't threaten me with a good time like that'!
Okay, so let me get this straight: you're telling me that the there's a simple way to improve public health, while simultaneously getting rid of the one percent most conspiratorial-minded, and willing-to-violate-the-law-if-it-suits-them, members of a police force! This is great ****ing news! The police have begun to defund themselves!"...
"It worked out so much better than we could have predicted! They were trying to stop covid, but they ended up forcing the dumbest people in police forces across the country to tell on themselves, and resign without having to involve internal affairs pretending to investigate anything!"
"What unbelievable whine-babies these police are: they rush into harm's way, in like, a gang den, but then they're so scared to of a little shot that they snip the supposed blue line that stands between us and chaos. I mean, I know it's like, they're like: 'Oh, no, it's different, this is about body autonomy and me doing what I want"... Which I just translate as "I enforce the law, until the second the law actually affects me, and then I stomp off like Baby Huey."
It would be great if the senior brass of the Calgary Police Service could take that attitude: what a great way to clean out the force.
But, nooooooo.....
Instead, Calgary Police brass chose to help their employees, instead of protecting and serving the public trust, by helping them avoid vaccination.
The details are dull, frankly, read the story. The City was going to make it expensive to cops that didn't want to vaccinate, but the police made sure the public would have to pay for their testing that was an allowed alternative, if significantly less safe for everybody the police officer comes near.
It's called "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy": that people who protect the bureaucracy, at the expense of the actual job of the bureaucracy, tend to rise to the top of the bureaucracy. By the second generation, the bureaucracy always protects itself, its members, its future, first, and does its damn job, second. The Chief served and protected that most dark, conspiracy-minded, contemptuous-of-regulation portion of his force, rather than those paying their salaries.
CCCC would like to take this opportunity to invent a new word for the "unvaccinated". Let's call them the "covid vulnerable". The covid-vulnerable cops will need two $40 tests per week, or $4000 per year, each. If 10% of the 2500-ish cops of the City of Calgary choose to go with publicly-funded test regimes instead of publicly-funded $20 vaccinations, the 250 of them will cost Albertans $1 million per year...all to fund the public being endangered, so that 250 cops can have their paranoid conspiracy theories.
And, no, they don't even have to wear any badge that lets the public know they might elevate citizen disease risk - which would also identify the cops with the most-concerning attitudes and beliefs. Every poor person is instantly stigmatized as a poor person by their dress, and cops treat them accordingly; cops with nutball beliefs will get no such exposure. I bet their partners don't even get to know whom they're in the car with.
Can the test costs come out of the senior staff salary budget?
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxrant
But this article had a cause, other than, "well, it happens very rarely to the young and healthy, but it does happen, sometimes, it just happens"...which has been pretty much the message so far.
This article links instead to an easy-read for laymen article in the science journal, Nature, about the genes that make you vulnerable to COVID.
Briefly, that study found nine genetic sites where variations on those genes are associated with increased severity of a COVID case, four more where they increase your susceptibility to catching it.
The increases for each genetic effect are often just 20%, or maybe 50% for a few of them. But, one on the "chromosome 3 region" makes you twice as likely to develop severe COVID - and those are the variations 10% common in European ancestry. You can have multiple variations, and the effects would add up. So some people can be, as the first article says about John Eyers, "primed to react with maximum violence to the Covid virus".
It doesn't matter, if you're one of them - as long as you're vaccinated. The doctors who are sure that John's extraordinary case is genetic are also sure he'd have been fine after a few days, if he'd been vaccinated. Instead, the athletic champion, former bodybuilder and stripper, workout fanatic, went into hospital four days after testing positive, and dead after a month in hospital, half on a ventilator. A classic case for a 90-something, not a 42-year-old with a nominal 1-in-1,490 chance of death on average.
Honestly, I looked at that 1-in-1,490 paragraph and thought, "Isn't THAT high enough? I wouldn't get on a plane that had a 1-in-1,490 chance of crashing."
But the 1-in-1,490 is a grand average, including the genetic unfortunates. The other 42-year-olds actually have a 1-in-1700 chance of dying, the average brought down by that 10% that have double, triple, octuple odds of ending up dead like John.
The story includes family and friends begging John to get the jab. They listened with eye-rolls to the anti-vax lies he repeated to them from social media, (and which he repeated himself as a "Facebook ranter", who "couldn't put his phone down"). He also got anti-vax rhetoric from Tony Robbins, whom everybody should have been ignoring long before the pandemic. I got the impression they are left with little survivors' guilt, because they genuninely tried to save him.
I hope his story can save others.
http://brander.ca/c19#badgenes
I got frustrated as the case numbers went up and down, and I was never sure what the trend was. Back in September, I started tracking just the 3-days-of-data we got every Monday afternoon from BC Health, giving a kind of automatic 3-day average, once a week.
I just graphed a few months of weekends at left, and the limited data is simplifying and clarifying: we've had an "R" so close to 1.0 for two months, that any little outbreak, in a town, a few care-homes, can send the cases back up for a while, but they steadily have trended downward. At this rate, the other metric I've been waiting for - the ICU occupancy to drop below 100 beds - is probably finally coming in early December. We made it below 100 cases/million/day weeks ago, and we're closing in on 50.
Here's the thing: it's entirely the story of the Fraser Health Region, which is the eastern cities of Metro Vancouver, and some of the places now under water in the Lower Mainland. The graphic at right is just the Fraser positivity rate for the last seven weeks. Northern was bad positivity, but with only 6% of the province's population, they were only a real contributor to cases when they were at their worst, sending sick people to external hospitals.
The other regions had quite steady positivity, and low. The sum of the rest of us was always more than half the cases, but Fraser, with 1.8 million people, our largest region, was always the biggest single contributor.
The slow progress may be vaccination, or gradually dawning sensibility of how to behave. It's not natural immunity, because with hundreds of thousands unvaccinated, a few hundred cases a day won't shrink that very fast.
Vaccination in BC is as uneven as anywhere else: from 97% of all over 12, in the heart of Vancouver, down to 30% for the 12-30 ages in some small towns in the interior.
It's all about those locations, at this point. There's no need to push for more vaccination in places that are already past 90%.
http://brander.ca/c19#3day
Perhaps it was lucky that I got on and off 14 airplanes in the 16 months before the pandemic, kissing the ground at home in mid-February 2020. I haven't felt the slightest urge to travel, not by hated airplanes from hated airports, yet.
The urge to fly might never return, though the urge to see family is constant.
I was caught by the lead "grab the audience anecdote" on the story at left; a woman is stuck in South Africa for a few weeks, because she flew down to see her son, recovering in hospital from a snake-bite. She said she "couldn't afford to quarantine" and I dropped my jaw. How can you afford to fly to South Africa on a whim, but not have a few thousand to spare for a hotel? Turns out another clueless Boomer doesn't understand modern air travel costs: there are flights to S.A. for five hundred pounds, not even a thousand Canadian dollars. The magic of modern technology and mass-production of airline flights.
I've had some (dark) "fun" in comments about climate stories, the last few years: Greta Thunberg showed the way, became world-famous for simply not flying - but absolutely nobody is emulating her, certainly not other climate activists. 140 Indigenous activists flew to Glasgow for COP26, to complain about, well, other people's carbon emissions, since they didn't apologize for their own, or even mention them.
Could they have demonstrated at home? That way, they could have mocked all the private jets. (Boris Johnson declined to take a train home to London, just had to fly - in a particularly luxurious small jet - because of schedule. He needed to be at a dinner of former journalists, most of whom had mocked climate concerns.)
But, back to the pandemic, international travel also spreads disease around the world. Maybe that's a cost we can just suck up, during most times, as we mainly only spread human diseases. But during a pandemic? Only because our leaders a slavish to every single businessman who claims he's losing money and can't do payroll, are we even talking about international travel for fun, just now.
Nobody used to be able to zip around the world because of a sick family member; heck, it's only a few generations since we've had telephone to call them with, you'd just get the story of their survival or death by mail. As for air travel just for vacations, that came in during my lifetime - only after I grew up, for anybody middle class. (There used to be a term, "jet set" for rich people. It's now everybody.)
It's not that CCCC is stepping up with some kind of proposal for illegalization or even rationing of air travel. (That can come from the climate people, when they get serious.) It's just that the newspapers should be mocked for expecting any of us to have sympathy for the plight of international air travelers. CCCC will reserve all sympathy for people so poor, they not only can't travel, they can't get a damn vaccination. There are billions of them, so screw the air travelers.
The lady should have Zoomed her son, like I've had to Zoom all my relatives in Spain.
http://brander.ca/c19#intertravel
I can't watch news channels much, because there's this thing I hate: talking and talking about a news item that is basically pending, as you await the election outcome or whatever, to fill time, while just waiting for the actual news.
The three things we need to know about Omicron (has it a higher R; does it sicken more; is it vax-resistant) will all take weeks to learn. We will learn one thing within the week: "Is it already prevalent around the world, and no point in African travel bans?"
That news will be so big, either way, that the world's smallest pandemic blog will not be needed to spread the word. So everybody else's topic for the next few weeks, is not mine.
Nope, why not cheer myself up on rainy day XXXVIII, than celebrate the departure of Matt Wolf from Jason Kenney's government? The departure of Kenney himself will have to await an election, unless he is removed by his own party - but the odds on that being for "not enough pandemic fighting" are 50/50: just as likely a mutiny from the Matt Wolfs of the party will throw him out for not being courageous enough to just "let the bodies pile up" as Boris Johnson would (if he could).
There's little need to harp on Wolf's misdeeds, which are neatly summed up in a few words at left. Oh, what the heck, twist my rubber arm. We all know what happened next, but I'd like to rub it in with the reminder at right.
It was his chasing around an activist doctor that was almost funny. Dr. Joe Vipond, who is a long-time NDP donor, but has turned down every offer to run for office, made it a practice to speak at rallies for more pandemic fighting of every kind, critical of Kenney's approach.
Calling him an "NDP activist" was kind of bizarre. It was like advertising for the NDP, in certain quarters: associating the NDP with doctors and disease fighting? Please, Matt, throw more of us in that briar patch. The only place where the approach made sense was in the darkest corners of the Conservative Party, where embracing infection was brave, and avoiding it was not just cowardly, but a political expression, like wearing an NDP T-shirt.
The physician responded that this is the opposite of being paid by the NDP. His politics are clearly driven by his policy interest in "fighting disease", a position not formerly controverisal or political. He'd been an NDP donor for years because they favour more nurses and hospitals, but now it's about, well, even using nurses and hospitals, fighting disease at all.
We shouldn't have to defend that from Matt Wolf. We shouldn't have Matt Wolf near any public policy. He can't leave soon enough.
http://brander.ca/c19#mattwolf
Apologies for the day off; new monitor, and it was hell to install. (No, seriously: old computer, new monitor, adapters for the HDMI cable needed, and my computer basically hates having three monitors to start with.)
Stock markets crashing, panic in the streets! (At left, movie poster for 1950 film about a man with Plague hunted like an animal.)
First of all, let's admit that part of the fear might come from the awesome name. A favourite Greek letter since college equations, it has three syllables of rolling thunder, sounding like a lesser Mordor Wraith from Lord of the Rings: "Omicron, Lord of Thrargrarsh". That might be part of the problem.
Secondly, let's get one thing out of the way. If it transmits well, if it transmits 1% better than Mr. Modi's Malady, Delta, then it will arrive at your door. And your restaurant. We've seen this movie over and over: travel and border restrictsions are speed bumps. Useful, valuable delays, but only delays.
The graphic links to a quick read about what little we know so far, from Salon.com. Here's the even quicker version, get on with your day.
But the probability runs heavily against this being a major disaster.
What this underscores is how very right vaccinators are, how wrong anti-vaxxers are, and how "not vaccinating the whole world as a policy" is basically being another anti-vaxxer.
I almost hope this is bad enough to get notice, in contrast to the fears that were cranked up (including by CCCC, working from fears expressed by Gwynne Dyer, who is rarely wrong) about the Bolsonaro Blight, the P1 variant, and P1 did not become another pandemic. (Of course, we were "wrong" only in that Delta was actually worse, and beat out P1 at Badness.)
If Omicron is bad enough to prolong the pandemic a bit, cause some alarm, we proponents of "vaccinate the world" might get some more traction. That effort has been disorganized, underfunded, and generally pathetic. It's on track to keep the pandemic going with new variants every year for the next decade.
Let's vaccinate the world before it gets to Omega.
http://brander.ca/c19#omicron
Often the loss is more tolerable because of the age and health of the deceased. At least three men have died there in recent weeks, all unvaccinated, all subjected to anti-vax messages by their own friends. One was in his thirties and an athlete who put in five miles per day as a golf course marshall. The other two were in their mid-50s and previously healthy.
They all met regularly with a social circle at a restaurant run by an anti-vax activist, plan strategy for suing over vaccine mandates.
Now, of course, the families are very, very upset at the surviving anti-vaxxer circle. But they are defending themselves with vigour, and it's getting pretty ugly. There was a fourth man, who survived after some time on a ventilator, and the experience didn't convert him. He describes friends as being "called to God", and accuses pro-vaccine people of "being in a state of psychosis" for being angry at anti-vax.
You read these stories and realize there's nowhere to go with some people, no point in trying.
As I anxiously await whether the next month or so of kid vaxxing and ongoing slow adult vaxxing, to hit a number that might work (unlike Singapore's 85%), it's discouraging. But I'll put it down to the awfully depressing weather, and soldier on.
http://brander.ca/c19#newlow
Another post that's just an ad for the one article, and you barely need to read it, anyway. In recent days, we've surveyed that both Denmark and Singapore, pandemic exemplars to the world. Both found out, the hard way, that vaccination to 80% and even more, is not enough to prevent a massive infection wave hitting the population if you completely re-open.
America is anything but a pandemic hero, but it is large, it contains multitudes, and the most-impressive pandemic nation-state within it, Bernie Sander's Vermont, (he started as Mayor of Burlington, right), which is 95% white and wealthy, has been the example.
Until it hit 80% first-dose back in June, four months ahead of BC just getting there about Halloween - and completely re-opened. They are now up to 300 cases/day and 3 deaths, rather where BC is today. Except BC has 5 million people, and Vermont, just 625,000 - so it's giving us a preview of BC hitting 2400 cases/day and 24 deaths, worse than we've ever had it so far.
So, we simply cannot be foolish enough to completely re-open and drop all restrictions. The "population-level experiment" (hugging at family gatherings this Christmas) will hopefully be the biggest experiment we conduct for the next few months.
I feel like CCCC articles, as best I try to find matters of interest, are just vamping until the next experiment - Singapore dropping restrictions (again!) next Monday, now with 92% vaccination, supposedly "enough". But Monday won't give any answers, nor two Mondays after that. It was a month, for Vermont, and Denmark, and Singapore, before the effects of re-opening clearly showed up in the case-counts.
Worse, variability in how long that takes means that the LACK of cases, is still not any clear proof. At the one-month mark from next Monday - the very end of the year - we won't be sure that a wave won't start in Singapore the next week. There will just be slowly increasing confidence.
Singapore isn't the only experiment running - the whole world is running a thousand slightly-different experiments. But the Vermont, Denmark, and Singapore experiments, which had the very best examples to start with, declare clearly now that nobody can competely, utterly re-open, not at just 80% or less.
http://brander.ca/c19#vermont
As we learned yesterday, Denmark shot up into full-ICU-land when they totally re-opened at 75-78% vaccination. Singapore is the one that CCCC will be watching the next two weeks: having done the same at over 85% vaccinated, they pulled cases down very rapidly with some limited restrictions, will be re-opening again Monday, at 93% of population-vaccination. (Which must be 98% of adults!)
If Singapore can fully re-open in six days, then not be showing a new exponential taking off a week or so later, we've found the vax level high enough to beat Mr. Modi's Maladay, Delta.
In the meantime, Canada may be repeating the first Singapore experiment this Christmas. Seems that about half of Canadians have plans to ditch social distancing over the season. We'll be back to hugs and shouting at each other across the turkey, to be heard over the kids.
It's a happy image, but fingers crossed. We won't be at higher vaccination rates than Singapore of September was; we just hit 80%, and it's slowed down so much that in four weeks, I wouldn't expect to make it all the way to 81%.
Except for kid vaccination, otherwise, I'd just be confidently predicting a nasty wave in January. Kid vaccination should give us another 3%, if the parents indeed vaccinate about half. And I'm even hoping for a few more adults getting in, stimulated by their own kid getting it - or needing to take the jab to get the kid to do it.
There's no hope of getting to Singapore's current 93%, of course. We're probably in for that January wave, even if we make it to 85%.
http://brander.ca/c19#holidistance
I looked for a pretty graphic of Denmark, but I can't get around the drama in yet another boring old case-count chart from worldometers. (It links not to worldometers, which has 100 links from this blog, but to the MSN story on Denmark.)
Denmark hit 75% population-vaccination three months ago, had a sharp decline in cases over the next month, from 950/day (like Canada having 6000) to 300/day (like Canada having 2100, about 20% less than we have today). So they opened up completely, no more vaccine passports, nothing...and the vaccination rate hit zero, basically, as everybody presumably just relaxed. It was over.
Oh, my god, no, it was not. As the graph shows, Denmark shot up to 3800 cases/day (like Canada getting 25,000 per day, triple our worst days of last Fall and Spring), so, of course, they are grimly restoring restrictions.
We are only a little ahead of them on vaccination rates. Denmark still stuck at 78%, we at 79%.
So it isn't "over" in the no-vaccine-passport, totally unrestricted sense. We've seen the warning from Denmark. We have only one more percent first-dose, and one less percent "fully vaccinated".
It ain't over, then. But the kid vaxxing is here. Fingers crossed that it closes the gaps.
http://brander.ca/c19#denmark
The news, rather, is that:
That required keeping my media shopping in British Columbia, where a major disaster, gas rationing, and that drug crisis heavily competed for media attention.
But still - more people died of COVID-19 ON THURSDAY, just in BC, than died in the whole disaster so far (9).
Of course, if more news organs followed worldometers, as CCCC does, yesterday would have been a news story where the US death rate slipped below 1000/day for the first time since mid-August: down to 983. And yet, I just went over the main page of the Washington Post, and there were zero pandemic stories above the fold, no opinion columns about it. The "more top stories" section, below that, finally had a single story about vaccine mandates at Disney world. It was below the story about Adele convincing Spotify to not shuffle her album play.
When is the pandemic over? In sociological terms, it can end before it ends epidemiologically. That 983/day death rate would have been a big story a year ago, now it merits no mention. They're used to it. Canada, down below 25/day, much more so.
As I said, not a story, it's a lack of story. "Indifference" is a hard thing to measure, let alone track. But it points a way to us all remembering how to go to theatres again, and relax.
http://brander.ca/c19#nonews
The real Cuban Army is the one that can invade other countries. Granted, Cuba did kinda-sorta invade Grenada 35 years back (they claimed they were helping out), but realistically, they have no army for doing anything but defending Cuba were it invaded.
Nope, the powerful, respected Cuban Army that is welcomed in 40 countries around the world is their "white-coat army" of doctors that have been very active during the pandemic.
They've been doing it since 1959, for PR and for hard currency. (The US has attempted to criticize it as "human trafficking" because 75% of the payment goes to the government, not the doctor, who is still earning more than at home. The doctors are not coerced, and if anybody could run away from Cuba, it's somebody already on foreign soil, wielding a useful skill.)
They even assisted wealthier nations than their own, Andorra and Italy, because of pandemic pressures.
They are also called the "white-coat battalions", but "army" is more appropriate; we're talking some 32,000 people around the world. Jamaica added 137 to the 296 already practicing there for the pandemic; they're "the backbone of pandemic response" in some Caribbean countries.
Caribbean countries. The ones that are a half-hour flight from the richest country in the world, and yet they depend on little Cuba.
Between Costa Rica, the Public-Health Superpower, and Cuba, the active-response superpower that has its own vaccine industry, and has brought in 30,000 foreigners to its International Medical School for training, it seems like the Gulf of Mexico is better off with self-reliance.
Of all the countries that touch the Caribbean or the Gulf, the USA and Mexico have done the absolute worst in the pandemic. Leadership isn't so much a thing in itself; it's just conducting your affairs in a way that others want to follow. Who'd want to follow the USA, these days?
http://brander.ca/c19#cubanarmy
Google News is good at searching for phrases, but not for concepts. I can't remember the phrases used in articles a month or two back, where pharmacists wanted permission to start child vaccination immediately, with their existing stock, when approvals came. (As they did this morning.)
There's nothing to it. Pharmacists are trained to do far more complicated drug preparation than diluting one-fifth of a little bottle and putting it in your arm, or even disregarding the "adult" instructions on the bottle, and giving a kid exactly one-third as much.
So that's what they asked to do. At the time, I didn't see articles about them getting any reply, which is normal for our public health. They don't communicate much detail.
Understand, this means that if they'd been given permission, you could be walking your kid into Super Drug Mart right now, and asking for a shot. That would be it.
But the stories all have our answer this morning, which is that our children (and their grandparents) must simply wait until:
A week, not a big deal? Even if kid vax doesn't "end the pandemic", just a transition from Canada's 2500 cases/28 deaths, per day, right now, down to, say, 1800 cases and 18 deaths/day, if delayed by a week, has a cost of 70 lives.
A vastly higher cost has been endured simply to respect our process of testing, testing, testing, every single new treatment, then all over again for kids; they're getting vaccinated nearly a year later than the first health-care workers last Fall. (Again, recall that Cuba, with its own sovereign health-care system and vaccines, vaccinated down to age 2 right off the bat. Successfully.)
But this cost is being paid just to let Pfizer sell special "kid bottles" of vaccine, rather than use what's right there in the pharmacy today. Seventy lives(!) It comes on top of the news story today that Canada has thrown away a million doses already.
With vaccine, that's obscene.
http://brander.ca/c19#kidsdelayed
Chauncey DeVega, at Salon.com, has always been one of their best truth-tellers.
While others use the careful language of journalism, couch statements in the subjunctive, add tentative qualifiers, DeVega is mostly blunt and plain-spoken.
I just found the review of the last American administration that I've been wanting to read for ages, since the devastating documentary "Totally Under Control", by Alex Gibney.
There's no news here, though. We've been following the whole story all along, we know it. DeVega simply reacts to it, the way we all should still be reacting:
None of this should be a surprise. Trump and his regime committed these crimes against humanity in plain sight. These "revelations" are simply providing more evidence and clearer details of how and when these crimes took place.
He quotes Charles Pierce in Esquire:
The sheer contempt for active national leadership and the sheer disregard for the public health illustrated by this material has no parallel in American history. For the sake of their own public image - which, ironically, was headed for the storm drain anyway - members of the administration abandoned even their most rudimentary obligations as public servants. The country was denied the information it desperately needed because some time-servers and coat-holders were trying to avoid a tantrum from the Oval Office. We are lucky we survived this long.Salon interview with epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves about his use of the word "genocide":
Trump's pandemic response is not the same as Nazi Germany. It is not Rwanda. But Trump's response is something that is well beyond a policy mistake. One hundred thousand people are dead. There are likely to be 150,000 or perhaps even 200,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. The estimates are that two thirds or more of the deaths could have been prevented. ...Moreover, it was premeditated. There were people in the White House and elsewhere warning Donald Trump, "People are going to die. We need to do something about this." And the White House made a concerted policy decision to let people die. Their response to the coronavirus was death by public policy.
We can parse words about whether that is manslaughter or mass negligence. Part of me, in retrospect, feels like using the word "genocide" made it too easy for some critics to deny the reality of the situation.
Incidentally, Dr. Gonsalves' July 2020 prediction that 'two thirds' of deaths could have been prevented is 16 months ago: and Canada's deaths-per-capita is 32.6% of America's today. Nice estimating, Dr. Gonsalves.
Dr. John Gartner, who psychologically profiled the ex-president:
Donald Trump's behavior with the coronavirus pandemic is intentional. He is malevolent. He is a first-degree mass murderer. This is a plan.
...
Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is going to be the most successful bio-terrorist in human history. Let me repeat myself so there is no confusion. Donald Trump is the most successful bio-terrorist in human history. This is not an accident.
Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner:
Some jurisdictions call this involuntary manslaughter or negligent homicide. The lowest level of homicide has three elements to the crime, and Donald Trump satisfies them easily.
..the details of the three elements are in the Salon article. I've done so many quotes, this is like one of those movie trailers that gives you all the best scenes. DeVega actually has a lot of company on the plain-speech, and he brings them all up for review. We've been hearing one commentator after another say all this for 21 months, but then they are diluted again by journalists using softer words, and reminders that millions of people have come to agree on the "controversy" of masks, distance, and vaccines.
The conversation turns to this all being "normalized", accepted, not called murder, or bioterror, or even negligent homicide, for which a literal court-case could be constructed - just not talking about it at all, because we feel helpless to ever have accountability. A great new term, "Malignant Normality", is coined to describe our current psychological position.
It IS painful to look back on the era, of course; Holocaust survivors also actively avoided memory, to reduce their pain. But CCCC is heavily breaking its rule to not mention the former president's name, if avoidable, because we mustn't avoid this: making it go down in accepted history that this was all as good as mass murder.
You can have truth without accountability. We don't shun from talking about the sins of other countries just because we can't hold them accountable without a nuclear war. We do call the treatment of Uighurs in China, "genocidal".
Indeed, the previous administration very much wanted China to be held accountable for their seminal part in this. I completely agree. I just think that every such administration should, too.
http://brander.ca/c19#bioterror
When I want to point out to American commentators how different Canada is, I point to Calgary Skyview, the federal electoral district that covers most of Calgary's northeast.
The election graphic shows how American we aren't. Instead of being gerrymandered into some bizarre district shape, instead of it being a fight between one party (of colour) and another (95% white), in Canada, it just means that every candidate was "of colour". The Conservative lost, but didn't do that badly. Skyview may have been an immigrant destination, with cheaper housing, for fifty years: but they came in one year at a time, and absorbed the local culture, so they vote Conservative, just a little less than Calgary ridings of Less Colour.
And, they fight COVID. In fact, their high community spirit may have given them advantages. They are no longer in the news for their high COVID-19 rates, but how low they are. And should be, at NINETY-NINE PERCENT ADULT VACCINATION, the best in all Alberta. Or, maybe, anywhere.
They turned their negatives into positives. It's a community with multi-generational homes, which creates risk for the elders. But that also gives educators the hook to call upon the whole household to vaccinate, when grandma is. It's multi-lingual: but that means those who speak the language are automatically more-trusted when they call. Volunteers set up faith-informed appointments at a religious centre; drive-thru vaccine clinics, and a "vaccine rodeo" at the Leisure Centre. It takes volunteers, creativity, community knowledge of where you catch people.
Community leaders of every stripe, but especially public health departments, should be studying their tremendous success the way Harvard Business School studies "unicorn" super-success companies.
It has a population of over 150,000, has had 3 deaths since early September. By population, their share of Alberta's 700 deaths since then would be about 25.
Alberta Skyview has pretty much won the pandemic, at this point. The upcoming child vaccination is pure gravy - and from the network of good relationships they've built, I bet they vaccinate about 80% of their kids, instead of the expected 50% in most places.
Wouldn't it be something if more "racialized communities" pulled together to become the pandemic's biggest winners, instead of their current stereotype as its losers.
http://brander.ca/c19#skyview
About five weeks after my praise of Cuba and their DIY vaccination strategy, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! did the video piece on Cuba's successful pandemic fight, praising how they'd kept cases way down until their vaccines were ready to go.
Then all hell broke loose. Amy's praise was almost comically mistimed. When Amy did her story, Cuba was having about 5 deaths per day. They have a quarter of Canada's population, so that's like 20/day for Canada, lower than our current count. It hovered at that level until cases went exponential in June, and as seen at right, deaths exploded at the start of July. They peaked at 100/day, as bad as when the USA hit 3000.
But the vaccination program kept going faster as well, took off when they hit 50% about Labour Day, and they are now almost the most-vaccinated on Earth at 89% to one dose, for the whole population. As also seen at right, cases went down rapidly after that, deaths are now back to 3-4 per day.
And this is not entirely due to the lockdown they had to implement: yesterday was the day their airports reopened. They area also reopening restaurants, theatres, everything. They vaccinated from age two up! That's why they're at 90% of the total population already.
The Cuban vaccination program, being their own DIY thing, is fascinating, after the year of agonizing and debate about ours. They developed three vaccines, and used all three. I guess case-counts in coming months will tell them which worked best. They all involve three doses, no less; with a very tight social community approach, they can count on people getting all three, too.
I'm so impressed by Cuba, I think I'll stretch their coverage over two days. Tomorrow, about how they helped fight the virus around the world.
http://brander.ca/c19#cuba2
The third P.O.P. (Protect our Province) briefing came out just a few days after I covered the second briefing, on strategies for schools, so I didn't catch it at the time.
It's still there (linked from graphic) so you can "Hop on P.O.P." for their very nice, friendly, easy-to-take lecture, this on testing, and how bad BC has been at it.
Right out of the starting gate, moderator Melody Ma points out that only 10% of the tests just gifted to BC by the federal government have even been used.
It includes explanation of what PCR tests are, versus the faster, easier Rapid Antigen Tests that we haven't been using. (The joy of internet video lectures is how easy it is to skip ahead if you already know all that.)
But there's also positive history, of isolated sites where heavy testing was made to work: a homeless shelter, acute care outbreaks, a long-term care pilot. Dr. Victor Leung was involved in some of it, and has prepared a quick, clear lecture with slides and all that.
It's a very nice volunteer service, but especially needed since the one complaint that really stands out for the basically successful BC public health work, is how bad they've been at information we need and want. Especially about testing!
For the modelling - how much good testing should do, theoretically - Dr. Paul Tupper, an actual math professor, takes over. We're apparently talking about preventing 50% of the infections in long-term care, that are brought in by staff.
Since the rapid tests have flaws, there are situations where they do good, others where they do little, or as much harm as good. The problem of "false positives" is pooh-poohed, frankly; since positives are rare, they can all be followed up by a second rapid test, and/or the full PCR test that is still trusted.
This issue also affects our biggest political trouble, right now, whether you have to use the slow, expensive PCR test to get back across the border, or can we get by with the rapid, cheap one? From the lecture, I get the impression that the rapid test would also be good enough for border control, and the current regulations are just unsupportable.
Lastly, Dr. Lisa Barrett talks about her use of rapid tests in the community, in Nova Scotia, and how well it worked.
It's an "informational" lecture with a very strong political message, to be sure: start using those 3 million unused rapid test in BC. The case is very strong indeed, and I hope public health is listening.
http://brander.ca/c19#poptesting
Just to dig into a pandemic side-issues (I just checked: this is post #573, we are down to "side issues"), what if we don't yet know that COVID-19 has a high mortality in some other species?
We might lose much of a species in a sudden die-off, if they're vulnerable to COVID-19, and it just hasn't hit them yet.
I don't know why that hadn't occurred to me before, it was always there. We know lots of species, particularly cats, can get COVID, but it never seemed to be more than a cold to them, when stories surfaced.
Well, no more: a children's zoo in Nebraska just lost, not one snow leopard, but all three. They caught it last month, along with two tigers, who both recovered. But the mortality for their snow leopards was 100%.
Gorillas can certainly catch it easily enough. a single zookeeper, double-vaccinated and wearing PPE, nonetheless passed it to 13 of 20 gorillas at the Atlanta zoo, last summer.
The remainder are being vaccinated! The 13 were treated, including a 60-year-old that got monoclonal antibodies. The zoo is also vaccinating its cats. San Diego announced recoveries for all eight of its lowland gorillas. Snow leopards in California responded to treatment and are going to be OK.
In nature, however, there are no monoclonal antibodies, vaccinations, or anti-virals. If COVID proves high mortality to something, we may have a die-off of a whole species to lay at the door of a certain pack of dictators who let it get out into the world.
http://brander.ca/c19#animaldieoff
I hadn't thought of the great Norman Spinrad novel Agent of Chaos, for years. I was reminded this morning by Peter McKnight's op-ed in the Vancouver Sun, about "The Plague Doctors" (link from graphic).
In the book, Spinrad, mostly a clearly leftist writer, anti-war, anti-big-business; saw that a cradle-to-grave nanny state would be an oppressive state, too. An opposition was needed, that would first have to champion the notion of Change, at all, because every big state resists change. So there were "agents of chaos" that simply disrupted society, and were, if anti-heros, still the heros.
It turns out we have exactly that among us: people who just see the society as a bad thing, and rather than working towards incremental change, or even violent change, just want to burn it all down, like The Joker.
McKnight's op-ed brings up the findings of a psychologial study by Asher Lawson and Hemant Kakkar in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, that found that sharing of false science news was not, strictly, a conservative or liberal phenomenon. It was only common in conservatives that rated low in "conscientiousness", a term for traits of impulse control, delayed gratificaion, planning, goal-directed, respectful of accepted norms.
High-conscientiousness conservatives did not share "fake news" about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin any more than liberals did.
All of this seemed pretty straightforward - how could a person with conscientious traits be so irresponsible as to spread deadly lies - until I got to the "chaos" motive.
They found among the non-conscientious conservative subjects a "need for chaos". To quote:
The need for chaos is described as a drive to disrupt and destroy the existing order or established institutions in an attempt to secure the superiority of one’s own group over others.
I had thought of Steve Bannon and his "fill the zone with bullshit" strategy as one somewhat-crazed ultra-partisan using a public relations strategy, an wild one. I hadn't thought of a whole psychological class of people - who are clearly at least several, maybe tens, of percent of the population - have an active need to disrupt our whole society, just trash it, like a mob breaking all the store windows on Main Street, and throwing Molotov cocktails into the broken windows.
You can only hope that society has an "immune system" to protect itself against such madness. I mean, if "filling the zone with bullshit" worked, then we wouldn't have made it this far.
But it was the most-depressing pandemic article I've read in a week or so, which is really saying something.
http://brander.ca/c19#chaos
Water metering was (is, no longer, read on) a hot-button issue that also caused some customers to get emotional about government tyranny. Calgary was still almost 50% flat-rate, and the flat-raters, most of whom we could show were actually overpaying for the privilege of being able to maybe-overconsume someday, were holding fast to it.
We were clear on one thing: City Council must be persuaded that no new houses built could go flat-rate, and then, that nobody on meters now could switch to flat-rate. Both of those were relatively easy fights, because nobody with a water meter had to have theirs taken away.
When could we go to that difficult pass? Rob was asking what else we could do besides stop meters growing, and the room went quiet. Thats when I spoke up, and I used that lilting voice you use when making a funny remark. But it was kind of calculated. If the remark didn't go over well, it was just a joke; if it scored, then the joke-voice wouldn't keep the suggestion from landing.
I used this technique countless times in my career, and I'd say it had a 90% fail rate; mostly the audience would accept it as merely-a-joke, no doubt with relief. I had a number of too-radical ideas in my career.
Rob Pritchard, however, got it in a flash and highlighted it. For years, just at coffee, I claimed credit for the strategy, which was absolutely, certainly never discussed as such.
I said, "we have to let the no-growth work, because Calgary is growing fast, and just gently convert for now. But when it hits 80% water-meters, we can start demonizing the flat-raters as water-wasters who are costing everybody else money, and push for forcing them to switch".
I punched up the joke-voice on "demonizing". I think I even did air-quotes, it being the mid-90s, and we'd recently invented them.
I'm not sure what made me say "80%" as the sociological tipping-point where you can demonize, but it still has a good feel to it. Minimal, even: you definitely need a huge majority to marginalize the remainder.
We may be reaching it with the unvaccinated, as we reach 80% population-vaccination here in Canada. It's not us, yet, I was inspired to write by Austria putting only the unvaccinated into full don't-leave-home lockdown. Wow.
And Austria may be the leading warning for Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland, which are all seeing soaring cases just now, despite vaccination to about 70% for most of the area. All the stories mention vaccination, that the new restrictions will apply to the unvaccinated. Germany is just reaching the point of banning the unvaccinated from entertainment, but they're talking like they're ready for more.
There's some reason why Aaron Rogers is "furious" that he was outed as unvaccinated. Sports stars depend on their reputations for their income, their endorsement millions, which is why they avoid politics. (Except Colin Kaepernick, whose very successful cancellation will ensure no other Black football player makes a political statement for years to come.)
This LA Times Op-Ed is gentle about the unvaccinated, only angry and blaming about those who spread misinformation...but it records all the other op-eds and speeches that are much angrier.
If child vaccination, and the slooow march of adult vaccination don't get us to a point of naturally declining cases in the New Year, I think it's going to get much uglier. At the moment, we can point to child vaccination and gentle persuasion as still getting us out - at least, those of us already past 75%. In parts of Europe and America, it could get uglier before Christmas. The vaccinated supermajority will start feeling both outrage, and the reassuring presence of great numbers on their side.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxmargin
At left, modern body armour (extreme version) which you are required to wear if you wish to work for the military. You might have done your own research into bullets, and concluded that it would slow down your dodging, that is a far better way to avoid getting shot. But, alas, there's your way, and your daddy's way, and the right way, and the military way, and in the military, you have to do it the military way. Or you don't get the job.
For the military, vaccines should be just another life-risking, annoying part of and endless list duties heaped upon you because you were crazy enough to sign your life away in the recruiting centre. (It's the one place where "sign your life away" is completely literal.)
That's certainly how Canadian military are taking the mandate. Over 90% were already vaccinated when the order came down.
And then we come, of course, to America. From the "US Naval Institute", an article on American military vaccine 'hesitancy'.
It goes back a long way with them. They lost something like 16% of the Guard and Reserve officers from the Air Force, in 1998, when they mandated anthrax vaccinations. And that was where they were afraid of anthrax being used as a weapon in theatre. Any disease you can vaccinate against offers possibilities for germ warfare, because you can arrange for your own forces to be immune, then just spread it generally. And still, left, or went non-active, to avoid it.
There are some lessons learned: they didn't provide a lot of information about it, depending on the mandate to just force the issue. But this meant a lot of their people "did their own research", which of course involves stumbling into confidently presented lies and misinformation.
On a day when we remember those lost to the air having an unhealthy content of iron and lead, we should also have remembrance that half the dead of World War One died of disease. It's part of war, and part of survival to fight disease as the enemy. The doctors are certainly not.
http://brander.ca/c19#military
Well, their signature super-building patio where the Crazy Rich Asians got married, looks like a great base for a giant Yukon "Inukshuk" man to stand, as the fine, skillful photoshop-art at left makes clear.
But, also, both have massive levels of vaccination - 90% of the over-12 population, nearly 90% with both doses - and also, are fighting big waves.
Not big in the absolute sense. Singapore was mentioned by CCCC just over three weeks back, trying to get back down to an "acceptable level of violence", and have now had some success. The wave broke, with cases coming down - though deaths, lagging, are still up around 10-15 per day, twice as bad as Canada, given under 6 million population.
They are back on the CCCC radar for coming up with a typically Singapore, hypercapitalist solution to vaccination. (Singapore came in second, behind Hong Kong, on a listicle of "hypercapitalist nations", at Yahoo.) Singapore is actually going to start charging COVID patients for their treatment if they are not vaccinated by 8 December.
The article doesn't mention the costs, but over here, they are hundreds per day in hospital, over a thousand a day in ICU. I don't see our culture going to this pass, but I'm kind of glad somebody did, just to make the point.
Meanwhile, in Yukon, the stories about it are frustratingly lean on detail of who is transmitting, and how. They literally are not reporting contacts any more, as they say that all community contacts are currently dangerous. It's clear most cases are in Whitehorse, as you'd expect.
Comments on one story stressed that everybody seems to be home with a sick kid, and demanded to know how many cases were children, in school. The news won't confirm the number of children vs adults; no story indicates the number of cases that are vaccinated, either. It's pretty frustrating.
It would be great to have a sense of whether we should be optimistic for the situation after ages 5-11 can be vaccinated, or if that's likely to be only an incremental improvement, like getting past 75% was.
http://brander.ca/c19#singyukon
I just had to pass along the article just today at The Atlantic, on How Easily The Vaccinated Can Spread COVID-19.
The question has been up since the Provincetown story last August, where a large number of cases were all to vaccinated people. It raised the question of whether they were still transmitting it just as much as sick people, perhaps worse since the vaccinated may have no or few symptoms and continue with their lives.
The Atlantic article clears it up, at least somewhat. My post on Provincetown linked to British studies that showed vaccination reduces transmission by a factor of six. One-third as likely to get it (that's still roughly true even with Delta), and half as likely to pass it on if you do become positive. The latter was true for Alpha, in Britain (the BoJo Bug), but not so much for Delta, the Modi Malady.
The new study that The Atlantic links to is very recent, references the previous British work, and has new data for Delta. Vaccination still reduces transmission from infected vaccinatees, but 'merely' by 25%-50%, rather than 50%-63%. (The number drops with time after infection; vaccination makes you much less infectious for the first few days, but then only somewhat less infectious by the end of the week. That's oversimplifying what I read, but it's the rough idea.)
So we should continue to count on vaccination reducing total caseload of society, benefiting the unvaccinated as well as the protected. But the reduced protection compared to earlier variants may explain much about Whitehorse, while we'll tackle tomorrow.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxtrans
Which pandemic changes will hang on for as long as it takes to completely shake up a business with a big makeover? The ones that save money.
For months now, I only went to the "Delany's" coffee shop on Denman, though a Blenz a few blocks closer is now acceptable. There are now two that have put the sugar and cream back out on a condiments table, so you can get your coffee/sugar/cream mix to that perfect proportion your habit requires.
Starbucks, I confirmed the other day, still just asks what you want (I say "double double" grateful to Tim Horton's, not for their unexciting coffee, but that handy phrase) and provides something close. I let myself be irritated, this once, and went back to ask for more. I was provided with a few white sugar packets and a little cup with at least an ounce of cream in it, a bit of a waste. And it struck me that they haven't even had to buy brown sugar since the pandemic started, since brown-sugar fans no longer see the sugar go in.
That's got to be a bit of a time saver for the staff, not having to tidy up the condiments stand every 20 minutes, probably saves a few dollars for the store, as well. Things that dispense cream, handless, the way washroom handless soap dispensers work, could have been around by now; it wouldn't be hard to do a handless one-teaspoon-of-sugar dispenser, either. But, they're more expensive than just putting out packets and jugs, I suppose.
Robert Heinlein once wrote that the answer to every question starting with "Why don't they..." is "money". "Why don't they go back to pre-COVID customs?" about any business, is undoubtedly the same.
http://brander.ca/c19#starbucks
It really provided a lift the other day with this article on vaccination rates across Greater Vancouver.
It's a quick read, check it yourself, but the upshot is that with the exception of Vancouver's most-troubled areas, like the Downtown East Side, the whole greater city of nearly 2 million people is at more than 95% vaccinated for those over 12.
My own home area, both "City Centre" and "Midtown", is over 97%. That's downright amazing for vaccination levels, the flu vaccine can't even compete. I'm not sure our measels or smallpox vaccinations would ever have reached that height.
It struck me, thinking about the under-12 part of the population, that I don't see them in restaurants. We don't go to "family" restaurants, mostly, and everybody in the place is 12 or up, which means if there are 12 other customers in a restaurant, the odds are 75% that all twelve of them are vaccinated. (0.975^12)
The staff would have to be, of course, and we are, so we can be subtracted.
While the vaccinated can spread COVID, the odds on them doing it across a restaurant, to another vaccinated person, are just not worth worrying about.
So I'm going to stop. I just talked Connie into hitting an old favourite Chinese Dumpling Restaurant tonight, one that has kind of close quarters; I've missed it, and I miss eating Chinese food hot from the kitchen.
We're going out, we're going out carefree. This thing is ending.
At least in Vancouver.
http://brander.ca/c19#van97
For some really upbeat, life-affirming, moral and practical uplift, read the New Yorker article by famed physician and author Atul Gawande ("The Checklist Manifeto", look it up) that's linked from the hero picture at left.
Gawande investigates something that's becoming plainer and clearer over the years: impoverished Costa Rica is, for its budget, at least, a public health superpower. They live longer than Americans, and not because of their reactive, acute, care, but their pro-active public health system. It's amazing.
They are in the pandemic news today, because of their logical, but brave-sounding (to us) COVID-fighting strategy up next: legal, mandatory vaccination of the whole 5-12 age group.
Costa Rica hasn't had a great pandemic, about twice as bad as Canada's, with nearly 1400 dead/million, and the vaccination rate is 73% to one-dose so far. That's a few percent behind Canada, but looks very good compared to their neighbours: Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, all in the fifties or lower. Panama, El Salvador...and The United States of America, are all several percent lower than Costa Rica, in the sixties.
And now, the bravery to just tell people to vaccinate their kids! This is on-top of several other diseases being mandated for vaccination. I couldn't find a list of them, but I'm sure it's the usual stuff all our kids get vaccinations for.
Vaccination would be a really classic Costa Rica move: huge medical outcomes value for the minimum in cost. Their whole program runs on shoestrings, so they ensure they get topnotch shoestrings, at least. Their vaccines are the Western brands, in contrast to Chile getting to a hugely impressive 86% vaccation - but with Sinovax from China, which may limit the effectiveness. Indeed, it may explain why Chile hit 80% vaccination a month ago...but has also seen rising cases the last few weeks.
Costa Rica's cases are currently down to a few hundred a day, slightly worse than Canada's rate per-capita, and declining. Fingers crossed that their continuing vaccinations, and the children's, will see them out of danger.
http://brander.ca/c19#costarica
It's just the day for conspiracy theories, like Halloween is the day for superstitions. Well, why not a new conspiracy theory? And for extra drama, I'm just going to accuse the fair-haired Doctor of BC, Our Hero, with conspiracy.
My scurrilous accusation isn't complicated, and it doesn't involve a lot of conspirators, the one kind of conspiracy theory that has a hope of being true.
Suppose the top few people who decide on our level of restrictions, actually wanted the currently-too-high, and very-slowly-declining level of cases, to be just that?
But the modelling they're doing is an assumption of an R of 1.07, juuust enough to keep cases up there. As they say, around 500/day now, down from 700/day at the height of the fourth wave. (CCCC has resisted noting any decline, because of just that R number: if it goes down for a few days in a row, count on an increase, like yesterday's jump up to 596.)
The current case-load is bumping off a few, to several, of our citizens per day, has killed 10% of the total pandemic losses (200 of 2200) since that fourth wave hit. Failing to shrink the case-load with some more restrictions, "circuit breakers", or otherwise, has costs.
The dark thought occurred that this is mostly a pandemic of the unvaccinated: only a few dozen of that 200 were vaccinated people, all of them very old and frail, with few years left either way. Such sacrifices might be, however unconsciously, deemed acceptable for the Greater Good.
As long as the cases continue, as long as tales of the ICU are on the news, as long as somebody down the street emerged shaken from a week in bed to talk about how they regret not getting the jab, there's pressure on those last unvaccinated to fold.
If we had a period of restrictions, and cases plummetted to, say 50/day instead of 500, one can see vaccination cratering: the hesitant, the just-procrastinators, the "busy", would all call the pandemic over and not get around to it.
Sentencing themselves to a fifth wave, a second pandemic of the unvaccinated. Bonnie might well think that's the worse outcome, a total death-toll that's higher.
Bonnie and her bunch can always say they're just balancing restrictions for health against the need to re-open, the wave is being pushed down as best as possible, the ongoing case-loads are a frustration.
On the fifth of November, however, the unworthy thought presses in: is this the "acceptable level of violence", not for enduring over the long term, but for harrying the stragglers to the clinic? For making the fourth wave very long, but the last?
CCCC is conflicted over whether to decry this 'conspiracy' or join it.
http://brander.ca/c19#R107
 Germany: 68% is not enough | 
UK: 73%, also not enough |
Netherlands, Belgium, | 
Spain and Portugal: |
As you look around that end of that continent, you get widely-varying results.
One might tentatively conclude (especially since epidemiologists have said this) that 68% and even 73% total-population vaccination, as in Germany and UK, are simply not enough to prevent what Russia is having a much worse case of right now, "The Pandemic of the Unvaccinated". (Russia is so bad, I removed it and confined this to Western Europe. Maybe when I get interns I can handle that much more data.)
The head-scratcher is the comparison of France, and the Low Countries on her borders: Netherlands and Belgium. They're all at about 75%-76% total-population vaccination (one dose), yet while France is only starting to worry about a slight uptick in cases, Belgium and Netherlands are dealing with big waves like those last spring when vaccination was just the doctors and olds.
I started googling around for how those countries followed the tough vaccination policies of Mr. Macron. Absence of evidence isn't much, when you can only look at English news about non-English countries, but I couldn't find anything: more about demonstrations against restrictions and mandates. So I have to wonder if the major difference between France and the other two are those mandates: same percentage, but it's the people in business and service that are at near-100% in France.
And then we come to the Good Kids of Western Europe, who did their homework and ate their vegetables, and got their dang vaccines. Why can't you other kids be more like Spain and Portugal? Look at their results, they passed their Fall COVID-19 exam with flying colours and can now graduate to Normality.
Well, one hopes. It may be that Spain and Portugal are still just also behaving better, have more of those "Safe Behaviours" that CCCC champions. But it all goes together: countries and provinces and cities where behaviours are better, are also the places with the highest vaccination rates; vaccination and low-case-numbers may be both symptoms of the same cultural priorities, rather than vaccination being the cause in this correlation.
Despite BC only declining slowly, and the prairies struggling to get their cases down, Spain and Portugal point to Canada being another major nation about to join those looking at the actual end of the pandemic.
Not much point in belaboring this point, as it will only become clear on a scale of months, not days or even weeks. Much depends on the child vaccinations, and on Canada reducing those clusters of rural unvaccinated. But I'm starting to hope for a Merry Christmas.
http://brander.ca/c19#westeurope
The image links to the October 23rd story decrying the foolish homecoming at Queens, as covered also by CCCC tentatively approving it, with finger-crossing like "Perhaps...we'll find that even 8,000 students, under a vaccine mandate...can meet, outdoors, even in a thick crowd, without a serious spike in cases..."
CCCC declares full vindication of the prediction, based on sixteen days of subsequent case data, at right. The kids were alright; we were timid, and the foolhardy students right to have their homecoming party.
True, Global News is fretting that cases have jumped to levels not seen since May - though the story doesn't mention the party, or even Queen's university; it mentions young kids and schools.
In any event, put the "jump" in perspective: it seems the price of the party was increasing cases from 6/day to 9/day a few days later, then a huge spike of 25 cases in a single day, October 27, ten days later - and a few days after that, still at 8-10/day.
All told, the bottom graph of currently-active cases jumped from well under 50, to about 75-80, but that seems to have been the peak. Yesterday's case-count was back to three. It's five days past that spike, 16 past the party. The total addition seems to be maybe 50 cases.
It's not spreading. The extra cases did not lead to still further cases; R was one or below, for the vaccine-mandated community of Queen's College. The thing about university where the students live there, is they hardly have contact with anybody else, at least not during the middle of term.
A party like this probably wouldn't be so "low-cost" in cases, in the general population where vaccine rates are a "mere" 80%. This crowd, even with some non-students mixed in, was likely over 95%, and if they caught a case, they were way less likely to spread it, at least around Queen's. (And their youth may help.)
Because it's not spreading to the older population, these extra cases will almost certainly not lead to deaths or injuries. The party, in COVID terms, came free, no butcher's bill. Including the secondary and tertiary infections, maybe 80 got sick from 8,000 partying, virtually all had mild symptoms, and back to work and school. A 1% risk of a few days or at most a week in bed; no real risk of harming the family - for homecoming? An easy risk decision. Have the next party, kids, enjoy.
I'm not sure what to make of the Ontario dashboard that has a ZERO for outbreaks in post-secondary settings. If true, then the whole "spike" I'm writing about was due to something else, like elementary schools full of unvaxxed children, a problem everywhere else. In which case, that party had no cost at all, no cases, zero. CCC is being conservative and "generous" to the scolds, to guess at 50-80.
Either way, I think this party shows that it's possible to get back to normal, at least outdoors. You couldn't get less distanced/masked/safe than that crowd.
Let's celebrate along with the kids.
http://brander.ca/c19#kingstonwin
Salon reports that the NYPD has "caved", that is, accepted a vaccine mandate that most of them likely didn't hate to start with.
Think about that, when you read of unions or associations of any non-political kind suing or fighting over vaccines: there can't possibly be an internal majority against vaccines, because only a small minority of the general population are anti-vaxxers. By the time a mandate is discussed, and some union starts protesting, a solid majority of the profession or whatever group, have already vaxxed, most of them eagerly.
How can it be? Easy, when you've ever been part of a voluntary association, right down to cub scouts and condo boards: a loud, angry minority can chivvy along a shrugging, largely-indifferent majority if the issue isn't that hard for the majority to take. People would rather get along.
With the NYPD Benevolent Association and union, a small smile of victory can be had, discreetly, over their early bravado saying "officers would resign in droves", that they would sue the city, that there would be "fewer officers on the streets" - in the end, came down to 34 officers (out of 50,000 employees) being given paid(!) leave. And vaccination in the NYPD has gone from 70% to 85% since late October.
There is something special about police unions. The entirety of the New York public employees were mandated, but only the police union had this small core of anti-vaxxers that harried their majority into a futile fight. Of course, we know from the summer of '20 that police have good reasons to see themselves as beyond external governance. These are the same guys that turned their backs on their Mayor when he spoke to them; they knew there would be no consequences.
I'm glad for all of New York they lost this one.
http://brander.ca/c19#nypdvaxxed
I almost laughed at the very idea when I saw a headline today that the COVID-19 global death count worldwide is five million and rising.
Hah.
The graphic at left links to a story from last summer, where studies finally concluded on India's horrible surge last spring: that while the Indian death toll remains officially at about 450,000, it's certainly over 4 million.
I won't bother copying the graphs, but there's something very odd about the Indian statistics again. After they fought their surge down in June, the case-counts continued to slowly decline down to 14,000 per day (which is like Canada having under 500/day), and the deaths down to a few hundred per day (like Canada having 10). But a few weeks back, the death-counts ticked way up, now at 750/day, without the cases going up first. Rather as if cases weren't being reported unless they went to hospital. In short, another Indian wave may be starting, and the government still not able (or willing) to report on it.
India is not the only country to undercount. The world total by this point is surely at least ten million. The global sum on worldometers has been showing a declining wave for some weeks (frustrating, as BC stayed and stayed at 700 cases/day - we were behind the whole world...) The last two weeks, however, have been ticking up, hinting the next wave (world average) is already starting. We are still losing, at a minimum, 7000 humans per day to this enemy.
The world vaccination is going so slowly that one despairs of seeing it done in 2022. For all the progress, that ten million looks glumly certain to hit fifteen million next year. I pick the number because that would be "the 2000 club" that America and UK managed to fall into, except the whole world would qualify.
I see now that my group, the double-AstraZeneca gang, are approved for a third dose. Bluntly, until I see some indication I'm at significant risk of a bad disease event without it, I'd rather see it expended overseas. (Certainly not vaccine-hesitancy: got the flu shot yesterday, no reactions at all!)
We should vaccinate the world, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it would give us a kind-of funny line to pull on our own anti-vaxxers: "Don't be so ungrateful! There are people in India who have no vaccine at all!"
http://brander.ca/c19#10million
That seemed an appropriate headline for Halloween. It's how we don't think of the virus, and should. The pandemic is so large a story that you can miss whole amazing stories, lost in the shuffle. I never noticed the Fiji story.
I only came across it as a mention in the story about Tonga getting its first case. Which, by the way, gave a shiver: the traveler from New Zealand had tested negative in NZ, then positive after his plane flight to Tonga. They slapped him and everybody who'd dealt with him into quarantine. (The rest of the airplane? No mention. Let's keep an eye on Tonga.) If it had taken him a couple more hours to turn positive, he'd have been away; and so would COVID-19, across at least the main island of Tonga.
But the story mentioned the comparable incident in Fiji, which had many travelers quarantined over the course of the pandemic, but never had an outbreak. Then ONE "community transmission" was found last April 19th. He was the first of the outbreak at left: 50,000 sick, 675 dead so far. (The dead rise for weeks after the outbreak ends, as the ICUs gradually lose their fights.)
As always, it doesn't say whether the community transmissions that then got away, were all contact-traced back to one infection. Fiji being such a small place where "everybody knows everybody", it strikes me as very likely that the whole thing could be, and was, traced back to the first hospitality or travel worker who got it from a traveler.
That would be weird. All you are is another disease victim, not somebody who did anything knowingly. Yet, you've been traced to be the first case of the outbreak that got away, and 675 died, rather like somebody who unknowingly dropped a match and started a fire.
The graph at left tells a typical story. From those first cases in April, they worked hard at tracking, tracing, small lockdowns of areas; they had a terrible problem from the start, since one of the early cases attended a funeral with 500 people. It's clear that Delta keeps surprising us: one transmission was when a helpful person caught it by handling traveler's luggage.
But, it was all in vain. It completely got away anyway. If I had to pick a turning point, this June 7 report on Fiji News that has 83 cases in one day, some outside their "containment zones". The story ends with pleas for vaccination, and wow, did they vaccinate fast, look at the graph at right. Man, you get no better uptake than in the worst period of an outbreak, with cases every hour and deaths day and night.
The vaccination leveled off at about two-thirds of the population. Does that mean even in the fires, people just won't step up? Not really. Fiji is a group of Islands. Two-thirds of the population live on the one biggest island, where the outbreak was. The other Fijians had no such sense of urgency. They've just hit 70%, well ahead of the USA, and the rest are trickling in.
The island nations of the world had a real advantage at the pandemic, but the virus becomes a wolf in the fold if it gets in. We have to vaccinate the world.
http://brander.ca/c19#fiji
They were a pretty new thing, once. People died in horse-related accidents all the time; but the licensing and regulation of motorcars meant we started tracking their death-toll, and we've always accepted it.
We did work, and still work, at reducing it: there's a budget for policing, a budget for interchanges, a budget to maintain traffic lights. But those budgets are not infinite. We don't set an infinite value on human life, because we can't. We put up with some dying.
I studied it a bit, when researching the Titanic, and lifeboats, and double-hulls. I read Barry Glassner's "The Culture of Fear" about how we spend more on some threats than others (more on EPA keeping cancer away, than traffic deaths, as it happens: one is invisible, and scarier). And, fascinatingly, we absolutely hate to put a known number on the value of human life, though the EPA and traffic departments, and a hundred kinds of industry, simply must. We implicitly put a limited value on human life with the highway-interchange budget, the smokestack-scrubber budget, and of course, the public health budget. And we avoid showing the implied value, or even calculating it. (When we do, we often find it scandalously small.)
Canada currently accepts about 1900 traffic deaths/year, about 5 per 100,000 population. Which also means accepting about 9000 "serious" (think, life-changing, crippling) injuries. So there's even a similarity between COVID deaths, and the larger number of "long COVID" injuries. Let's assume we will basically stop thinking about COVID, save as part of the slightly-expanded ICU budget, if it drops to 5 deaths/100,000/year, across Canada.
Case-fatalities are still close enough to 1% for estimation, so that's 180,000 cases/year, or roughly 500 cases/day, across Canada. BC would be allocated 64/day, so we have ten times the acceptable rate, now. Ontario, 200 cases/day - and yesterday's post was about Ontario levelling off at 500, picking that as their acceptable level of violence. Are we willing to shrug at over twice the traffic accident rate?
Actually, maybe. Traffic accidents are highly random about who gets hit, but have some preference for not killing the very poor (don't have cars), and the very old (don't travel much). COVID, on the other hand, loves killing the poor and people of colour, really loves killing the old, especially the very old. As our care-home story reveals, we don't value their lives highly, either. Our tolerance for deaths among the poor and those of colour are, of course, well-known indeed.
And the unvaccinated. Nearly 90% of the deaths are going to look, to many of the vaccinated, as basically suicides, or, ahem, "evolution in action": killing the dumb.
So, yeah, I think that while the death-toll of traffic would be the maximum we should accept, we're probably in a mood to find two or three times that rate, "acceptable", and just vote to expand ICU sizes to handle the load.
The Ontario graph from yesterday, just below, gives the pandemic a new fundamental equation, changing it to endemic: a steady-state level that leaves the ICUs with a few free beds. Maybe we're ready to just find 4000-5000 deaths per year in Canada, to COVID...acceptable.
http://brander.ca/c19#calculatingtheacceptable
From the BC volunteer group yesterday, to the COVID-19 Science Table today, fairly good news!
The group is basically putting forward the yellow line at left as the most-probable future for Ontario: the same as the recent past.
As BC continues to, sadly, have 700 cases/day that we've had since weeks before Thanksgiving, as our "acceptable level", Ontario is in a much better place with only 500/day for three times the population - a quarter of the per-capita toll. And their modeling group predicts that their behaviours, even into more re-opening, will be cautious enough (and vaccinated enough) to hold at that level indefinitely.
We all, of course, continue to hope for some sort of final exit, cases petering out as kids are vaccinated, holdouts converted, 90% exceeded, by...New Year's? Valentine's Day? Spring? But, we've learned the hard way to only predict six or eight weeks ahead, and the modeling group is too canny to go past late November, at left.
But my topic, which is becoming the CCCC theme topic through repetition, is the "acceptable" part. Except for the worst-hit health regions, like BC's Northern; and except for the two worst-hit provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, the feeling of "emergency" is leaving the news. Where the ICUs still have beds left, where surgeries are back on schedule, the medical system is apparently accepting of a certain level of COVID work, the population accepting of this level of COVID risk (i.e. very, very low indeed for the vaccinated under-85).
We are transitioning to "endemic" and a new normal, you can feel it. We're just trying to figure out what the acceptable level of violence is.
Let's think about that weighty issue, tomorrow.
http://brander.ca/c19#ontviolence
BC has had a good pandemic by any relative measure (except relative to our Maritimes and a half-dozen superstar nations), but they've been justly criticized for not providing enough information. Volunteers have stepped forward to fill the gap, and it's one of the best COVID-19 briefings I've ever seen at any level of government.
This is in spite of their total lack of performance chops. As seen in the screen-snap at left, audience questions were flashed up as chyrons on the screen-bottom. At first, the audio just went silent as we all read. Which is fine, the whole audience is literate, but showmen abhor dead air. It was only about the 4th question where moderator Jen Heighton (left) started reading them aloud, too, with an apology that she's never hosted before. That cracked me up, because the presentation was already multiple times as useful as professionally-delivered equivocation, generalities, and bafflegab I'm so used to.
Not that it was all amateur-hour. They were all prepared, delivered their messages well and clearly, it's obvious they're all educators. The slides were excellent, I just wish they'd had time to make more. (Says the lover of data-graphics.) The technology did not work on YouTube, but the stream on Twitter was fine, though I don't have the Twitter app - just another web page with a video frame.
Some figures I hadn't heard from the officials:
What really pleased me about the show was the focus on safety strategies for schools, of immediate value. You see the question on the screen, and it was answered at length with multiple suggestions about behaviour, like taking breaks to let the atmosphere in the room change over. Like the amount of air circulation found necessary, and how to test for whether the air is changing over enough.
I won't try to summarize more: the presentation isn't that long, and the papers have already done the same. This is just my recommend for how good and practical it all was.
Their strongest editorial position is that BC doesn't do enough testing, that they're really "making it hard" to get data and respond effectively. Which will segue into their next show, about the need for RATs in the schools (Rapid Antigen Tests). The lack of those has been just baffling in BC, and I'll be glued to my seat for their next lecture.
http://brander.ca/c19#bcpop
On compassionate grounds, we should still recommend vaccination to all, even people who've already had COVID-19. You can get it twice, and the second time can be worse - in a few cases, much worse. Some who had sniffles on encounter one, went through hell and "Long COVID" on number two. Everybody should get vaxxed, for their own protection.
But, as far as demanding vaccination, even for previous cases, on the grounds that the unvaccinated risk the rest of us by spreading it, the argument for vaccination may just have been, ah, spiked.
It's CCCC's friends David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters, number-crunching for The Guardian, again, that have the tale, linked from the graphic at left.
Earlier versions of COVID conferred less immunity than vaccination. It was like previous-infection was good for a 65% reduction in risk, but vaccination for 80%.
Delta is a harder challenge for the immune system, though, and current vaccinations are down to 65%-70% risk reduction. But those who have had Delta itself, are just as resistant to Delta again, that same 65% (or so) that getting Alpha gave you to Alpha.
So that kinds of cuts the legs out from under our "you're hurting us, you're endangering the old" side of the argument. If they don't want to accept the risk to themselves, the risk of their family losing them, we no longer have a "selfish" argument to use against them.
I'm fine with that - no skin off my lungs, and after polite efforts to be compassionate, I'd leave them to their risk, as one must with drinkers and bungee jumpers.
The great news here is that we are more-vaccinated than we thought. Indeed, a fair number of vaccination-avoiders may be doing so because they feel they've paid their dues already, with a case of COVID, and can rely on natural immunity. Turns out they're now right!
British Columbia has had nearly 200,000 cases that we know of, who didn't die, and the overlap with "also vaccinated" may be only 60% or so, if a lot of people can't be bothered with vaccination after illness. We might have another percent or two of BC "naturally vaccinated", and be not at 80% of the population, but 81% or 82%.
That's not big deal - until you get closer to 100%. As we approach 90% of the public, every extra percent we get "free" is one-tenth of the remaining unvaccinated.
One hates to give any ground, of course, hates to give anybody an excuse to not get the jab: "I'll just wait to catch it, I barely get colds, I'll be fine, and then I'll be naturally vaccinated." Argh. Science doesn't support that decision, only the decision of an already-infected not to vaccinate.
But, you can't appeal to science, and then ignore it when it comes down on the other side. Already-infected vaccine-haters should be just as welcome in restaurants, and I'm fine with them at the next table.
http://brander.ca/c19#justasgood
Viewers of "The Rookie" TV show had it made clear that nearly all police start that career by their mid-20s, have their 30 years in by their late 50s, few work past sixty. (The Florida cop that was called "coward" for not going into the school shooting, simply avoided further controversy by retiring at 55 on over $100,000 per year, good 50% more than I did at 58.)
So you'd think cops would have a much better COVID-19 survival rate than the general population; they lack the old people who did 80% of the dying. The USA in general has lost about 2.2 people per thousand. Times 50,000 New York Police Department employees, that's 110 people, but because of age profiles, you'd think more like 20 dead.
But, their NYPD COVID-19 Memorial, screen-snap at left, is a video of 63 names and counting. Over one dead per thousand, from people nearly all under 60, is appalling and frightening. You'd think that cops, so exposed to the public, would be eager vaccinators.
This is different from groups of school teachers getting together to sue over vaccine mandates: this is the NYPD officer union, the official representative for the officers.
There's something about literally toxic masculinity in there somewhere, I think, that weird Joe Rogan/Jair Bolsonaro belief that "strong" men who exercise have such "strong" immune systems that they'll just... "not get sick", naturally.
I guess you can always believe those 63 dead were somehow weak people, unlike yourself. One does hear of vaccine-dodgers coming to Jesus when somebody they know personally gets a bad case: they have to know the person, know they were not somehow weak? After all, care-home workers who'd attended the dying were often against vaccination, too - possibly because they'd gone that far without catching it.
I dunno - I'm guessing at their thought patterns.
So are we all.
http://brander.ca/c19#nypdvax
It gets worse: the vaccine available isn't an international product, from labs and pharma-factories across the world; it's the local one, purveyed my Mr. Superliar.
So vaccination stalled dead at 40% of adults, 35% of the population. The infection rate went exponential a month ago, and now the death rate has climbed above 1000/day, for less than four times Canada's population.
The linked article is a bit painful. Painful, because the guy putting out all the right messages, about "your options are to get vaccinated or get sick"...is Vladimir Putin. So you have to sympathize with Russians who don't trust him - at least, not about Sputnik V, the Russian vaccine. I'd need a minute to get over my fears of the stuff, myself, were it offered.
Russia is better at sticks than carrots, of course. No Jason Kenney $100 for them, it's more like "ordered to stay inside for 4 months except for food runs, unless you get the shot".
It's funny: I'm prone to saying stuff like that myself, about our anti-vaxxers, though I'm 90% kidding; they just frustrate me, and cranky responses come easily. Humbling.
The article ends on a downer note, that Russia will just have to keep imposing restrictions, for an indefinite future of ICU-capacity managment.
http://brander.ca/c19#russia
Today's post is a segue from the last, starting with a pregnant woman from northern BC is now passing into a third week in a coma on a ventilator, will probably die.
But her reluctance to get vaccinated wasn't just from a misunderstanding of risks to her pregnancy: it was likely because she was from a small, remote community, Ft. St. John. It does have 20,000 people, but that makes it the largest city in the Peace region. (The local MLA has also noted that it's very close to Alberta, and the attitudes seem to spill over.)
But, generally, it's coming out, for all the lack of data from public health departments, that there's a rural/urban divide on vaccination.
In America, NPR was noting it at a national level, early, back in May.
The graph at left actually dates back further, to February, and show survey results taken in December and January about intentions, not completed vaccination rates.
Some fascinating things about it: the rural/urban divide is not seen in Asia, and in Africa, it's reversed: greater vaccine acceptance in rural, than in African cities. And it's worse in Latin America than Canada, Australia.
Canada's spread, from 76% to 81%, frankly seems smaller to me that what happened.
This story from two days ago shows bad news like County of Forty Mile with 33%, Taber under 40%. The ruralest of the rural, High Level, Alberta, at 18%.
The source of all those infections in a "well vaccinated" country or province suddenly coming clear, no?
The problem with COVID has been that it isn't deadly enough, in a way - there can be high infections, full ICUs, but for people who don't follow the news about that, life seems normal. But really high infection rates come with their own price, finally: a salon in Three Hills saw more business with Mr. Kenney's "re-opening", but business is now falling off again as people get scared. A local pharmacist says that vaccinations have ticked up from nearly zero in summer, to 10-to-20 per day now.
So, the our rural areas will learn, as the Dakotas and even Wyoming gradually learned the virus is real.
I sure wish they were less susceptible to misinformation, more likely to see themselves as part of a community, but there you have it. Rural areas are were non-vaccinated people are still clustering. They'll be the last places where the dying stops.
http://brander.ca/c19#rural
Kate Cray, at The Atlantic, has an urgent article on vaccination of pregnant women.
You barely need to read it, frankly; heck, I can give you the deets you need in a short blog post. There is no reason for the pregnant to fear vaccination, none.
Only 25% of pregnant mothers got the shot in their pregnancy, though. Concern about every single thing you do to your body while pregnant, is understandable, but every health agency has found no concerns about it, and all recommend it.
Those 22 dead in August alone join some 200 women in America that have died of COVID-19 during pregnancy. Mercifully, one can't do the old joke of "divide by 10 to get the Canadian number" because we've had so much better a pandemic than America. One-third the dead per capita, no doubt that applies to the pregnant, as well, and for Canada, the 200 becomes not 20, but, ahhh, "several".
Still adding any is a great tragedy, when the disease has mostly confined itself to the end of life. We don't need to lose any more, before life even got to start.
Dental appointment in an hour, so you just get a quick thought for the day, here's another. I'm not even going to dig up the link, I could barely stand to read the headline, and skipped the article myself. Two COVID-19 victims in the USA were parents of five kids, now orphaned. And the orphans get to deal with people in their area calling the story of their parent's deaths, "fake news".
Damn, that's awful.
http://brander.ca/c19#pregnant
It was gratifying that a panel said Bolsonaro should be criminally responsible for all the deaths in Brazil that would not have happened if anybody remotely sensible had been in charge. It'll never happen, but at least it's been said.
The world is getting over the Fourth Wave, in general (left), even Canada (inset) is definitely on the downside of the curve. That's no thanks to the prairies, or even BC, which continues to orbit about 700 cases/day, with only tentative and easily-reversed signs of progress. Dr. Bonnie presumably knows better, as she's going ahead with re-opening plans, while targeting only very specific locations in one health region for additional cautions.
But there are not even signs of progress in Britain, not since that one dip in early August after the "football game" spike was over. All that gained ground has now been lost, all October has been steady increases.
But Boris, just today, said no changes in plan, that these increases are expected. That our position "going into winter is incomparably better than 12 months ago". No, it's easily compared: it's about 10% better, but won't be in two weeks of further case increases.
But, then, we knew Boris is delusional, and keeps returning to his delusions; the virus has to keep re-educating him, over and over, that he can't wish it away with cheery words. That only works on political problems, even for Boris: it doesn't work on the real world.
We forget that it wasn't just America that had an active traitor against the pandemic fight in charge, and not just Bolsonaro. Boris is much smarter than both those men, is able to back down, and knows when he must; but he's the same underneath, he will always revert to magical thinking and "heroism" by embracing risk (for others).
Pity the poor UK: Boris is going to get a bunch more of them killed, currently at a rate of 40,000 deaths/year, for the last two months and 8,000 dead. Britain finally joined that 2000 club, has reached 2,036 dead, to Canada's 750, just today. We'd have another 50,000 dead in Canada, had Boris been running the show.
When I started this blog, I thought it would just be about how different nations strategized and strove to oppose the pandemic. I thought the differences would be kind of minor. While it started by noting that the US would do badly, I'd kind of thought their politics were pretty unusual. As it turns out, the differences are huge, an order-of-magnitude between the really good performers and the worst; and that the worst are worst, not from poor fighting, but for their leaders basically going traitor, helping the virus win.
The human species is coming out of this looking fairly good, statistically; most of us have done the good things, personally. It's our politics that look bad, and some nations are going to have to reassess their whole political culture.
Eventually.
http://brander.ca/c19#UKcrazy
From "Retreat from Antietam; The Battle of Shepherdstown":
The biggest loss was in the 118th Pennsylvania Infantry. A brand-new unit of green troops, the Colonel of the 118th PA refused an order to retreat and his men became trapped between the bluffs and the oncoming Confederates. In the fight, many of the men discovered that their newly issued Enfield rifles were defective and would not fire, giving them no means of defense. Of the 363 Union casualties of the Battle of Shepherdstown, 269 were from the 118th Pennsylvania. The regiment reported 36% casualties (269 out of 739 men engaged), and Shepherdstown was the unit's first and deadliest battle of the entire war.
Fact #7: Breckinridge's charge on January 2 was one of the most violent charges of the war.
...
Over 1,800 attackers became casualties, roughly 36% of Breckinridge's total force. This places the charge at Stones River behind only Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg in terms of attacker casualty percentage.
Yes, I got both stories by googling on the phrase "36% casualties". Since there have been so many battles in history, you can google any percentage and come up with a few examples.
But note that both these battles are accounted as particularly terrible in their losses. Thirty-six percent is a lot. It might well break the morale of a battalion, leave them unable to put their heads up out of the foxhole, sure they were next.
Why am I on about 36%? The story at left is high up on the Vancouver news this morning. We move from the Battle of Stone Mountain, to the battle of Little Mountain Place, against COVID, from last November to this spring.
Little Mountain Place is being taken over by the government after their battle management. The stats:
When a captain loses 36% casualties from a 100-man rifle company, we don't charge him with murder. But we don't let him command any more rifle companies, either.
The Great Care-Home Shake-Out has yet to happen. It's been needed for decades, and there were multiple reports about it, often in every province. (The reports in Ontario were scorching. The new reports about Quebec should perhaps call for actual criminal charges.)
We can't let this go. Don't forget The Battle of Little Mountain: we need web page memorials like those War Battles pages I leeched from here.
http://brander.ca/c19#36percent
This is a pandemic blog, the COVID-19 pandemic. So, for the very first time, I think, I'm going off that topic, and the 1991 newspaper story at left highlights the word "epidemic" for a thin connection.
I'm just grumpy that Colin Powell is being buried with the journalistic coverage of a saint, a good man with one flaw. I actually saw the headline "The Moment when [he] Squandered His Spectacular Career", as if the UN speech were his one sin.
To start with, he didn't just make the one speech (which had no effect, the UN remained against), he sold the war to the American people, for months, with lie after lie after lie.
But, never mind that. Between the tragic bookends of Vietnam and Iraq, surely the Liberation of Kuwait was a shining moment of American arms, diplomacy, and altruism? Oh, my God, no. The 1991 Gulf War being "The Good War" is the worst new American myth, certainly helped sell the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, Powell's biggest achievement.
But the highest strategies of the 1991 war, where Powell was Chair of the Joint Chiefs, Shwarzkopf's boss - was what we'd call "genocidal", today. They very knowingly destroyed (not temporarily damaged, just destroyed) 75% of Iraq's power generation capacity. This lead to the loss of all water treatment, and the massive typhoid and cholera epidemics that killed hundreds of thousands, half of them little kids. Read the article. The generals talk calmly about how this wasn't needed to win the war, but to provide "postwar leverage" and perhaps even induce the citizens to revolt. And, of course, they weren't really innocent (right). I guess the innocence of those 170,000 kids was also "unclear".
Powell signed off on the lot of it, likely sat in on the planning meetings that computed which water treatment plants would close. A friend I described this to, popped back with "that's germ warfare, by proxy" - well said, Tom.
To drag the topic back towards our pandemic, the darkest suspicions about the pandemic are that it is Chinese Germ Warfare, but even the Qanon crowd can't quite put their hearts into it, because a "weapon" that affects everybody, including your own, is beyond stupid. Even if the Chinese had "miraculously" produced a vaccine in December 2019, and been the only vaccinated nation, they'd still be hugely damaged by the loss of trade. So it's nutty theory too nutty for the nuts.
But, Colin Powell's germ warfare on Iraq really did just massively hurt and impoverish a nation of 30 million, and the sufferings were confined to those whose water treatment plants he bombed. Germ Warfare Success! It didn't do America the slightest good, but if definitely killed lots of "enemies", and so he is being buried as a "soldier and statesman", with just the one speech a "blot on his record".
Me, I just spent a quarter-century providing safe water, the proudest achievement of my life, and I still mean every word of the sentimental speech I gave on retirement. So, when I came across this story a few years ago, I figured this nice man was my bitter enemy.
A few years ago? Yeah, I didn't know the story, either. Thank-you, Jon Schwarz of The Intercept for unearthing it. Matt Taibbi is right: the worst "conspiracies" in the world, are the ones happening in broad daylight, duly covered by newspapers, just in paragraph nine. Actually, paragraph twelve of the linked Washington Post story. Normally, "If it bleeds, it leads", but the headline was not "US Bombing Killed 170,000 Children", it was just "Allied Air War Struck Broadly In Iraq". (Though none of us "allies" struck civilian power plants.) Virtually nobody knows this story, nor will they, after reading his obituary coverage.
Intercept readers are better informed, about that, and later lies.
So bury him, but excavate into the harsh light, the record of his germ warfare sins.
http://brander.ca/c19#powell
For once, I'm going to watch the silver lining, instead of going all judge-y about "covidiots". We're late in the pandemic now, Ontario is well past the peak of its fourth wave, and cases coming out of Kingston will probably bump into a larger population that has R<1, so this won't get a whole lot of people killed.
If any!
Perhaps, says Mr. Silver Linings, we'll find that a even 8,000 students, under a vaccine mandate (the party would have been joined by non-students, of course, but even there, 80% vaccination rate in general for 18-29 in Ontario), can meet, outdoors, even in a thick crowd, without a serious spike in cases a few days later.
If the local health region sees a spike this week - and, worse, if the cases in older citizens go up late this week, early next - then the gathering will not only have gotten students sick, but their elder contacts. Vaccinated college-age people getting sick doesn't bother one at all, obviously, 99% will barely know they were ill.
The Kingston-area health region covid dashboard (linked from chart) certainly shows what a college-town the place is: 18-29 group has had more cases in the pandemic than all the other age groups put together. Charts just above it show that cases were already rising in the area, the last two months, are highest now. Kingston is NOT on the downside of the fourth wave, like the rest of Ontario.
So, it's a pretty good experiment, in a way. The test subjects, vaccinated teens and just-older, are at very little risk from the transmissions that actually happened at the party. (If any! Outdoors, during the daytime...) Because they are "away at University" unless they actually come from Kingston, they won't be taking it back home to the parents very often.
We could gain some valuable information from this, with few sicknesses, and maybe even zero deaths. Call me optimistic.
http://brander.ca/c19#kidsofkingston
It's over six months since I had to change my 2020 post "Pity Poor Portugal", when Europe's poorest country was in the throes of a bad wave, to "Praise Proud Portugal", because they beat that wave with a disciplined, hard, lockdown, and got back on track.
I have to re-visit again to pile on more praise. Canada is one of the world's better-vaccinated nations, but we have peers in South Korea, Uruguay, and Singapore, and betters in Spain, Iceland, Chile, Cuba...and Portugal, the highest vaccination rate of the lot of us nations with populations in the high millions.
How did they do it? 88% of the whole population, which certainly means over 95% of the adults. They got there months ago, so that now 85% are fully vaccinated.
And they have reaped the rewards. Unlike Singapore, yesterday, they have few cases, about the same number as BC, despite over twice our population - and about six deaths per day, also the same as BC.
If our population seems to think we have "an acceptable level of violence", surely the Portuguese find half that to be tolerable. They are monitoring it closely, and not afraid to discuss measures against it. That link is to Portuguese news in English that notes they have seen "R" hit 1, and transmissions rates rise slightly,(but 1%) the last few weeks.
The photo on that article shows people wearing masks outside, which is a pretty cautious thing to do. That seems to be their acceptable steady-state: when a 1% increase over weeks makes the news, you've found your steady state.
It's sobering that even 95%+ adult vaccination is not enough to push R below one, by itself. But kid-vaccination is coming, and I'm sure Portugal, with all their budget limitions, will still be leading the way as we find out if that will do it.
We should be glad to follow.
http://brander.ca/c19#praiseportugal2
Singapore is being singled out by vaccine critics as proof they don't work. The city-state of five-ish million population, not much bigger than New Zealand's, had an equally disease-free, death-free pandemic - until a month ago.
Reaching 80% vaccination, they completely re-opened, after being very closed for the whole pandemic, almost nobody having natural immunity. Cases began to soar, doubling every 8 days, and are now at 3700/day. Gathering restrictions have already been re-implemented.
So much for vaccination.
Except:
80% is not 90%. There are twice as many disease vectors still wandering about with 20% unvaccinated, rather than 10%. The many outbreaks and spikes to similarly-vaccinated places might have warned Singapore that cases would indeed take off. They are still vaccinating, though slowly; Canada may catch up in 6-8 weeks, with our Maritimes already comparable, and BC about 3 weeks away.
But, mainly, so what for the 3700 cases per day? Of the vaccinated, 98.5% of cases are asymptomatic, or "mild". For the medical system, 50 serious cases per day from the vaccinated, and another 50 serious from the unvaccinated minority, are a medical problem, hence the restrictions. But for the great majority, the restrictions are an annoyance to comfort people who didn't get the shot.
It's a first case, where there's this horrifying-looking spike on the dashboard (right), but the population are unworried. The bug has been de-fanged of its fearsomeness.
In short, it's a more-extreme version of the "anger at the unvaccinated" story we have at home. Not to mention the "just desserts" attitude, when one hears that the very few unvaccinated deaths were all to the very old, and already sick, or the not-so-old, but very sick with multiple conditions. The rest are all unvaccinated deaths, as here. They don't make for very sympathetic figures.
The Ministry of Health page has a fascinating picture of a spike in a heavily-vaccinated region. Kids are a surprisingly significant part of the "hospitalizations", because they're all unvaccinated, of course. But the kids drop off the chart when it escalates to "needed oxygen". A few thousand kids have been through hospital, but only for rest, not heroic measures.
Unfortunately, of course, this means that any place not reaching at least 90% (and that may not work, either) may have to have gathering restrictions for months more or even years, until herd immunity is finally reached slowly, without blowing up the hospitals.
I hope this spike gets Singapore's vaccination program re-started; that would be even better.
http://brander.ca/c19#acceptable3
Since it was the UK that came up with the phrase, I suppose it's not surprising they're pioneering the https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/cases-skyrocketing-in-heavily-vaccinated-singapore-as-locals-beg-for-more-freedoms/news-story/140d80c6ea19856c13e1268763066965discussion of how much dying to just put up with as background noise. This is an ad for the Guardian article linked from its sub-head at left.
It's a one-article blog day, because this article discusses in great detail, the phenomenon of a previously-alarming death toll becoming "normal" - or not. The main headline notes "this may not last".
Some good bits in the article include the note that they used to talk like Dr. Bonnie in the UK: that "today 15 have, very sadly, died", but now they just say "70 died" and have dropped the "very sadly". (Apparently, no intermediate period where the they "sadly" died, dropping only the "very". They went straight to not-sad-at-all, one guesses.)
There are scientists that have opined that there are countries just tolerating high rates of infection, maybe it's time to just accept the disease as endemic; and in the UK, at least, these have basically sabotaged the pleas of other scientists: as soon as the government has two sets of science messages to choose from, Boris can pick the "endemic" philosophy.
A good point is made that humans react to change: when cases keep going up and up, that's alarming. If they persist around one number - like BC holding at about 700 cases/day for weeks - people come to accept.
Or not! The counter-argument is that Britain is hitting over 800 deaths per week, a steady-state would be 40,000 per year. They've long accepted 10,000 deaths per year from flu, but 40,000? Discontent may set in. The UK government, it is pointed out, is attempting all possible spin to make this look "normal", an acceptable level of violence.
It's all a good discussion, with no right answer, and Britain's own longer-term all quite uncertain. But with terms like 'new normal' and 'steady state' in every other paragraph, it's all about finding the public's "acceptable level".
More on this tomorrow. It's really THE topic for ending the pandemic - it's not going to end with "zero"; so what's our acceptable level?
http://brander.ca/c19#acceptable2
...maybe there's no lab leak. Canadaland has had another "lab leak" podcast, this time with the other side of the issue.
Angela Rasmussen brings a lot of direct expertise to the subject, whereas Elaine Dewar of the previous podcast is a general science journalist.
Both journalists and scientists commit to truth about facts, and there are not just disagreements about analysis and speculation, but about some facts, so it gets awkward from the start.
It's not just that I'm not about to adjudicate such controversies in a 500-words-a-day blog, but that CCCC is repeatedly on record with the opinion that "it just doesn't matter", because CCCC holds China very much at fault for the pandemic, whether it was a lab leak, a food-system leak, or an illegal-homeopathic-viagra-industry leak.
I was disappointed with only one facet of the second podcast: while Dr. Rasmussen addressed most of the issues raised by Dewar's interview, the story that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing research with a coronavirus at a Level-2 lab, when such should have been done at Level-4, was one of the strongest parts of Dewar's story.
This podcast goes on at some length about the how unlikely it is that a sample from a bat cave (with superhuman effort, I insert no Bat Cave joke here) was really the ancestor of COVID-19. But you don't have to track a claimed story back before a virus was handled by the WIV; it can be taken for granted that a virology lab has a lot of virus samples in storage; maybe they let leak something they'd had in the freezer for years. Basically, you just need to believe that China's first Level-4 virology lab, which they had to ask the French to build for them, made a mistake with one of their virus samples. Any earlier background is nice, but superfluous.
It's a great podcast, though, recommended to all, as is Canadaland in general, they need your support! If you need some more China-negativity at the end, though, check out the The Fifth Estate on CBC, about China pulling the rug out from under our vaccine deal, and not even telling us. Months and millions wasted. All business with anybody in China, is business with the government of China, we're going to have to learn that on a deeper level.
http://brander.ca/c19#nolableak
In the meantime, it sounded bad when I looked at the headline that said as many as 2,000 care-home workers in BC had refused, or unknown vaccination status, were about to go on leave.
Then, a paragraph in, I was stunned to see it added up that we have nearly 49,000 care-home workers, that this is just 4%. 93% of them have both doses already, three more percent have more-recently agreed to one dose. 4% more overtime, (or, in these folk's case, just less part-time!) is not going to be an insuperable burden.
Many "refuseniks" are simply retiring a little early from a back-breaking, poorly-paid job. There's a LOT of that going around!
One hopes that a silver lining of the pandemic is a great improvement in employment opportunities for young people, and increased wages. That would be some inflation I could feel good about paying for.
http://brander.ca/c19#2000refuse
The BC Modelling group is a gaggle of scientist-volunteers who are supplementing the unfortunately tight-lipped public health officials. BC may have had one of the best pandemic outcomes in the world, but it wasn't because of their transparency, their fulsome offerings of data. The Modelling Group, however, just dumps easy-to-read advice, with well-presented graphics that I wish I had room to show you.
At right, just a thumbnail of their "closing the circle" chart for vaccinations actually made the pie chart work well at something, when data-visualization guru Edward Tufte (my hero) had dismissed pie charts 30 years ago as useless.
At left, one that would also delight Tufte, who preaches the use of "small multiples" - many repetitions of the same basic graphic, with data about different situations, rather than trying to cram 8 lines onto one graph. It pulls out something that hadn't been reported in media, hadn't been communicated by the public health authorities: those soaring cases for the under-10 set are only in three of our health regions. Vancouver Coastal, the biggest, has no sign of it. Interior and Fraser have some commonalities, but little in common with Vancouver Island, they've had very different pandemic statistics: so what's similar about Fraser, Interior, and Island, with respect to kids, this last month? I'm guessing a look at the schools is in order...
Another interesting fact that should surprise nobody, since getting vaccinated is all about acknowledging your own vulnerability and need for protection, paying attention to your own health: men over a month behind women. Males reach a given vaccination rate five weeks later that females in their age group at 18-29, but it keeps getting worse: 5, 7, 10 weeks as you go up to old age. Except the worst are males in 50-59, worse than the older ones. Of course, the older ones have heard their age range mentioned far more often in the covid obituaries.
Anybody who thinks there's even a chance that we don't need to vaccinate the 5-11 aged children needs to just look at the second half of the report; the benefits vastly outweigh the risks for them, and the secondary effects to older people are dramatic. The fact that kids are more-likely to be asymptomatic means they are far more likely to pass it on to those near them. Most of the remaining pandemic fight is vaccinating them, as far down in age as can be approved.
The graphics link to the PDF of the actual report; it's very accessible, mostly a powerpoint-type series of slides with lovely graphics, and well worth a bit of your time.
http://brander.ca/c19#bcCOVID19group
Fall is in the air, but so is hope.
http://brander.ca/c19#thx
So, you can now register your 5-11 year-old kid for their vaccination. Pretty good hint that approval will be routine. (Hardly surprising: besides the tests, over 10,000 kids of that age in Canada are already done, because of special medical reasons, over 100,000 in the States. No news of trouble.)
We've all watched glumly as we vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate, but the outbreaks, and surges, and even spikes keep happening. They're happening in the Northwest Territories, despite vaccination rates well past 90% for the over-12 population.
So, with 5-11 vaccination, kids, the hopes and fears of all the years are set on ye, tonight. It's up to you lot to stop getting and transmitting the virus, and shut the door on it, so the waves go away.
The demographic pyramid at left is the most-recent I could find, let's assume the age distribution hasn't changed. The Age 05-09 bars are all included, and estimate the two 10-11 population as 40% of the 10-14 bars above that. That adds up to 325,000 kids from 5-11, or about 6.5% of the BC population.
We aren't getting them all vaccinated, that's for sure, and getting that group to 90% is dubious - unless it is made mandatory for school. Let's hope for only 75% vaccination, to be conservative. That's 5% of the total population.
We're going to pass 80% of the total population with one-dose on Monday, for sure, it already being 79.9%. The number of mandates now coming down for large companies, and governments give assurance that we will keep going, at a rate that recently has been 1% per week.
So, in a week, about the time the 5-11 vaccination is considered for approval, we should hit 90% of the over-12 population, we are already at 89%.
Over the weeks of kid-vaxxing, it's possible we'll even get to 93% of the over-12 population, stopping only when we hit that hardcore 7% that are anti-vaxxers. Who knows, some of them may grit their teeth and take the shot, if it means their job.
A smidge over 93% of the over-12 population should be 84% of the total population.
84% plus the extra 5% from the kid vaccinations, which of course will take well into December, will get us to 89% of the total population.
There isn't much epidemiological difference between 89% and 90%; when they estimated that as needed to quell this variant, it was a round number. If it was a little rounded-up, we should be celebrating Christmas with few and declining cases, despite no more restrictions.
If it was a little rounded-down, and especially if the remaining 10% are clustered in rural towns, or age-groups that socialize (i.e. if the current problems continue) then Christmas will see only some relief: a little room in the ICUs, maybe, regular surgery returning.
Many provinces already took the attitude that any kid going to turn 12 in the calendar year is eligible, and vaccinated some 11-year-olds. If Xmas brings no joyeux noel to the hospitals, 2022 should start with a similar declaration about 4-year-olds, even if that's only one more percent. And of course, it should be implemented with a vaccination program right in the school, be combined with a mandate.
If vaccination doesn't work - we need to bear down on it. It's not crazy to talk about getting past 90% - smaller provinces like the Maritimes are undoubtedly be doing it. They may be the first to really re-open.
http://brander.ca/c19#kids90
I have to hand it to Willian Saletan, whose whose piece at Slate.com I can't finish because of a paywall. Just the teaser paragraphs, though, point out a coincidence that should be uncomfortable, about Joe Biden's vaccine rhetoric of recent weeks, where the unvaccinated are "overrunning" hospitals and vaccination is "patriotic":
It's a formula that Republicans have often exploited in other contexts. Here's how it works: First, you identify a politically vulnerable minority. Then you accuse that minority of deviant behavior. You depict these people as a threat to everyone else, and you blame them for the country's troubles. Over the years, conservatives have cynically applied this algorithm to many topics, such as homosexuality, welfare, immigration, Islam, and kneeling for the national anthem. But now it's being turned against Republicans, because they've chained their party to a genuinely deviant minority: vaccine refusers.
It's certainly uncomfortable reading that, until you get to the word "genuinely", of course. By the Republican's own lights, Biden is doing what he should to protect America, because the threat is actually genuine, this time. It's by liberal lights that one should be more like Bonnie Henry and try, try, try to protect America with soft words of sweet reason. One defending Biden's tactics could point to how badly America has vaccinated so far, and plead that throwing elbows has become necessary. (Bonnie is about to celebrate 80% vaccination of her whole population today, easy for her to moralize, eh?)
Speaking of Canada, This episode of Canadaland's 'Short Cuts' podcast talked about how Trudeau kind of suspiciously had trouble keeping all those anti-vax protesters away from his speeches during the last weeks of the campaign. They were often heard, or even in-shot during the coverage. And Trudeau's speeches were clearly running against anti-vaxxers, not against Erin O'Toole.
That implicitly made O'Toole on the side of the anti-vaxxers, by conversion; and the difficulty that all conservative parties across the world have had keeping anti-vaxxers from their ranks (where they even try, unlike the USA) make it a weak point for conservative politicians.
I'm pretty much on the side of demonization, as long as it doesn't get personal, or involve any threats. Except threats to their employability and ability to accept hospitality business, of course. But just calling them names, like "unpatriotic", and "dangerous", and "leeches on tax dollars", that's all fair game. It's not slander, because it has the defense of truth.
It's not often that cynical politics is an actual, genuine public service. (The "public service" of "getting the right guy elected" is their opinion, and doesn't count.) But, as Saletan says, where politicians tie their wagon to a "genuinely deviant minority", of less than 10% of the population, aggressively spreading lies - unlike most political lies, these are long proven by peer-reviewed research to be lies - we have the extraordinary situation where Republican political tactics are briefly moral. The lies are getting people killed. Demonizing? They're self-demonizing.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxvillans
The winning variant is the one that spreads the best, not kills the best.
I've been often highlighting stories that are prominent in the news already, not that helpful. I nearly did one today on transmission concerns in the BC Interior, or on care homes still not having enough sick leave; but this story is almost untouched except where I found it at Salon magazine, on the disappearance of variant "Mu".
It's been out of the news for a bit, so a reminder that a strain found in Columbia, earlier this year, and named "mu", had indicators of vaccine resistance, understandably scaring the pants off everybody who read the article.
The Salon story, and this one, from Newsweek, just about the USA are tremendously reassuring: the variant has disappeared. Not a sign of it in weeks, all around the world. The Newsweek story is actually over a week old, about it vanishing from America.
We never really had time to get scared of Mu; Delta, the Modi Malady, is so spreading like wildfire down the Coquihalla in July, that it's outcompeted all others for access to humanity's virus-replication services.
Maybe it's twice as bad as the original, but at least it loses to vaccines, and actually protected us all from loss of vaccinated status.
So, credit where due. Thanks, Delta!
http://brander.ca/c19#mu
It's kind of funny (not) to have this confirmed even as everybody celebrates the new anti-viral pill treatment ($17 to manufacture, on-sale for $700) that "halves" the risk of ICU and death.
The two cancel each other out, roughly: if you get the current COVID-19 today, and get the pill as soon as your symptoms are clear, the test in, then you have the same risk of death you had without the pill in 2020.
There may be another cavalry coming over the hill: global clinical trials will be moved to standard practice immediately, to give COVID patients blood thinners while still moderately ill, and signficantly reducing ICU and death outcomes.
They found last December that blood thinners for patients in ICU are a negative, come too late. But if administered while "moderately ill" (just reaching hospital, as it were), we can save a lot of lives.
So maybe all the news still adds up to a net positive. But surely, no big one, no "game-changer", no end to the pandemic. Back to the vaccine strategy.
http://brander.ca/c19#squareone
A faith healer/psychic type claimed to be a "molecular biologist", and that bit was singled out, the city logo displayed prominently, and boom, 200,000 customers on YouTube for the distinguished molecular biologist working officially for the City of Dawson's Creek. Tell me, can you imagine if somebody presented to Dawson's Creek, or Orillia, Ontario, on how you can live longer if you exercise and eat your vegetables, getting 200,000 views? That would be the correct life-saving information, and you can't give it away.
So, on the bad guy side, instant fame every time you can get the slightest wisp of a platform granted to you. On the good guy side, this is how hard it is:
A single anti-vaxxer being convinced otherwise was a whole news story. The headline has some positive spin, that it was "one sincere conversation" that flipped him, but it was a two-hour conversation. With two people. Who were family members. And health-care workers. And his presence at a wedding was up for discussion.
Well, great: on the one side, you can win a single vaccination, under absolutely ideal, perfect conditions, and great effort. On the other, almost no effort for far better results. Of course, I know that over 99% of those 200,000 views were just anti-vaxxers wallowing in how right they are. But if even a tenth of percent (200) were shown to not-yet-vaccinated friends and family, if a half-percent of those (1) were enough to stop that friend getting a shot, then it was the same win as the two-hour marathon.
We were invited last year to try to imagine what it's like for Black people, and the "work twice as hard to go half as far" rule. For vaccine teams, it's Black times ten: twenty times as hard to go a twentieth as far.
Which is why we have mandates. No need to link to the announced federal mandate this morning, it's the top story everywhere. And the big headline on my Vancouver Sun this morning, is "Public Servants Welcome Vax Order", with unions requesting even more protections. A reminder that Canadian vaccinations are just about to hit 90% of possible recipients, by month's end, we are the overwhelming majority. We might get past 90%.
It's really just 7% or so, watching a faith-healing psychic on YouTube.
http://brander.ca/c19#asymmetric
The Facebook outage actually affected me, because I've picked Mondays as the day I gingerly scan Facebook for several minutes in search of friends who've had a nice hike or family occasion in the last week.
Facebook is great for that, it must be admitted. My High School class declared at the 25th reunion, there'd be no 30th; it was getting hard to find people, and to get volunteers for all the work. But there was, amazingly, a 40th reunion five years ago this summer - because Facebook connected us. Credit where due.
And I have friends who message relentlessly on the system; one friend put up the message at left. When you happen to agree with the message, that all seems nice, too. This one, credited to a Maggie Haywood, is an excellent reminder of how odd it is for medical personnel, of all people, to balk at vaccination, when they've already accepted so many.
Is my friend's message reaching people who might be convinced by it, or just preaching to a choir? On Facebook, you can always hope it'll get around to people you don't know, if popular enough. It's just tossing it out there, and crossing your fingers, trying to do your bit.
And then I came to this. This is from a college-era friend I haven't seen much since their son's wedding, save on Facebook, where he's a Facebook-activist. At least, he doesn't mention going out to any physical activism, but he does a lot of this: posting up memes, or stories circulating in the anti-testing, anti-lockdown, anti-mask, anti-vax communities. (With frequent forays, last fall and winter, into pro-Trump activism. Yes, he lives in Airdrie, but felt strong sympathy for Trump activists on January 6.)
This frankly surprised me, for all I've seen. CCCC has covered (and refused to link to) those who run blogs like the "Herman Cain Award", noting the many deaths of anti-vax activists when they caught COVID-19 themselves. That stuff is pretty bad, too.
That post shows my own struggle with the topic of misfortune to those you disagree with: as I say it's "not funny", I'm reminding the reader to be conscious it's not funny, when your subconscious just might be thinking just that. A measure of how ugly the atmosphere has become.
The thing at left is going around the anti-vaxxer community indeed. I sure won't provide links, but alas, just googling the mother's name finds several, at the top of the google list.
And, yes, they are all, like my friend, implicitly blaming a grieving mother for the death of her baby 8 days ago - that the child died because she got vaccinated.
And, no, it's not worth engaging with as a medical claim, because they don't even attempt reason, offer a mechanism, an explanation: the mere fact that she was vaccinated, and indeed had the temerity to proclaim it, and its benefits, on social media ("gloating" about it, as one blog put it) is sufficient to convict her of infanticide.
There's just no need to reply at all, much less argue the point.
And that's Facebook for you. There are real benefits to the thing; suitably reconfigured to only contain family-and-friends content, it would be a great thing or everybody to check out every day, stay in touch.
But, needless to say, I'm going to continue my policy of skimming it briefly once a week - skipping past the awful stuff, looking for the photos of mountain hikes.
Has Facebook been of value in the pandemic? Honestly, I think we can probably blame it for many, many thousands of deaths. It's hard to even guess an order-of-magnitude. Add it to the pile of their offenses.
http://brander.ca/c19#facebook
Most-likely, it's just a rhetorical stance, but if not Andrew Nikiforuk is dreaming in technicolour.
(Canadian Content question: "Technicolor" is an American commercial term. Can one even Canadian-ize it into "Technicolour"?)
Nikiforuk's analysis-and-opinion piece should be read by all, but not with any glimmer of hope that Jason Kenney will suffer any consequences whatsoever. Sure, he may fail re-election, but we might have gotten that with no fourth wave, or even with no pandemic at all.
It should be read just for the hard, plain speech, a real breath of fresh air:
Instead, they pretended that "personal responsibility" and "choice" was a public health measure. It isn't, and never will be....that last quote linked to the CBC article by professor Duane Bratt, about how the classic conservative ideology is not the right response to a pandemic.
That's hardly a knock on conservatism, of course: small-government, do-it-with-private-enterprise is not the right response to war, either. Good conservatives understand that extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary solutions.
So their thesis is that conservatism offers Kenney no excuse: it was negligence, criminal negligence. Nikiforuk ends only by asking for Kenney to be forced to resign by popular demand, not that he be charged in court.
But even that "consequence" is not coming. It hasn't come to a single conservative on Earth. Not Modi, not Johnson, not even Bolsonaro, though demonstrations have been held in Brazil. (They already had nine reasons for those before Bolsonaro aggressively did the worst pandemic moves.) They'll all retire peacefully, surrounded by affirming supporters reassuring them they were right.
There's no triumphal march into Paris at the end of this, for the good guys. Just the knowledge that they saved whom they could.
One can only hope it is taught in schools in future years, with the behaviour of the virus-collaborators and public-health saboteurs as cautionary tales.
http://brander.ca/c19#accountable
It's been too long since CCCC touted a most-favoured analyst, the "Weekly Stats Uncovered" columns at The Guardian, with David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters.
This week's is nearest to the heart of CCCC: safe behaviours are everything.
The analysts go over the reports from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), who ask people about their direct contacts.
This is the fine-grained data below the public rules and requirements. We talk and talk about masking in restaurants, but the real story is in how much people contact each other. Feared spikes have not come, because of something CCCC has always suspected, and mentioned: just because the rules "open up", doesn't mean that people lose all their fears, and change back to pre-pandemic behaviour.
School makes kids go up to 10 contacts per day, but work only brings adults up to six. Mask use declined, but stabilized, for those over 60. In Britain, fewer than half of young adults are masking in supermarkets, but what I see around me in Vancouver is over 90%. These differences really count in what "R" you have that week.
All this dovetails with the CCCC contention of four days ago, that the BC (and UK) populations find the current level of fright over the ICU to be acceptable. The UK has 30,000 infections per day - but that's not enough to scare young people into masking at the store. People are having this many contacts, because they aren't anxious enough to avoid them. They've accepted the feeling of risk.
It's unfortunate, how many young people in BC are finding it acceptable that a lot of moms are anxious about their kids at school, are continuing contacts, not to mention so many avoiding vaccination.
But I'm sure that the LSHTM could query across BC on our contacts, and find it's just the number needed to keep R around 1.0
http://brander.ca/c19#behaviour
The embedded graphic there is from a July post about the price of not vaccinating children. Well, we still aren't there quite yet, and the bill is coming in. The graph shows this report from two days ago. It notes that of 1,086 kids under 17 diagnosed, five have been hospitalized. That's really low, very reassuring. But we still don't need tens of thousands of kids getting sick, and a hundred hospitalized.
Partly, it's vaccinations: The story notes that those places generating most of the cases - Fraser and Interior - have vaccination rates as much as 20% behind the lower mainland. The result? CTV News reporting "92 different schools in Fraser Health" reporting exposures. 92! The number in Coastal is 10.
But, secondly, it's how you run those schools. CTV News also has an analysis comparing the BC infection rates to Ontario's, and comparing how Ontario schools have been much more pro-active about fighting transmission with ventilation and HEPA air filtration. And that our provincial health officer is not only reactive instead of pro-active, but "reacting slowly".
Also up for criticism the BC "weak testing regime". We've always had low test numbers, well below the national average. That was fine as long as we were having success, but now, we're not.
We are so near to shutting the door on this virus, and it looks like schools this fall are a key battleground. Let's not lose this battle.
Besides ventilation, and testing, let's turn the schools into pop-up vaccine clinics, the better to canvass Fraser and Interior - and to prepare for vaccinating all the schoolkids under 12, preferably next month.
We are so close, you can see the end from here, the light at the end of the tunnel. Now is the time to finally lose patience.
http://brander.ca/c19#covidkids
Top of the fold, on many newspapers today, is the announcement by Merck, of a pill stuffed with multiple antivirals that cuts hospitalization and death rates in half.
Which is nice.
Is it one of those "game-changer" drugs, like aquarium cleaner and horse dewormer were touted to be? Not really. Readers can go back to CCCC post #1, almost exactly 18 months back, for the exponential increase in death with age: it doubles, very roughly, every decade.
So, halving your risk is to be "10 years younger" when your symptoms get bad enough to be given the pill. Soon, I would be suffering only like a sprightly young lad of 53, instead of 63.
Since I note people of 43 still nervous about COVID, it's not the game-changer we need, not yet. Certainly a step along the road.
Vaccination lowered our risks by more like a factor of 20, than two, and people were still nervous! (My own risk-reduction is worst, says new data today from BC: those of us with AstraZenecaX2 are "merely" at 93% lower risk for hospitalization. With this pill, almost 97% lower!)
More help is on the way, of course: because of the odd animal origin, pandemic-news fans were intrigued by the National Institute of Health getting excited over llama nanobodies. Yes, llamas, apparently they are immunological wonders. However, that story came without even a faint timeline for implementation, one suspects it's not 2022, much less soon. (The story uses the term "eventually" about human trials. Sigh.)
So, we're stuck making Merck richer, as they're ready to ask for "emergency use" authorization. This is a nice little "bonus improvement" on top of the massive improvment in my odds from vaccination, so now I'm really ready to hit any bar or theatre. Only concern for the unvaccinated is keeping me down, at this point.
PS, added later on Oct 1:
I saw the story on this at the National Post, with its comically-bad comments column of right-wing nutcases. Sure enough, the top comment was from some guy flatly saying that men on this drug are completely infertile, and pregnant women can't take it. On zero evidence. Anti-virals have no history of risk for pregnant women, and they certainly don't affect male fertility. The utter, lying horseshit began same day.
http://brander.ca/c19#merckpill
This is basically an ad for both Elaine Dewar's book on the "Lab Leak Theory", and for the Canadaland episode that interviewed her and summarized her story.
I've never been that interested in the story, not just because I, too, wrote it off at first hearing as a conspiracy theory, and, as I noted in my post on The Tyee's review of the theory last June, "it just doesn't matter".
I figure that China is responsible for this pandemic; if not a lab-leak, then their food-handling, or their extinction-causing superstitions about wild animal parts being viagra. (And, like we didn't hate them already for cyberterrorism, Uighur genocide, extreme environmental crimes...)
Journalist Elaine Dewar is a much-applauded writer with a large back-catalog, who's tackled many topics, none of them conspiracy theories or political polemicism. Her work on this topic has been exemplary, and done the hard way: stuck at home, she just did the I.F. Stone thing: read the publicly-available documents for thousands of hours.
We were all easily convinced that the first "lab leak" stories had to be conspiracy theories, because it sounds like a movie: biowar, or at least biowar-research, shadowy cooperation between governments, cover-ups.
Dewar's narrative is considerably simpler, can easily be seen as something that could happen by accident with some poor procedure - and the cover-up notion fits in rather nicely with the timing of a January 2020 trade-pact announcement that nobody would have wanted to ruin.
In short, it's "compelling", as the Canadaland host called it, and the book is recommended. It's been out for a month, and really should have made a bigger splash by now. Particularly in Canada, which plays a part - mostly because our security people were awfully lax about the National Microbiological Laboratory in Winnipeg, and whom they worked with.
http://brander.ca/c19#lableak
In 1973, Northern Ireland had about 1.5 million population, and had suffered 480 deaths in "The Troubles", the previous year, 255 more that year, for a loss of 490 deaths-per-million in two years.
That was the year some British official coined the phrase "an acceptable level of violence". It was used again in 1988 by a police sergeant on the 'front lines' interviewed by American journalist P.J. O'Rourke, perhaps because by then the deaths-per-year rarely cracked 100.
Northern Ireland's loss-rate in 1988 (104/1.6M = 65 deaths/million/year) is far lower than what BC is losing in the pandemic (about 5/day = 360/million/year), much less the UK (~120/day = 644/million/year), but back when the phrase was coined in 1973, the numbers are kind of comparable: between the BC and UK current losses.
I'm raising a much bigger question than what John Horgan or Boris Johson is willing to lose of their population. It's what the population is afraid of, how much sense of danger it takes to modify our behaviour.
BC has barely closed a business in months, reportedly because most transmissions are not happening at work. School outbreaks explain some young cases, but most of them seem to be happening, in personal, social, family contacts. People are just exposing themselves more often, because they're not afraid to.
The old are vaccinated and not that afraid of dying, maybe enough to mask and distance more often...except from family. Younger people aren't even afraid enough to vaccinate, despite the drumbeat of ICU news stories.
I'm just saying, that this business of both BC and UK circling around the same daily infection numbers, is new. A disease that we're used to seeing expand exponentially, or die away exponentially, is just ... coasting at one level, with an "R" that never strays far above or below 1.0. So the dying continues, at a pretty steady rate: and people's behaviours aren't changing - like the Irish starting to shrug their shoulders at another bombed police station or pub.
Perhaps that's how the pandemic "ends". Maybe we just increase our hospital capacity, double the size and staff of the ICUs, and this is the new normal. Or, at least, if it were the new normal, the population would just live with it.
It won't work, of course. As long as the planet is unvaccinated, there will be another variant, and another, until there's one that does scare us into crushing the pandemic at last. It would be nice if we could just do that with our human intelligence, looking ahead, instead of being reactive, frightened into it like animals being herded with a lash.
If that wasn't guaranteed, I could go along with this average of opinions; I, too, am vaccinated, and not driven by fear. But it is, and we must not let this be an acceptable level of violence.
Those wanting to create a "meme" political cartoon can just grab that photo, paste "140 dead/day" on the fire, and "Very Young Boris Johnson" on the kid, and you're done!
http://brander.ca/c19#acceptable
I don't know if my data-graphics idol, Edward Tufte, would be proud of me, or appalled for putting one graph inside another, at left. Outside, the UK covid cases the last two months, since their football-pub-crowd-fuelled spike over 3 weeks in mid-July. Inside, the death-counts of the same period, shifted a few weeks.
No, the graphs are not the same shape, the death-rate was "de-coupled" in the sense that most of the spike was younger, pub-going football fans, and they didn't die like old people do of COVID-19.
But the overall community transmission that followed the spike has gone up and down, but circled around an average in the low-30,000s-per-day area for six weeks. And during the last month of those, the death rate has quietly crept up from 90 a day to 140/day.
While the two graphs don't track closely, they still have a rough correspondence, where 30,000 people become infected every day, and about a third of a percent of them die, some weeks later.
That's a huge improvement upon a couple of percent! The UK has slashed the COVID-19 death rate by a factor of, umm, several. But not quite a whole order of mangitude. But any notion that the UK could jump up to 60,000 per day without the death rate also doubling is nonsense. Hospitalization, death, and infection are still, surely, connected; the ratio has just dropped.
At right, the familiar case-graph for BC for the last couple of months. How similar to the UK! We, too, have been dawdling around a similar number of daily infections for nearly two months: it goes up and down, but circles around about 700. Our deaths-per-day have jumped as high as 11, low as zero (once) and one (once), but mostly, we have 4-6 deaths per day, with an average for the last month of five.
So ours, too, is still connected: the connecting ratio is just 5/700, or 0.7%.
There's no comparing the UK and BC ratios. BC has always had low case-counts, because we don't test as much as most other places. We had a "case mortality rate" as high as 6%, early in the pandemic, because we only knew about the fairly bad cases to start with. We were testing enough it was already down below 3% by this time last year, though there were no vaccines. So our drop in mortality from the vaccinations is comparable to the UK - a factor of "several", if not ten. (CCCC is too smart to give more-precise figures about such an imprecise area of study.)
Why are both the UK, and BC, wandering around at this steady level? The same deaths per day for months, not going up or down much? There's an ugly theory to be said about that, but it's for tomorrow.
http://brander.ca/c19#decoupling
Just scroll side-to-side; I couldn't bear to shrink it. And, Quebec-baiting aside, a far better case could be made that "The Maritimes" are all a "distinct society" with a pandemic like New Zealand, far better than the rest of us.
Quebec is only a five US states worse than Manitoba, though if Quebec had Manitoba's death-rate, then some 4000 Quebecers would still be with us.
Save for Quebec and Manitoba, Canada could claim all our provinces are better than all but two US states: Hawaii and Vermont. The US zones that everybody is concerned about have of course hit over 3000 dead/million, a "club" inhabited only by Brazil, Hungary, Peru on the international lists.
We are used to thinking of that quarter of the USA as some kind of "distinct culture" in its own right, a near-third-world with awful statistics on every measure of human success: health, crime, corruption. It's surprising still, to see really high numbers over 2000 dead/million, worse than most nations, in middle-America states like Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas.
And weirdest of all to see it in northern states that border near Canada itself: New Jersey and New York. (Worldometers acted swiftly, many months ago, to correct their corrupt, gropey governor's lies about the death count in New York). If you get COVID and go to a New York hospital, bring your luck - if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere! Sorry. I'm sure it wasn't the hospitals.
I may be wearing out the theme of "be glad you're Canadian". Our election was, of course, a time for politicians and journalists alike to claim that we live in a hellish place. I think I've heard us called "a laughingstock" over Afghanistan, Trudeau's opinions, and of course, over China and hostages.
If anybody calls us a "laughing stock" to our faces, we just have to point at, well, not just America, but most other countries, and name the number of additional dead Canadians that would be in the ground now if we had their pandemic performance:
| Polity | Pandemic Losses | Additional Canadian Dead |
|---|---|---|
| Super-Vaccinator Israel | 824/M | 3762 |
| Merkel's Germany | 1118/M | 15,000 |
| Herd-Immunity Experimenter Sweden | 1452/M | 27,600 |
| France, most-admired medical system | 1780/M | 40,000 |
| Wealthy Connecticut | 2379/M | 62,800 |
| Spacious Arizona | 2722/M | 75,900 |
Who's laughing now? A whole lot of live Canadians that can be glad they don't live in disease-ridden hellholes like Switzerland, France, and Rhode Island.
http://brander.ca/c19#statesprovinces
The linked article is just the "Latest News", a few paragraphs each in the Vancouver Sun about different COVID stories. There's a connection between two adjacent stories, though: on the one hand, BC cases for kids under 10 are trending way up, almost certainly because of school outbreaks.
On the other, Pfizer is "days not weeks" away from asking permission to vaccinate the 5-11 age group. What timing! Just as kids seem to be imperiled, it's Pfizer to the rescue.
It would be terrific, awesome, perfect, if Canada approved them as well, this next month, and began a school vaccination program by November. BC, at least, might actually be on track to hit 90% of the over-12 group in just three weeks, even before the "October 20" date predicted by CCCC just a week back.
Once we hit 90%, there's not much more the adults can do. A recent story noted how uneven the vaccination is in our Northern health region: lowest in some smaller centres, but Kitimat has reached 96% of adults(!) Nonetheless, you can also find stories of cases going up and down in Kitmat all this last month. It's not clear whether most of those are children - or even adults, who caught it from an asymptomatic kid that never got tested.
To some extent, we won't even know how much vaccines can do until we can vaccinate those kids. I still have fingers crossed for that discovery being our big Christmas Present.
http://brander.ca/c19#children
With more thanks to Charles Gaba, whose graph at left is the payoff, the result of his graph from yesterday.
The general idea was already plain enough: the places with local cultures likely to vote American-Republican are also more likely to not-distance, not-mask, and not-vaccinate. Yesterday's graph showed the truth of the last, in county-level detail, thousands of counties as data points.
This graph is just brutal, however: the death rate, since vaccines had become widely available and mostly-accepted, last June 30 (most places had vaccinated down below age 50 by then, down to ages who do little dying anyway). Canada was 67% vaccinated by then, so were three US states. But rather than aggregating rural areas and cities together by giving state-level death rates - which also show the vote-vs-death relation less clearly - it goes to the county level again, and the correlation is painfully clear.
The graph is making the rounds among epidemiology coverage, in recent weeks. Or reduced to a line, that the highest-voting counties now have 'nine times the death rate' of the lowest.
If I may go back a whole year, here's the CBC story on how "Alberta has more 'cynical spreaders' than other provinces", people who ignore all the public-health advice.
From the following December, the Herald story on 'how did we get here' , to Alberta's brutal second wave.
The government rules and rhetoric may drive some of the infections, but they are also symptoms of the local culture. People aren't ignoring distancing and masking dozens of times per day because they fear Jason Kenney will call them chicken: they already felt that way.
In these American communities at the right-hand side of the graph, it's that times ten.
It would be nice if the pandemic could change the attitudes of certain governments; but they'll change on their own if the pandemic actually changes public attitudes. Their belief system, their worldview, doesn't just make them easy prey for a virus. It makes them poorer competitors on the globe, stuck in a provincial, inward-looking, unadaptable culture.
As long as you still need statistical analysis to see it, of course, they don't have to be affected by it. For the rest of us, it's a sad story to watch.
http://brander.ca/c19#votevsdeath
I don't know how to thank a Mr. Charles Gaba enough. His name there links to what he describes as his web site, which is a page promoting "ObamaCare" signups. A page inside that web site is linked from today's graphic, at left, where he has it twice as large so you can read it properly: consider mine just an ad for him.
(He also has some presence on Twiddler, or whatever you call it; I can't bring myself to provide a link to that.)
But the graphic is also enough to clarify the whole theme of the graph, for those with just a few minutes to waste on America's poor democracy and the terrible effects thereof. While the R-squared here is a mere 0.44, meaning that a Democratic-leaning county might have a vaccination rate of 30% or 65% - most of the ones that voted 60% Democrat are clustered around 45%-55% vaccination. And most that voted 60% against the presidential Democrat are lower, around 40%-45% vaccination. And so on down. The 0.44 means it's a rough prediction, but it's also stable from 20% to 80% voting groups.
(A side-note: America is so much more polticially and culturally polarized than Canada that you, amazingly, can find counties that voted only 10% or up to 90% Republican. To a Canadian, both seem weird, even though the mostly-Democrat counties resemble us a lot more. Canada has very few places where the NDP, much less the Liberals, get under 10% or over 70%.
This is much more fine-grained data than looking at vaccination rates for a whole American state, because all their states have more Democrat voters in their cities, fewer in the rural counties. In Canada, you can barely see the effect, visible only in the lower vaccination rates of the more-often-Tory prairie provinces. But! There are almost no higher vaccination rates on Earth than in Nova Scotia (89% of 12+). But, Nova Scotians, despite a champion, New Zealand-grade pandemic (barely 100 dead/million, a seventh of Canada's average), by their former Liberal government - they just tossed out Liberals, albeit by just 38% to 36% in the popular vote.
But in America, politics and local (county-level local) culture are welded to each other. Even in America, most of their conservatives affect to be vaccine-positive in their direct statements, like our Jason Kenney. But they are far worse than Jason Kenney at deprecating the whole pandemic and real underlying need for vaccinations with the subtext. (You can't say that re-opening is possible now, and also promote vaccines in the same breath; the two contradict.)
The effect is not certain for any county (a cloud of points) but very clear across their nation. It has a cost. Which I'm going to delay until tomorrow, but you can jump ahead if you look around Mr. Gaba's web pages a bit.
http://brander.ca/c19#votevsvax
I was warming up to a post on how BC is clearly dropping in case-loads and positivity, then yesterday, 759 cases, a big jump. Post postponed.
For a fresh topic, why not a nutty idea? This article on the office-space going to waste caught my eye. It's always the greatest thing if you have two problems that happen to be able to cancel each other out.
(Traditionally, that involves a small kingdom that instigates war between two large ones over "who gets the small kingdom", and sells arms to both.)
But it's hard to get around the fact that the difference between office space and housing space is the amount of plumbing, and ventilating kitchens instead of coffee rooms, plus more bathing. It's not an insuperable conversion.
We have a shortage of housing, and a surplus of office - can't those two cancel each other out somehow?
The problems are basically legal. The shortage of housing isn't about a lack of land, timber, or roofing: it's about zoning and legal restrictions. However, it's probably easier to overcome NIMBYism when the "back yard" is commercial land, and all the owners that might protest are commercial office owners, going broke.
It's particularly painful to think of that warm, dry, running-water-equipped space sitting empty while people camp in parks: they wouldn't even care about upgrading it to what most would call "good housing".
That's probably the place to start: look into alternative to the execrable nightmare SRO buildings in Vancouver, so we can tear them down and end the blight.
http://brander.ca/c19#nutty
Another single-article-recommendation here at CCCC. Some mornings, I'm on the third paragraph when I know this is the "thought for the day" article to focus on.
As often, it's at The Atlantic, the article by Amanda Mull on our supply chain.
It's very simple, we just don't think about it any more than we are forced to. Wealthy countries don't make much of the goods they consume, any more, we employ the rest of the world to make stuff for us.
And our prices are rising, shortages still growing, because we haven't vaccinated our employees that make our stuff. We haven't vaccinated the Asians in the factories, the sailors on the ships, truckers, miners around the world.
One after another has to shut down for weeks at a time: factories, ports, companies. It's not a robust, resilient system. All that was sacrificed for efficiency and cost-savings. So every closure causes snarls down the line.
The pandemic has tied the supply chain in knots because it represents an existential threat to the lives of the humans who toil in it. The fact that Americans now can safely go on vacation does not mean that people half a world away can safely make new bathing suits for them.
So, get in there and lobby for "Vaccinate the Planet"; it's not charity. It's just supply-chain management, necessary to production.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxsupply
CBC reports that the PPC pulled in "5.1% of the popular vote, some 726,000 votes".
It was supposedly 1.6% last election, so I'm going to credit the whole difference, almost exactly 500,000 Canadians, to anti-vaxxers.
That's using "anti-vaxxers" a little loosely - to sum up the whole cluster of beliefs and complaints about public health measures, from masks to mandates, that also motivated a few thousand Australians to get violent with their police, yesterday.
I've just been reading the neglected book (all three copies at VPL were "in" this week, until I took one out), "Could It Happen Here?" by Michael Adams of Environics. Adams shows pretty dispositively, with polling data, that Canada and the US are in very different places on topics like immigration and race. Yeah, we're racist and sexist and all that, too, but the degree of difference is a degree in kind. No Trump.
Indeed, the election showed that, with the pathetic 5.1% showing that didn't approach a seat in any riding. People are just "viewing with alarm" (something journalists do professionally) the 500,000 vote increase. And they look at the violent Australia protests, the hospital protests and rock-throwers here, and get scared.
The good news, I think, is that this next month or so will be Peak Anti-Vaxxer. The time new rules are introduced is when the passions are highest. Passions are hard to sustain. (No George-Floyd type protests lately? Because no recent passion-inducing video, frankly. Revving up a protest without something like that, is just hard.)
Summer is over, and the re-opening that vaccines (and mandates at businesses) provide is going to have people back at work and school, and just busier. Lockdowns can create ongoing protests, because the lockdown continues irritating and inconveiencing people, shutting down jobs. But you don't have to get vaccinated again every day - and vaccination mandates mean the reverse of lockdown: a situation that is creating job openings and money changing hands.
So CCCC is predicting "it'll be shrinking by Thanksgiving, over by Christmas", as a political issue. And that the next election will toss the PPC back down below 3% again. Not back to 1.6%, alas, there's a rachet effect.
But, as long as they're a joke, we can laugh and get on with our lives. And, right now, we can say to every anti-vaxxer that they've been heard, had their say, been proven to be a tiny minority that deserves no power over the rest of us, and get on with our pandemic fight.
http://brander.ca/c19#antivaxpols
I was going to write something else, when I realized CCCC should commemorate Election Day.
Save for the mathematically unlikely (astronomically so) outcome of the PPC taking 170 seats and forming our next government, this election is not about our federal pandemic response.
Conservative provincial governments have piled up an appalling record, I'll concede. And as a political lefty in general, I'm happy to pile on Doug Ford and Jason Kenney, though I've also given credit when due, to both.
Favourite line from that post:
Today, it's really time for left-wingers to begrudge that Jason Kenney, and even Doug Ford (choke) are simply not idiots of the American conservative variety; they're only idiots in Canada, where we have much higher standards.
I would tremble if Erin O'Toole had a record like Doug Ford, much less Kenney, of trying over and over to dismiss the pandemic as "only old people", "just a flu" and "bad, but got to get back to work". But he doesn't. I think a federal Conservative victory would not be much worse, cost any lives (or be any better). It's not an election issue. Trudeau ran on his past, but not on threats of future losses if his opponents win.
Unlike November of 2020, in the United States, there's just no chance of an electoral outcome that would sabotage our pandemic response. Even the worst Canadian response (Alberta) has a current caseload better than New York; Massachussetts; and forty-five other US states. There's just no comparison between the countries. Canada has had a third of the losses in America or the UK, 30% less than Austria, Germany, Switzerland.
In Canada, bad pandemic response is not even on the menu.
So, vote your political preference, today. Grandma's life is not on the line.
Oh, Canada, Oh Canadians, I feel so lucky to have spent the pandemic with you.
http://brander.ca/c19#canada
At left, how cases would react to vaccine alone, public health alone, or both together, for the original virus: they all shut down the pandemic.
At right, the model re-run with a variant with an assumed R-nought of 6.0, probably conservative for the current one. Neither one can beat it alone, both are needed together. Yikes.
Note, that Dr. Gasperowicz is working an Alberta model, with just 70% of the poplation vaccinated. BC is already passing 78% by tomorrow. I wouldn't hold out any hope for better outcomes, though, as she's assuming "99% effectiveness", which is liberal, even after full-vaccination (BC is just hitting 71% on that, tomorrow.)
If past performance is a guide to the future, we can't count on anybody paying attention to her, however. The "past performance" is to sit about, waiting for vaccination alone to save the day.
If we do reach 90% of the over-12s in 31 days, as CCCC has estimated, it might also take that long to realize that it, alone, isn't working. Perhaps then, we'll see some action.
CCCC is, again, indebted to Andrew Nikiforuk of The Tyee, in this case, his opinion article, "Resign, Kenney, Resign", for the link to Dr. Gasperowicz.
http://brander.ca/c19#gosia
There's absolute, and there's relative. The pandemic being over is an absolute, and BC is not heading there. The graphic links to a good Tyee article, which is not about any new restrictions to get cases down in the hard-hit Interior and Northern health regions of the province; just about getting them more hospital staff. They have put in some new public health orders there, to limit gatherings, not business. BC health is continuing a policy, they say based on data, that our current woes are all from personal, private interactions; they haven't shut down a business to prevent intra-employee transmission in months.
It all sounds pretty wishy-washy, to those of us accustomed to two-fisted pandemic fighting after 18 months of it. But. On the relative scale, it must be admitted that BC is still doing fairly well, even as I've given up hope that the weekend numbers will show any decline at all, on Monday afternoon. (See yesterday's post, below).
The graphic is the story: a thousand words to repeat it would be redundant. We're twice as bad as Ontario, yes, but less than half as bad as Alberta...and Alberta, for all of being the laughingstock of Canadian pandemic progress today, is better that all but a dozen-odd American states. Some of their worst are also their most rural and spacious: Montana barely fits into the chart, but there are seven states worse than it.
So are whole nations. The UK cases have been finally coming down, but they're still about the same as Alberta's. The American national average is a bit higher again.
The whole world is struggling with this wave, and BC is actually the best-poised to come out of it, with our champion vaccination rate. There are multiple stories this morning about the Alberta rate tripling, so there's hope even there. But we need percentage gains, not tenth-percent gains. One keeps wishing for public health to lean in, creatively, on that sales job.
http://brander.ca/c19#smugbcok
The graphic at left is appropo of nothing in the post, actually; I just had to show it. It's the thumbnail on YouTube for the CTV piece on hospital protests. Best image of the vaccine controversy so far.
BC better not be smug about Alberta having twice the cases, and having to flip-flop on vaccine passports and closures. We've little to brag about except a difference of degree.
At right, the chart for positivity in BC for the last month. The alarms are being raised by the green line, for "northern" health region, which has only 6% of the population and 15% of cases, and also by the yellow "Interior Region" line.
But never mind them. The Blue and Red lines are for Vancouver Island, and Vancouver Coastal, respectively - and it isn't just that 4% and 5-6% positivity are also pretty bad, but they are STEADY, not going down, no hint of that.
So, these regions would have higher vaccination, maybe 90% of adults, pretty good masking attitudes...and none of that is making cases actually decline. Cases would be well over 100/day and climbing slightly, even if only the Lower Mainland and the Island were counted.
So, BC has a problem with COVID-19. Still! It will surely cause problems in schools and hold people back from fully enjoying re-opening, losing their fears, until it is addressed.
Maybe those 5 weeks of patient vaccination will do it, and we have to hope so, as there's no indication that this level inspires our public health officials to do anything. Possibly, they're just waiting for all the unvaccainated to "reach natural immunity" by risking their lives. Pity.
http://brander.ca/c19#smugbc
I simply can't resist some way of illustrating the joke.
That's it, folks, save that I recommend everybody read the funny, viciously-headlined take from Jen Gerson, writing at "The Line", my new favourite Canadian news/opinion site. I'm on the brink of handing out gift subscriptions to friends.
I subscribe to a couple of relatively-lefty news sources (Tyee, CanadaLand, National Observer) and had wanted some views from the right, too, but there's just too much of it at the major papers like the National Post and even the Globe and Mail.
The contributors to The Line all seem to hail from generally right-of-centre: a former Harper campaign manager; Gerson certainly leans a bit right, so do other contributors. But none of them are out there on the conspiracy-believing, socialist-baiting, cultural-issues-complaining, alt-right. What a relief to find people just concerned about overspending and over-regulating.
And this piece is quite the example. I agree with Jen that even Kenney's enemies did (or should have, certainly CCCC did) hope that Kenney's summer gamble would work. The Stampede, in particular, seemed a small gamble, being an "outdoor show", and CCCC was cheered when it caused at most a few infections.
But Kenney, Gerson stresses, had to gamble last spring, as his political situation was already dire: he badly needed a big win. He bet all, and lost. It's a good take on it.
The Line is a new attempt at a journalistic platform, using the newly-popular substack system. I subscribed, I'm glad to see it, and recommend it to all.
http://brander.ca/c19#theline
I was looking for some sort of pattern in BC's vaccination rates: whether they'd jumped up in the last week as the passport rules loom. I thought I'd spotted something, in that the last 7 days, the first-vax number jumped up 0.94% - the week before only 0.57%. But the weeks before that, going backwards in time, were this list of numbers: 1.02%, 0.39%, 0.94%, 0.63%
Vaccination would seem to be an area where even a 7-day average isn't a wide enough sample to be steady. But when you look at the graph going back four months, it's actually steady as a train on rails.
The red line is dead straight through this graph of the 12+ vaccination rate. It's dead easy to extrapolate it forward another 5 weeks and see it reach the needed (please, let it be enough) mark of 90%.
I'd stretch that extrapolation to six weeks at least, as one would expect it to slow down at some point, as we get to the actual anti-vaxxers, not just "hesitators".
As noted yesterday, late October might be the point where we also get notified that vaccinations for the under-12 set can begin soon. 90% vaccination of adults certainly suggests their kids will get the same protection, so a few months after that, one might expect 90% of the full population, at last.
News stories today note that vaccination rates are low in the Northern health region, suggesting that we in Coastal are higher, perhaps at that 90% already - and our positivity rate is still about 5%, our cases 100/day, just in the one region. It's clearly not enough. Maybe with the kids, done, too.
With school in, and some schools already getting outbreaks, it can't come soon enough. Starting in less than 6 weeks would be perfect.
Please.
http://brander.ca/c19#steadyvax
Time for some cruel mockery of pandemic predictions:
Andy Slavitt, former Biden White House senior adviser for COVID-19 response, tweeted July 26 that if the Delta variant acted the same in the U.K. as in India, it would have a quick rise and a quick drop. The prediction seems to have come true. As of Aug. 3, U.K. cases have dropped to 7,467, compared to more than 46,800 July 19.
Then this one from the day before, August 2nd: "How did the UK overcome its delta surge? Experts point to 3 key factors."
The articles were still on web pages being viewed when the "sharp drop" reversed itself and started climbing again. What had really happened all along, goes the current theory, is that there was this very, very sharp surge because Football caused everybody to hit the bars. But then, England lost, games fell off, and the surge from football faded just as sharply.
The green line on the chart indicates there was a real surge going on underneath, that had nothing to do with football. The fans were the part of that surge that's above the green line, where the point of the arrow is. But below the green line, was the real delta curve in the general population.
As you'll note at the far-right of the UK graph, though, it looks like a week ago might be the real crest, and now we're past it? But look just left of that -another similar bobble two weeks before.
The Canadian and American graphs might be showing the same thing. Perhaps we've hit peak at last - as they say, you can only see it in the rear-view mirror. Canada's shaky drop in the last week or so is mainly because Ontario really seems to be on the downside. Quebec cases, however, are still steadily rising. Across the prairies, still sharply rising, and BC can't seem to make up its mind - if this BC hit peak a week ago, we're staying on it, at an "R" of one. Great.
This may be the peak, behind Ontario, and about to drop for the rest of us, or it may be a little bobble like UK at the end of August.
The pandemic "predictors" are pretty exposed as "guessers", at this point, and CCCC is not dumb enough to join them. We're at the "nobody knows anything" point in the pandemic. There are just too many variables: high vaccinations creeping up, slowly (too, too slowly) slowing the transmission medium, behaviours changing weekly as governments try different measures, and people gain and lose courage every few news reports.
It's pretty hard to have faith in anything but 90%+ vaccinations, down to age five, which isn't coming until late Fall, at the earliest - and probably 2022. But a crest in the rear-view mirror is certainly not beyond the reach of hope, and it would make a lovely, no, PERFECT news for Thanksgiving, that we are now definitely going steadily down.
The Canadian Thanksgiving is four weeks away, American ten weeks away. Given the differing problems of the two, that sounds about right, as something to hope for, at least, for both nations.
http://brander.ca/c19#pastpeak
I got (almost) nothin'. A few days off, and I'm depressed to dig into most pandemic news, most of which is Obvious Dumbness vs Common Sense.
Relatives visiting, and I'm off to the movies in a few hours, the latest Marvel punch-fest. It's day one of the new "vaccine pass" era, and I feel like Wayne and Garth, proudly holding up their backstage passes at Aerosmith, just aching to have somebody see them and envy them.
Of course, as the saying goes, the Vaccinated Club is "about as exclusive as a rainstorm". Anybody can join for free. Everybody is actually begged to join.
I'm really just proudly displaying my common sense and lack of Obvious Dumbness. I am not the sort to go on an on about the possible dangers of something already tried for a year by tens of millions of the old and vulnerable, surely the best canaries in the health-risk coal mine you could ask for - and then gobble horse de-wormer.
"I'm no fool, no sirree!" sings Jiminy Cricket. in a Disney public-service cartoons for schools about elementary safety measures in traffic and home accidents.
That's it. But apparently, this is a political position these days, and I'm happy to take it.
But, the happiness is just that where I live, we have this thing, this new attitude towards safety. That my right to see a movie in a relaxed state of mind is as important as a small minority's right to put me at risk for their convenience.
Alberta and the entire UK are not so lucky. There, the rights of a minority as small in Canada and the UK as, say, Muslims are in the United States. (6% of the population are Muslims, about 7% seem to be your serious anti-vaxxers.) Imagine if Muslims began to complain that their beliefs forbid them to get driver's licenses, and that you should be able to drive a car without having one, to cater to their concerns.
That's how nuts this is, and yet, in Alberta and UK, it's a dominant political ethic.
But BC has Common Sense, and I'm off to the movies, relaxed about it.
http://brander.ca/c19#passes
I've been grumpy about this for some time, because it's an "infrastructure thing"; my beat. With better infrastructure, we'd have less pandemic. Also, fewer colds and flu. We always should have been doing it.
The Atlantic article really pushes that: "The Plan to Stop Every Respiratory Virus at Once" ... is a bit over the top, since the article is about having to change every building in the world to pursue it.
We've been seeing through the whole pandemic how crucial airflow is for this virus. Remember the guy visiting beaches as "the grim reaper" to tell people not to play in the sun and wind and salt spray at the beach? Boy, was he wrong. Very little outdoors transmission, and 90% of that is at night. Salty sea air was just confirmed as the worst air for the virus transmission. And beaches are never crowded, in the each-other's-faces sense.
There was the restaurant where only the people downstream in the air-conditioning flow got infected. The article notes a 1977 case of an Alaska Airlines flight, where they were grounded for 3 hours with the air-recirculation off: 72% of the passengers were infected by a single flu sufferer. The Zeynep Tupfekci note at right links to The Atlantic's other article, by her, on the same topic ...from a year ago. It's time to push harder on it, from the lack of progress.
In the middle of a financial catastrophe, nobody knew how to advise hospitality venues to somehow put in all-new air circulation systems. A restaurant where there was an incoming airflow at your feet, and a big fan duct above the table, sucking away everybody's exhalations upward and out, would be much safer - but how to retrofit?
The teachers are certainly getting it. Demanding better ventilation in schools. If you're short on time, read that article, rather than the longer one in the Atlantic, which dives into the history of ventilation (Big Ben is mostly a ventilation "chimney" for warm outgoing air from Parliament). The teacher article gets into the real problem with no ventilation improvements so far in 18 months: the managers aren't exposed to the poor ventilation.
So, coronavirus risk, like all forms of crap, flows downhill, and the teachers are being told to "open a window" - or, in short, "you figure it out". The victims are blamed if they can't save themselves.
Ventilation has been an overlooked need in good building design for a long time. It's the one part of it that is still being overlooked, because now is an emergency, and you can't heavily renovate deep structures in buildings on an emergency basis. But the upwards-airflow restaurant will be a diner favourite when it's built, because the pandemic will cast a long shadow on public risk-assessments.
It'll become a new standard, with any luck. The pandemic will have done a good thing for once.
http://brander.ca/c19#ventilation
It's been smeared so that the QR code can't be used, but that's my passport. (The advice is to not share the QR code, though you need photo ID to use it. One can certainly imagine a harried waitress not looking closely at the ID.)
This is exciting for me for multiple reasons. I had bitter experience to tell me that government IT departments are scarcely able to do new things on short schedules, and it's clear the passport was not a long-held plan. They've come to them reluctantly, after recent spikes showed that we can't just vaccinate to herd immunity and watch life go back to normal.
I watched the presentation live on the web (how dead is TV, when you turn to the web for live coverage?) and Dr. B mentioned the coming interoperability with federal passports, and that it used a "global SMART Health Card framework", certainly the IT department's best decision: I'm sure 99% of the programming for this was already done, free.
Even the ACLU, formerly a mandate critic, is on-board with COVID-19 health passports. The public support for them is massive, overwhelming.
So I wanted in ASAP, for no good reason other than excitement. I hit on the website named in the presentation, while it was live. I was greeted with a polite, very accurate estimate of my queue position (20 minutes), and it counted down steadily, then let me in. The two minutes of entering my health care number, and the two dates, went smoothly, and I was issued my QR code in a second. I had to stop and figure out how to screensnap my phone, but then I had it, and logged out. Dr. Henry was still speaking.
That is not a normal experience with government bureaucracy! Congratulations to them all for delivering a needed service, in good time, with no glitches!
Also, of course, I printed it off, have a copy in my wallet. I forget my phone all the time.
On TV last night, bar owners were skeptical, afraid their place would be empty this time next week. These folks need reassurance and support! I will have to make an effort to get out to all the bars I can.
To support pandemic rules, of course. Going to a lot of bars will be this selfless public service I provide.
http://brander.ca/c19#passport
I found the image at left just looking for a fun vax-at-school image, but the story is worth a click and a glance. It's from 2015, about school vaccination rules being cracked down upon, resulting in "132 shots to 82 students" and also "143 emergency expulsions", of those who wouldn't vaccinate.
Perfect. Just the attitude we need. There's a few polities right now with anti-vax regulations slapped on their schools so that COVID is the only thing they can't require vaccinations for, just the many other diseases that got those 143 Spokane students sent home.
Canada's 12-17 set is about 73% vaccinated, about the same as the 18-29 crowd that also need a major boost in jabs.
We've been slack about vaccinating them because of their own low risk. But now, the 21% of Manitoba that is 0-18 are 33% of the COVID cases. Just over 1% of them, 17 of 1554 so far in Manitoba, have entered hospital, and none to an ICU. That'll change if Manitoba's problems are multiplied by thirty as the same happens to the whole country. So far, about 1500 of that age have been to hospital in the whole Canadian pandemic, 174 to ICU, 12 dead.
It would be great if the fourth wave didn't abruptly double those numbers in the next few months.
Much more importantly, far fewer vaccinated kids asymptomatically bring the virus back home from school, causing a breakthrough infection that kills grandpa.
Vaccinations should be required for school; it's not like the kid can't attend school at all without, because the last 18 months have certified that it is officially "schooling" to have the kid attend by Zoom. So: unvaccinated kids can keep Zooming, vaccinated can come in person. What's your complaint?
And, certainly, vaccinations should be available at school. In fact, I'd make the exception that kids who get vaccinated at school can continue to attend while it takes effect. The few weeks of declining risk are a minor risk to take, if it'll promote more shots.
Lastly, the provinces that vaccinate 11-year-olds if they turn 12 "this year" need to extend that rule to "this school year" immediately, catch about a third of the 11-year-olds; every bit helps. And, needless to say, every kid that turns 12 in 2022 needs to be vaccinated in early January of 2022. That'll get a bit of the 5-11 set done early. It hardly needs to be added that approval for those vaccinations is a burning need.
Everybody seems content to not rush that in any way, so CCCC will just fume and vibrate with impatience. The mechanisms and supplies to vaccinate them should be all lined up, though, so that mass clinics (in school) can begin the day after the first approval.
http://brander.ca/c19#schoolvax
The image at left links to the one article today. Finally, we have a randomized, controlled, fully-scientific study of the effect of masks in a community. It involved 350,000 people, went on for months, in Bangladesh.
There have been studies before, in hospitals, with everybody wearing proper surgical masks properly, all the time, and we know masks have a huge effect in that case.
This was more about letting some villages do as they pleased, and some got encouragement to mask. The big jump was from 14% masked to 43% masked, as counting the faces shown in public squares. That jump reduced the number of people infected by about 10%. Not huge, but quite significant - especially in that cases for older people dropped 39%, probably because they were much more diligent about actually wearing them.
There can be little doubt that getting masking way above 43% would have much more effect again.
The things that worked to get people to mask were few. It came down to personal contact, to reminders. Nudges, money, texts, signs, none of that worked. Just personal reminders.
It's good to at least have data.
http://brander.ca/c19#maskstudy
Back to vaccines later. Today, back to the origin-job of CCCC: staring in horror at the Worldometers Dashboard of Death, left. Having exhausted the attempts to make the pandemic costs hit the gut by comparing them to wars, and then to city sizes, the back-to-the-origins is to look a the "deaths per million", the CCCC metric of national performance.
The occasion is that today, the United States of America will enter the "2000 club", those nations that have lost 2000-per-million, a fifth of a percent, of their population, to the virus. (Duly noted, some of the recorded, died with covid, not of covid, but they are certainly outweighed in every country by the covid deaths that were never recorded, so there.) The USA will become the 20th member of the club on worldometers.
Dishonorable mentions are due to countries that certainly belong there, but are just lying about the number of dead. India is reasonably reckoned to have hit 4 million dead during that staggering wave that filled the rivers with bodies, backed up the burning grounds; they're in the 3000 club, and headed for 4000.
The members vary. Some have had just a few dead, but joined because of their tiny populations, like Gibraltar and San Marino. Some joined because they were previously so successful at giving people long lives, so long they had large care-home populations, like Italy, and Belgium.
Most are simply some combination of poverty and poorly-run health care, like Peru, Paraguay, Mexico, Bulgaria. Corrupt, fascist-leaning countries are over-represented, like Hungary, Brazil, and again, India. The USA clearly showed how even some fascist, authoritarian, the-truth-is-what-we-tell-you-it-is thinking can destroy a pandemic response.
The "New Deaths" column in red tells you how quickly the number is rising. The numbers are from two days ago, Friday, when reports were complete. The USA, with 1500 dead, went up by over 4 that day, every 332 deaths another death-per-million. They have long since blown way past the UK at Death Race 2021, left them behind at 1950. UK deaths are still rising, now past 100/day. They may peak at 130/day, or 2 deaths-per-million per day. but they're far behind the USA now, at 1950, and I don't think they can (be stupid enough to, even with BoJo) "catch" the USA now. They'll surely enter the 2000 Club, though, by early Fall.
That's it, today. Mostly, CCCC has been commenting on the pandemic fight, all about the vaccines and transmission restrictions. Today, let's just stop and look at this table. Over 2 million dead on it, nearly half as much as India. All of them left behind typical "flu deaths" and "traffic accidents" a long time ago. Most of them, despite their various challenges of demographics and money, could have had half or a third the deaths: there are millions dead by mistake and incompetence.
A reminder on the USA: Canada just passed 700 dead per million a few weeks back, and our current death rate is barely one per million per two days, a tenth of the current American rate. They'll certainly exceed three times our death-rate. America maybe couldn't have done as well as us with any federal and state administrations, but they could surely have halved their deaths, saved hundreds of thousands of people. On the September 11th anniversary next weekend, they'll surely lose about half the number they lost on the original, most of whom wouldn't be dead if they'd lived in Canada.
As we go into a Canadian election, let's just patriotically appreciate how much better our culture is than theirs, how much better our politics. We don't inflict wars on others, and we take care of each other. Oh, Canada!
http://brander.ca/c19#2000club
For visual filler, hard to beat the graph at left, from the "BC COVID-19 Modelling Team" publication of last August 18. They really pack in not just the case numbers, and reductions of what the "R" was every week, but the reasons for the changes ("No indoor dining").
The group are not affiliated with any government body; they are actually light on epidemiologists, they are physicists, chemists, mathematicians, who just track numbers and create models that appear to match the past, and show promise at predicting the near future.
With the government, you wonder if the study results have been limited, enhanced, distorted a bit to sell the government message, even from the most-honest government. Groups like this are a true public service.
I can't recommend enough clicking on the graph to go to their report, skipping that, and instead watching their YouTube video, which is very much for the wide population (carefully explaining log graphs about 3 times) and comes to clear, simple conclusions.
But, if you don't have fourteen minutes, here's the gist of the gist:
By contrast, a group called The Ontario Science Table incurred the wrath of Twitter and journalists by publishing the range of possibilities as a single chart, instead of walking everybody through two different modelling assumptions. So the one chart shows an 18:1 range of outcomes: from 500 cases/day to 9,000.
"These guys have no goddamn clue what is going to happen, and they'd be better off just admitting as much." huffed the indignant non-scientists at The Line. I attempted to clarify, in the comments, how these things should be read, and used. To no avail, I'm sure. It's part of the general right-wing suspicion of science that they want black-and-white, hard predictions of the future, or you're useless. They aren't as blatant about insulting scientists as the new alt-right are, but staid, stolid, grey-wool-suit conservatives have been pulling this on scientists for decades: Economists that tried to say tax cuts don't pay for themselves, climatologists, and, before them, lung cancer doctors. You're either precisely, indisputably right, or you're not to be listened to.
Offer statistics and models with a range of outcomes, and you're uselessly vague. Offer hard predictions, and you're selling an agenda, a narrative created by your liberal assumptions.
But the well-presented BC models, and the more-confusing Ontario presentation, both come to the same conclusions: we really, really need to vaccinate to 90%, and even so, need to go back to at least medium-tough restrictions while we get there. And if we don't, the fourth wave will be larger than the third.
http://brander.ca/c19#bcmodgroup
A column today at a much-recommended news/opinion site, The Line, today tossed off, casually, the idea that there's a "reviled 20 per cent of the electorate that won't get the jab".
Perhaps the exact number of them that "won't" get it is unimportant, but CCCC is all about number-crunching, and it's especially important with vaccine numbers as they get high. The difference between 87% vaccinated and 92% vaccinated is just 5%, but also might be the difference between R>1 and R<1 (i.e. "herd immunity"). So CCCC will be a number nitpicker today.
Firstly, Jen Gerson at The Line was rounding way down: it's 83.6% of the over-12 ages that are first-dosed today.
Secondly, "The electorate" are not those over-12, but over 18, and the 12-17 cohort are low-vaccinators, so "the electorate" is at nearly 85% vaccinated.
Thirdly, Trudeau won't really face "The Electorate", he'll face actual voters, and the least-likely-to-vote age cohort, 18-29, is also the least-vaccinated (even lower than the 12-17's, whose parents made them go). 18-24 had 54% turnout in 2019, 65-74 had 79% turnout. And nearly 95% vaccination rates.
Other less-vaccinated groups include all "persons of colour", who, hey, also have low vote turnout. I'm not going to run exact numbers, but all this pushes it up to 87-88%, of "probable voters", the real, practical "electorate", being vaccinated.
And, fourthly, yes, fourthly, it ain't over, yet. Most of the unvaccinated aren't anti-vaxxers, or even vaccine-hesitant, they just haven't prioritized it yet, especially the day-of-feeling-crappy part. The passports have improved rates up to over 0.13% per day, and the next 17 days should round it up by another 2.2%.
It's just an estimate, but CCCC is going with those who cast ballots being 90% vaccinated on Election Day, and calling that conservative. So to speak.
That's one overwhelming majority, and an overwhelming majority of them, will also either support health passes, or not be angry enough about them to switch votes. By focusing all their public vitriol on the PM, and associating "Liberal Hating" with the same bunch that scream at health care workers going in to work, and harassing restaurants,the anti-vaxxers are actually handing Trudeau a helping hand.
I'm not a big fan of Mr. T., and I'm not voting Liberal, but if they want to super-polarize the whole discussion down to Nazi Vaccinators vs Unvaxed Patriots For Freedom, then I'm in Trudeau's trench on that issue, and I'm glad to see them make an unforced error.
What an error yesterday. I checked my numbers this morning, and was a good 2% off. It's 90% voter vaccination, not 92%. Only those over 60 even have 92% within their own group; reducing the young people voting isn't that big a help. So it's about 87%-88% right now, and maybe 90% by Election Eve.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxvoters
"What Can't Be Cured, Must Be Endured"
Well, "Get To Zero" was a possible ambition before the variants, before we all got too tired of restrictions. As detailed yesterday, public health is now touting an all-vaccine strategy, no more restrictions. (Though if our future is entirely about rising cases, one can't see a point where masks indoors will be removed again...)
So, our new strategy is basically "Get to Ninety" - that is, percent vaccinated. First, the adults, giving us 80% of the total-population done, then the kids, apparently at no rushed schedule at all, so, February or later.
CCCC has already made, and some state or province or country has already tried, all the public methods of getting people out: lotteries, concerts, dancing stuffed animal mascots.
We do have everybody caving to the notion of passports, and praise be...not least because I shamefully enjoyed the schadenfreude of seeing Doug Ford turn a 180 and eat his own words; not to mention the fun of him somehow complaining about the lack of federal passports, which he was against just days ago.
Our own passport declaration in BC hasn't done all that much, for vaccination. We've vaccinated 1% of our population in nine days since the announcement, a tiny bump up from 0.07%/day to 0.11%. One might hope for a little rush around September 13, the way some people file their taxes on the last day possible.
But we need another 5% !
What's left? Well, plenty can be done, it's just expensive in time and people:
Above all, I would love to see a survey of the unvaccinated. Who are they, where are they, how do we find them and what do they want? Some work on that has been done, let's review in another post.
http://brander.ca/c19#get290
Before we even dig in to the main topic, I've got a respectful question. The linked story notes that 33 people died in BC, and a third were in long-term care. That's got to have huge overlap with the stat that 39% of them were to the fully-immunized, since LTC must be about 98% vaccinated. (Just that age group is 95%, so 98% is probably conservative.)
So, the respectful question is, "How many of those 11 deaths in LTC came from a care-worker who was, as was her right, unvaccinated?"
If it is, oh, I'm guessing at least 5 of the 11, then the decision, since reversed, to permit them to keep their jobs without vaccination... just had an identified butcher's bill. So, asking. Why aren't journalists?
But the main topic for that presentation was the modeling that showed anywhere from 400 cases/day to 1,600 - if vaccination doesn't improve and there are Bad Behaviours, as well, I suspect. Even a slight drop from now, to 400/day is with a "high vaccination" future that they don't actually expect. The most-probable median in the "projected vaccination" model is close to a thousand cases a day, and 50 hospitalizations, which is, frankly, Not Good. Fifty hospitalizations per day, means several deaths per day for a few months: the bodies could really pile up.
But the presentation had no discussion of any more restricting, though we just went back to mask-requirements. Maybe they're planning on more, but waiting for more full-ICU news broadcasts before they announce. But, at the moment, the strategy is to just let what happens, happen, and say "it is what it is" about the results.
I'm not sure I'm against it! Maybe public health has done all they even should, and put more pressure on the private decisions.
At some point, where we have >95% vaccination for the high-fatality demographic, and >85% of all adults and adolescents, even I'm ready to lift the hand of Public Health protection over the remainder, and call it "consequences". Just hope for those straggling unvaccinated to show up, and for behaviours to be generally restrained (as CCCC's "when it's over" post notes).
In which case, we really need to hype vaccination now. That'll be the CCCC focus for some posts to come.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxonly
Homeopathic Dilution advocates have been cruelly mocked for over a hundred years. "Most of their quack herbs are of little value at full-strength, much less diluted by a factor of a trillion", say mean killjoy scientists.
Well, the Real Truth is now out: COVID can be beaten, if you just COMBINE the awesome powers of aquarium cleaner and horse dewormer, then dilute by a factor of a trillion. This homeopathic treatment is then activated by slow absorption of zinc through the skin.
The instructions are perfectly simple, can be followed at home! First, you need to purchase the aquarium cleaner, at right, from any pet store. Ignore all the warnings and concerned looks you get. Tell them you really need to clean your aquarium.
Secondly, you need to purchase the horse dewormer. This may be a little awkward just now; you may need to use photoshop, because some veterinary supply stores are demanding that you show a picture of yourself with your horse, before they'll sell it. Definitely tell them you have a horse that needs deworming. Details count! When asked, confidently state that horses have four feet, and yours eat oats and hay.
The product at left, is preferred by homeopathic scientists, because the "Apple Flavour" (note lower right of package) has been found to enhance the medical effects.
Thirdly, combine the two. Fill one-half of an eighth-teaspoon measuring spoon with aquarium cleaner, the other half with horse dewormer. Be careful not to ingest any, they are at far too high a concentration to have the proper effect, and may spoil the results of the homeopathic solution when it is ready.
Fourth, dilution. Put the one-eighth teaspoon into a gallon-sized pot of water. There is no need to stir. Wait one minute, then put in an eyedropper and remove half a dropper-full. Put this into a fresh gallon of water, and do stir. Wait one minute, then remove half an eyedropper from that.
Lastly, prepare your pandemic medicine that will see you through to the end. Put the half-eyedropper into an two-litre pop bottle with distilled water, and put it up on your shelf.
Take a quarter-teaspoon full of this every morning, and you will not only be proof against COVID, but also proof against the malign effects of the vaccines, which of course are related to the antibodies created by the virus. Now that you are completely safe against both COVID and the vaccine effects.
The medicine is not fully effective unless activated with zinc. The third major discovery, along with the combination and dilution, is that zinc must be absorbed into the body, not through the digestive tract, where it would cause chemical changes in the other medicines, but through the skin. This is fortunately no more difficult or expensive than picking up zinc sunscreen! Research continues into the best colour. Scientists are still nailing down whether red or green has the strongest zinc-enhancement effect; each colour dye multiplies the zinc effects in different ways, and for the moment, it is best to go with multiple colours, as shown by the medical-research model at right.
Early work shows that if you elect to combine this treatment with a vaccine, the zinc is no longer necessary: as the body fights off the damaging vaccine, with the help of the homeopathic cure, the body's own zinc is made more "bioavailable" to cells fighting vaccine and virus alike.
But if you don't go with the vaccine approach, which works best with older cases, definitely go with the facial zinc application.
The cure found! Boy, now nobody will be laughing at homeopathy.
http://brander.ca/c19#homeopathy
So, America has now killed off all of Winnipeg (632,063), at least. Canada has only managed Brandon, MB (26,234) so far. We might make it to West Kelowna (28,793) if we can't slow down before spring, whereas America is concerned it might run close to another 100,000 (at least, Edmonton: 712,391) before their Republican states admit the truth learned by the folks in the last post.
http://brander.ca/c19#winnipeg
Above all, do not laugh. Even if you are so angry about it all that you regard this as a kind of war, these disinformation profiteers as enemy soldiers: we don't actually, laugh, when enemy soldiers die in a war.
There might be a certain feeling of satisfaction allowed. Mark Twain said something about never having wished anybody dead, but he had read some obituaries with a great sense of satisfaction. Your reactions are your own, but your laughter is public. Keep it inside.
I'm not providing any links with these, and if the headline doesn't mention the name, I'm not even doing that. These people deserve no more commemoration than any other of the 650,000 dead in their country...many of whom would be walking around if they'd not listened to disinformation.
Yes, "their country". This is just in America. I could not only find more just there, but of course many more around Canada, UK, Europe, definitely in other countries afflicted, as America was, by fascist idealogues: Brazil and India, where not only did this ilk get people killed: they got variants created.
Also, please note, this is just August 2021. It's breaking news. We might get another couple by August 31, to round out the total.
The other reason I'm not providing links to these stories, is because you really should just try a search on "anti mask died", and up they come. I started off just looking for the three I personally remembered.
I only just stopped at six, because the post was getting too long. I was paywalled away from an article listing many more, as counted by their criteria: of influence, anti-health words or efforts - as given a "Herman Cain Award". I'll leave a search for that list as an exercise, because it's Not Funny.
But man, what a humiliating way to be remembered.
http://brander.ca/c19#notfunny
There's funny non-news in the pandemic: reports of something being true that only cause a moment of surprise that we didn't yet know that "for sure".
The biggest, of course, is that vaccines are safe. That was the basic message of the former FDA approval of Pfizer the other day, the confirmation that Moderna was OK for the 12-17 set, just yesterday. We are awaiting, in agony as the dying continues for lack of it, confirmation that they're no more danger to the 5-12 kids, either. (Canada has vaccinated some ten thousand of those already, because they had special concerns, or are part of a study. In America, it's some 200,000. No reports of concern yet.)
On the list today is a clear work of statistics from Britain, reported on CTVnews.ca, that the Delta Variant really does double risk of hospital. Delta is a two-fer: more than twice as transmissable, and twice as nasty. Let's count ourselves lucky on it not beating vaccines.
That last is confirmed "for sure" by a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Immunity yesterday: 12 of 13 antibodies in the vaccines still recognized Delta, and all five of the monoclonal antibodies tested were able to reduce it - in comparison to only one or two that could beat some of the other variants. You got that right: by out-reproducing Beta and Gamma, Delta actually "protected" us against its cousins from Brazil and South Africa, which were better at breaking through vaccines. If Delta hadn't run 'round the world, we might be fighting them.
This next is more like the opposite, it's an anecdote that may be proven out later, on just how transmissable it is: "A Calif. teacher took off her mask for a read-aloud. Within days, half her class was positive for delta.". We'll be some time sorting that out: was this a class that interacted a lot with each other, so that two or three infections directly from the teacher became the other dozen, as secondaries? Because we haven't a lot of other examples of Delta just running wild through schools, but that can't be the only teacher to remove a mask for a bit.
It's a very different war, where we'll only know if we won it, why we won it, how we won it, a year or so after it's over and we can figure out, for sure, what happened.
http://brander.ca/c19#truth
I spotted the answer this morning, in the final paragraphs of a story about vaccine-passport polling of BC adults. (Support is up since March, to around 66%, which trails the number vaccinated, over 85% of adults. But think about those both vaccinated and young: very immune, why would they care about mingling with the unvaccinated?)
| Would Feel Safe Going To: | Percent |
|---|---|
| Restaurant Outdoor Patio | 70% |
| Restaurant Indoor Dining | 56% |
| Barber Shops, Salons | 54% |
| Libraries | 53% |
| Bus or Skytrain | 37% |
| Community Centre | 34% |
| Gym | 28% |
| Music Venue, Concert/Dance | 23% |
| Live Sporting Event | 20% |
My eyes were opened by the other poll questions, about where people would "feel safe" going right now, without passports, Poll released August 26, but conducted on Aug 19-21, before the province announced the passport plan:
If I ran live sporting events or music concerts, I'd despair. The politicians that always positioned public health experts as closed-minded, overprotective meanies (or flatly describe them as communistic dicators), who are holding back a bpublic eager to get back to acting normally, that is, going out and spending money. What the public wants, though, is for their risk level to actually be normal, so that they can then act normally.
The list is a fascinating look at the psychology of risk-assessment. There's a mix of two things: how risky the place is considered, and how badly the public wants to do it. Close-in theatre packing, elbow-to-elbow at sporting events and music, is riskiest, and the most-optional, so it's still toast. A bus is also an enclosed area, can be fairly crowded - but you gotta take it to get to work, so it has nearly double the numbers of sports (37/20). You get the same meal at the patio and the indoor table, so though restaurants are not that tight, there's a substantial drop (70% to 56% is exactly one diner in 5 that would go outdoors, won't go in.)
When is the pandemic over? When those numbers - perhaps just after the passport sinks in, who knows - hit levels that allow venues to open because they are again able to make money. It's not about them being "allowed" to open, because the Free Market really controls our economy in the end - government can only tweak it and nudge it. It's when the public confidence that their personal pandemic, for themselves and their loved elders, is "over", safe enough to be worth it; when that feeling reaches a proportion that lets business again be profitable.
The public in general will decide that, it's utterly democratic. It's just up to government and business to serve them well enough that they vote with their wallets that it's over.
Then it's over.
http://brander.ca/c19#notover
It's great news that vaccinations bumped up to more than double after Dr. B announced our health-pass plan the other day. But it won't be enough. To repeat the French graph of August 9th with a few more weeks of data, the laggard population of France may have bumped up their total vaccinations by about 5% (now at 70% when they would have been at 65%), but the Quebec population were already champion vaccinators before their health pass announcement. So there were fewer to be nudged, and while vaccinations jumped up, you really can't see it in the big-picture graph at right.
I've shrunken them a lot, just enough to see that the red line of the previous slope, for France, has a real "bump" above it, but the Quebec slope is unchanged. Quebec did get a "bump", too, but it was barely a whole percentage point added to where they were heading anyway. And, already after three weeks, they're back down to 0.1% per day, where they were in early July. Of course, at 86.3% of the eligible population reached, they're just over a month away from 90%, at that rate.
BC was the champion vaccinator (large) province before their health pass, and possibly ours will let us catch up that percent they surged by, put us on track for 90% by Thanksgiving, at least. But even 90% isn't a win, not anymore, see left.
This has been clear since Yukon, already past 90% of eligibles vaccinated, had a bad outbreak, now faded, just among their kids. We need both the adults at 90%, and the kids to some high percentage, before the outbreaks just die away from population immunity. Of course, it's possible it won't die even then, just keep circulating, with very few hospitalizations, among even a fully-vaccinated population.
One wonders whether there is any herd-immunity from the variants now, that we see nontrivial numbers of "breakthrough" cases among the fully-vaccinated. Maybe we don't stop seeing cases until well into spring, when we not only have 90% vaccination down to age one, but most of the rest have survived it, and many of the vaccinated have had their immunity boosted again by contracting it anyway. Maybe only then.
The health-pass is important, but with "the end" not coming until spring, the health pass is just a step along the road, not even one that takes us into the home stretch.
http://brander.ca/c19#nobump
The image at left will take you to a terrible story about how hard it is to vaccinate in Pakistan, especially the tribal areas. Some are still shooting vaccination teams, because they aren't trusted. The assassination of Osama bin Laden used a fake vaccination team to confirm where he was, and the price has been paid by the local physicians.
Maybe vaccination could have been revived in the area: maybe the US could have partnered with "locals" (as long as they didn't call themselves "Taliban" while partnering and taking US cheques) to provide security, while they toured the whole country, vaccinating everybody for free.
Wouldn't that have been a wonderful opportunity to locate everybody who wanted to leave, get their contact info, and arrange early departure months ago?
Just asking.
It must be conceded, CCCC should have promoted this idea months ago, at the same time it demanded we "Vaccinate Palestine!". Afghanistan felt like the virus wouldn't come there, so few tourists! But of course it was coming, still is, and we'll have very few options to help when it does.
Mostly, I wanted an excuse to mention Afghanistan so that I could link any reader to the do-not-miss, appointment-reading article by George Monbiot in The Guardian, on those to blame for Afghanistan that the media are not mentioning. That would, obviously, be the news media.
P.S.: CCCC is declaring a bounty: a free drink will be provided to anybody could can find a commentator who is both (a) saying stuff like 'why won't the Afghans fight for their country like we did?', and (b) an anti-vaxxer who won't fight for OUR country like we are.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxafghanistan
I think it was the Soviet General's Hat that did it. Even the most even-tempered doctor can only take so much. CCCC has been ragging on the provincial government for some weeks now, since our new surge started. A health pass was demanded, and a superspreader restaurant was exposed. So CCCC called her a failing general and told her to ignore the noisy minority.
And, by God, she actually did it. The whole careful plan, with its schedule of dates, was tossed unceremoniously in the dumpster this morning. That's after the almost-as-surprising health pass announcement the day before. That last was going to be today's topic, but it's been superceded.
Looks like the war is back on, with a bold counterstrike. I can't wait to see what the vaccination rate ticks up to, for the next few weeks. Quebec only jumped ahead a few tenths of a percent following their health pass, but they keep pulling ahead of BC. Now, their rate-of-increase, at 0.1% of the population, per day, for the last week, is almost half-again ours, which has been 0.07% of our population per day, last week.
We are closing in on theoretical herd-immunity levels of course, so fast progress is now impossible; so few left to lean on, whatever the pressure. Health passes should be great for reaching the younger set that have had the least incentive until now. If we could get a few tenths of a percent in the next week, and if it bumped back up to 0.1%/day for all September, we'll be very close to 90% of the over-12 population, if still under 80% of the whole population.
But the "over 12" population numbers strongly imply what the whole-population percentage will be after kids can get it: a family that got vaccinated is likely to protect their youngest, as well.
While we're on the military metaphors, think of this month, not as a reverse, as lost ground: think of it as the Battle of the Bulge, the enemy's last Big Push to hold off our win. After we crush this curve, it's a steady march to the endgame of childhood vaccination.
http://brander.ca/c19#allcredit
I just read the top lines of an article about a 72-year-old, dead of COVID the other day, despite full vaccination. But people only take action when they read of a death and think "that could have been me"..and not even then, when it comes to traffic accidents. Drownings. Lightning strikes, certainly - and most diseases. We write them all off as unlikely, so that we can get on with living instead of worrying.
All the COVID coverage can skew your risk-assessments the other way, make it seem like a stalking terror, when even one vaccination lowers its risks into the zone of many others we face, including seasonal flu. Two vaccinations definitely lowers the risk by more than 99%, i.e. my 63-year-old risk down to what teenagers had without vaccination.
If you are in a special risk group - which, a year after vaccination, this December for the 85+ demographic, might include a few million people, then OK, a booster. But if even they are not at as much risk as seasonal flu that many of them don't vaccinate for, it's hysteria (by comparison) to rate your need for a booster over a 60-something, 3rd-world healthcare worker's need for a first dose.
Those who are dying despite vaccination do not give me a "that could have been me" sensation, any more than I get that when reading about a lottery winner, and go buy a ticket.
Should variants and mutations raise my risk of serious illness and death way, way up, all the way to 0.5% again, I'll think about it. In the meantime, my long-term risk is minimized by lowering the virus' chance of coming up with those new attacks: by vaccinating the every human that it can experiment in, and dropping global cases down to ignorable numbers.
http://brander.ca/c19#nobooster
Basically a single-article reference, to David Graham at the Atlantic, writing about the opposite of Nixon's (fictitious) "Silent Majority". Those vaccine-freedom-fighters are an unpopular, but very noisy, minority, distinctly.
Graham's working from multiple polls. An Aixos Poll shows a solid 69% of Americans favor mandates in schools. At left, the summary of the Gallup Poll indicating similar support for mandates in workplaces. Graham wrote in May 2020 about the remarkable American "unity" supporting social distancing, with 80% opposing the re-opening of theatres, gyms, restaurants.
We are all beset by the noisy minority. I have to blame them for the wan, weak response to the fourth wave that I've been decrying the last few days: I think the public health officers are afraid of them, not without reason.
The politicians above them are leery, too: they know that those willing to demonstrate and act up for the cameras can place disproportionate weight on public perception of the politician: and heavy-handed reactions can backfire.
If they've been waiting for a better moment, surely it has come: the Gallup poll at left shows how the support has been rising for four months straight, and now the case-loads are squeezing the hospitals.
The majority may not be silent, but they haven't been loud enough, either: maybe we should make some real noise.
http://brander.ca/c19#noisymin
"Fair is Foul, and Foul is Fair; Hover through fog and filthy air."-Witch's Chant, Macbeth
That was pretty much the choice we had in Revelstoke, earlier this week. Outside, air so smokey, we had to wash our car off in the morning. On the inside of this pub restaurant, there was little ventilation, to keep the smoke out, the place was packed with a pre-pandemic spacing of tables, no plastic sheets up, no masks anywhere.
Revelstoke is JUST outside the Okanagan segment of the Interior Health Region, thus the restaurant was not required to observe any of the minor restrictions that General Bonnie had applied, so surgically, only to that sub-region. She's now applied it to the whole Interior Region, after cases continued to climb, as noted yesterday.
What a perfect day to bring this up. My fave guy at The Tyee, Andrew Nikiforuk, has just published an article about how wildfire smoke makes COVID 10% more likely to infect. Whether it does this by reducing lung function, or just giving covid particles a free ride on smoke particles, will be studied for some time yet, but the point is that the pandemic fight should have been even more conservative during the wildfires. With cases rising not just in the Okanagan region, but even on Vancouver Island, everywhere in BC, restrictions should not have been so narrow.
Most of the restaurants in Revelstoke seemed to be closed. The half-or-less that were open, were pretty busy, making them all risky-feeling. We weren't bothered, because of our vaccinations, and our intent to stay pretty close to home for some time after arrival. If we'd been on our way to visit an 89-year-old, it would have been more worrying. For all I know, we're infected, asymptomatic, and shedding virus right now.
Probably not, but we'll be informally isolating for a week yet, just because that supper gave us nerves. But we had only a choice between eating vending machine food out in the filthy air, or going inside, into the foggy air.
Macbeth cursed the witches with the imprecation "Infected be the air on which they ride". Fingers crossed, it didn't apply to that pub.
http://brander.ca/c19#revelsmoke
With military generals, the cliche' is that they're always fighting the last war, (now, we'll get it right). I'm losing faith in our pandemic generals, they seem to be dealing with the new variant like it was the last wave, and it's not working.
Today is two weeks since Hiroshima Day, when our good Dr. B. announced more restrictions for the BC Interior to fight the obviously-starting Fourth Wave.
Two weeks later, cases are higher than ever there, and her restrictions did not have any nuclear bomb effects on the Interior's COVID wave. Actually, there are no detectable effects of any kind. Interior numbers did go down for a week, but they're springing back to where they were when restrictions started.
It's not just that the Interior cases (orange) are pretty static so far, in the high 200s per day; the Coastal region is steadily climbing towards 100/day, and the perenially-worst Fraser region is climbing, too, towards 200/day. No restrictions of any kind have been announced for either region.
The vaccines aren't going to save us before spring, that's clear. More-highly-vaccinated places like Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Vermont have had waves worse than this already. Our number in critical care has more than doubled in three weeks, no reason for it not to double and double again by mid-September.
The public is absolutely in the mood for vaccine mandates, mask mandates, actively-safe schools and workplaces. Our generals do not lack for ammunition; but they seem to be lacking in the fortitude to use it.
It's like waiting for the Conservative party to ponderously, langorously, finally, turn towards acceptance that Global Warming is really a Thing.
Generals should keep up to the tempo of the war.
http://brander.ca/c19#lastwave
My French is so deteriorated, I can't even finish that famous phrase without looking it up, but it's "the more things change, the more they stay the same" in English. The cartoon, you see, dates to 1930.
After a 10-day vacation from blogging, what the heck, back to it. The virus hasn't quit attacking us, and the morons of the world haven't quit helping it, so CCCC sadly still has work to do.
There's serious issues happening (as always, during a pandemic) but for an easy return day, let's just regard this 90-year-old cartoon. The villains are "anti-vaccinationist", who are still around, and still going strong, albeit really just a few percent of the population. It's "Faddist" that I'm going to jump on. Anti-vaccination was a liberal fad for a while there: liberals distrust The Man, right? Big Pharma Corporations and their "thimerosal" denial. Haven't heard much from them, lately.
It's the alt-right, quasi-fascist bunch that I call out as faddists. They aren't anti-vax because they came into 2019 hating vaccine companies and technologies: it's a fad way to own the libs. They've always looked for whatever liberals are serious, solemn, and judgemental about, then aggressively done the opposite. If the liberal anti-vaxxers had been able to convince many other liberals to go along, you just know the alt-righters would be militant pro-vaccinators by now.
Then there's "Mr. Careless" - the majority of the unvaccinated so far just aren't alarmed about the issue. A lot of them are young, and have absorbed the year of reminders that they aren't in danger of much more than a bad flu experience, just a few percent odds of hospital - which they also risk at work or in sport. We can only work on them with patience.
I like the "anti-everything" guy, though, particularly his outfit. Another eternal constant in society.
It may not be a focus right now, but the number that sticks out for me is the low vaccination rate of the 12-17 group. Nobody is really leaning on that one, with clinics tailored to them. (School access would be ideal, and Dr. Bonnie is not making sense when she avoids them: for 12-17, the public clinics are just not getting the job done.) These are the ultimate "Mr. Careless" cases, where they'd get it if you made it convenient (or required) enough; they just have no personal incentive. But we need to remove them as vectors.
The value of an all-vaccine strategy, currently in favour, versus returns to some restrictions, is another topic. More tomorrow.
http://brander.ca/c19#antivax1930
We went to Black Widow a few days back, and there was plenty of room. Lots of restaurants have room, too, and all the bars. Business is not that good.
It goes without saying that a French-style health pass would make a lot of us more likely to put our butts in seats if we were sure the whole place was fully vaccinated, (or recently tested negative).
But I'm on about the other effect, that CCCC touched on immediately, but now has four weeks of data to confirm it: the jump in vaccinations. The graph at left is almost unique in the world at the moment, though Italy and Greece should be doing the same soon: the vaccination rate went up, instead of steadily down, like everywhere else.
The red line is me taking a guess where vaccination rates would be if they'd continued on the curve that preceded the health pass annoucement on July 12. I think they'd be at about 60% by now. (First dose). Instead, they hit 65% the other day, and it will continue.
Canada seems to be on a fairly steady trajectory: we've gained about 3.4% in those same last four weeks. It keeps slowing, so I can't assume we'll make only 3% in the next four, from 72% TO 75%. That extra 5% would take us all the way to 80% of the population, 90% of the over-12s, by the day after Labour Day, with classrooms filling.
90% of those surrounding the kids would give them a semblance of herd immunity, keep a lot of schools open. Dr. Bonnie herself notes, in stressing vaccination over restrictions, that just a few percent can make crucial differences in case-rates. Only 10% of adults not-vaxxed could be a huge difference from 15%.
So for multiple reasons, a French health pass could be all the difference between a slow stagger towards normalcy by spring, and a steady stride towards it by Thanksgiving. The difference between normalcy only after spring child-vaccination, and reaching it with adults alone, months earlier.
There are other things, of course, and the media are on them. Some hope comes from polls that show official "non-emergency" approval for the vaccines would help, and being able to get the shot from your family doctor. The first has to wait; the whole reason it confers trust is the plodding, careful pace of the approval process. The other, we could start looking into as vaccination rates fall even further.
The way we've been running things, it'll be done as a hasty desperation move when outbreaks start in schools and a fall wave begins. Our public health people are not pro-active go-getters, I'm afraid; they've been reacting, a beat behind, through the whole emergency.
CCCC will be on a vacation break for a few days.
http://brander.ca/c19#healthpassvax
The places with small populations, that make for a tight community spirit, are the best vaccinators, by far. Iceland, with under 500,000 people, at 80%.
Canada's own Yukon, with just 36,000 people, is our best, at 73% fully-vaccinated. It's also got our worst virus cases, if you measure per capita. Yukon looks bad if it has five cases a day - and it's getting them, despite the 12+ population at fully ninety percent vaccinated.
But nobody can beat Gibraltar, population just under the Yukon's at, 33,000 - because they're at 116% vaccinated. They vaccinated the Spanish workers that come for the day. They vaccinated British tourists before they went home, when supply was just starting to hit Britain. Alas, that overachieving kind of hides what actual percentage of real residents didn't step up.
Gibraltar recently had its 95th death, putting it very high on the deaths-per-capita. It's their first death since the vaccinations, though, and it was to a 65-year-old with pre-conditions, and was unvaccinated.
Basically, the virus hunted down the one unvaccinated guy left in Gibraltar, and killed him out of spite. No. Kidding. Viruses don't hunt. This tells us that the virus is still circulating around Gibraltar - perhaps partly the unvaccinated children - Gibraltar is just recently going down below age 16, so nearly 20% of the population actually isn't vaccinated, right there - partly the very few unvaccinated adults, partly just spreading through the vaccinated.
It pretty much implies there's no such thing as a herd-immunity percentage for Delta, at least not without kids included. Eight in hospital, out of 244 cases, suggest these mostly are not vaccinated cases. It's able to reach them through the "screen" of the vaccinated.
Yukon has been forthright, that for them, it's a pandemic of the children. They have had six deaths - five unvaccinated, one partially. Gibraltar simply hasn't said whether its cases are mostly adults, mostly vaccinated, or not. But what they have done is probably instructive: they've cancelled large parties like the one in the picture.
That's the big difference. Gibraltar is a vacation and party town, for Spain and Britain alike: it specializes in events like the above. If your behaviours are unsafe enough, there's just no protection for the unvaccinated, due to "herd immunity" of the more-responsible people around them.
Yukon's youth issues (which may well affect us all come fall and school) will go away when kids are vaccinated. Gibraltar's, apparently, will only go away if they either give up those parties forever, or the remaining few percent of adults quit depending on the rest of them.
http://brander.ca/c19#yukongib
There's no point in showing the soaring curves for cases, and now for deaths, in the USA. They're just the classic exponentials we were already tired of last year. The UK cases-per-day chart, though, is different, interesting, and not predictable (I'm going to anyway, because, again, the CCCC superpower is its irresponsibility). It's at right.
All were alarmed when an absolute spike happened from about Jun 20 to July 20, from 9000 cases/day to 45,000, in one month. But then the spike reversed, daily cases plummeted for nearly two weeks. Articles came out suggesting that Britain had beaten COVID, that BoJo's gamble had worked - the spike was just a temporary, one-time problem with men; in England; because of soccer matches. Hooray!
Then, a few days ago, the plummet halted, cases may even be going back up again, though the 7-day average has only leveled off so far. Predicting the future after that, is folly. I will, anyway: cases will rise, fall, in different places, to different groups, and probably stay up at what Canada would call an unacceptable level. They're currently at 26,000/day, about 14,000 a day for the Canadian population. We actually have 1,000 now, peaked at 8,000 on our worst day - puts Kenney in context, no?
There are more unvaccinated bodies for COVID to eat in the UK than here in BC, where cases are soaring. There's no reason it won't circulate around, finding one "unvaccinated cluster" after another, in various towns and industries and sports groups, any gatherings of any sort. I don't see any chance of the 7-day average dropping much.
But America is still just slowly accepting these same truths, in the worst places, and many places have a deeply-ingrained ability to ignore it, after all the propagandizing. Whereas Britain's death-rate will probably drop from recent days, over the next two weeks, because we're now 18 days past the sharp peak they hit, so this weeks' death rate will be a peak, too. America's case-count is still just rising, so even if it stops going up in another week or so, the death-count will keep going up for a month yet, certainly past a thousand per day. (7-day will pass 500/day on this weekend).
So, CCCC is irresponsibly ready to predict the outcome of its "Death Race 2021", grim-joke of a contest. The industrialized-nation Olympics of killing your own population is going to be won by the USA and its tenacious anti-mask, anti-vax nutbars, who have their own TV network.
While the UK death rate loiters about in the dozens per day, their "deaths per million" column on worldometers barely going up by one per day, the American death rate is heading up to a thousand, and that column will rise by two, then three per day, until it finally surpasses the UK pandemic total at last. The two countries had the gap between their numbers down to 10 in the Death Race 2021 post, and America has already closed the gap to 8. I think they pull into the lead in just over a week.
Both nations are out of the medals, they can't catch Belgium and Italy. But those worthies kind of "won" the game unwillingly; America and UK are actually trying to win, you'd swear.
http://brander.ca/c19#ukvsusa
Well, the Tyee's top story today is Nikiforuk doing the smackdown on Team Kenney, with the headline "Alberta Joins Team 'Just Give Up'".
The article contains extensive comparisons to Florida, which is at 58% vaccinated, to Alberta's 64%. It's also five times the size. Even dividing by five, though, is Alberta really going to 4000 cases/day, 40 deaths? That's twice as bad as the worst of the last peaks.
As highly as I regard Nikiforuk, I'm not sure that'll happen. I've come to think there are just inherent cultural differences between Canadians and Americans, and those differences are deepest with their "deep south", like Florida. So I suspect that, as cases rise, and hospitals even start to fill up, the Alberta populace will do their own self-protection, which Floridans are just starting to think about, as their hospitals max out.
Nobody, even Florida, will get to India's situation, for sure. When there are tent hospitals and no ventilators left, people dying for lack of equipment, they'll turn it around; even the India did that, despite their government being worse than useless.
Speaking of India, I have to preen how on-same-page Mr. Nikiforuk and myself are on specifically blaming some covid-denialist authoritarian (or would-be) specific leaders for the variants:
Boris Johnson's lax approach in England created the Alpha variant. Jair Bolsonar denied biology and cursed Brazil with the Gamma variant. Modi's shoddy governance of India gave the world the Delta variant.
Right on! It's the BoJo Bug, the Bolsonaro Blight, and the Modi Malady that are ruining 2021.
But, we can all help out change the trajectory, by mocking, insulting and criticizing Alberta to the max. We all need to start emphasizing what a majority we are: three-quarters of the population, over 90% of the elderly. This isn't a political "controversy", it's a settled question with a small, very loud minority disputing truths accepted by nearly everybody.
So that's why it's Jump-on-Jason week at CCCC. For his own good.
http://brander.ca/c19#teamgiveup
Well, the whole nation, it seems, is teeing off on Alberta, and their apparently-insane decision to not even test-and-trace, not demand isolation, any more. Canada's great national journalism treasure, The Beaverton, is diving in with the story at left, and also Alberta relaxes COVID precautions, demands Trudeau build them a COVID pipeline for exports.
Deena Hinshaw is attracting particular scorn, or pity, for her quote that "It's important to remember that COVID-19 isn't the only risk our kids face. For children under 12, COVID-19 infection is equivalent to, or even possibly slightly less risky, than seasonal influenza."
On the one hand, she's provably correct. That link is to the big CDC summary-of-mortality page, where you can check the numbers: for kids 1-14, there have been 160 COVID deaths in America, so far. It's just over a percent of all the deaths in that age group, from all causes. It's roughly doubled the "deaths by pneumonia" over the same period. The influenza deaths, in a low-influenza year, were 145, nearly as high as COVID. So she's right.
On the other hand, the column in the Washington Post by Texas pediatric care professor, Heather Haq is also a truth:
Over the course of the pandemic, our hospital system has diagnosed more than 15,000 children and adolescents with covid - a number that is trending up. About 10 percent of them have required hospital admission. Up to one-third of children admitted to our hospital have required critical care - including oxygen delivered through high-flow nasal cannula, noninvasive ventilation, and intubation with mechanical ventilation. When I discharge children from the hospital, I know that many of them have a long road to recovery, and many will require follow-up for cardiac clearance and long-term care in our hospital's long-covid clinic.These truths do not exclude each other. COVID can require hospital treatment of 10% of kids, but kill only 0.01% of them, like the kid sprained an ankle. Hinshaw is looking only at mortality, not how many flu patients have "long flu" symptoms for months and years.
Kenney is taking the same gamble as Boris Johnson with the UK, and the UK having a sharp drop in cases after one spike, is probably Hinshaw's real backing for the bet. Politicians live or die by public perceptions, however, and low death counts won't beat pictures of multiple kids in hospital beds getting oxygen. If the new variants rip through the kids of Alberta the way they did through kids in Yukon, we may get them.
I wish the kids luck, even though it means wishing Jason Kenney political luck, in the bargain.
http://brander.ca/c19#kids
The Post was echoed around America when they implied that the outbreak, where 75% of people testing positive were vaccinated, showed that vaccination can't prevent infection or transmission. If 75% were vaccinated, and 75% of those positive were vaccinated, then vaccination gives you 0% protection against infection, just against symptoms; that erroneous conclusion, just implied, became the takeway.
That stank, to me, from the get-go. I'd long since read very clear results showing vaccination reduces transmission by a factor of six. Examination of 500,000 UK households showed the vaccinated are a third as likely to catch it, from a given exposure, and just over half as likely to transmit it. (I think the WaPo story also noted that there was "just as much virus in the nose tissues" in the vaccinated, implying that they were just as likely to transmit, but not saying it. Just implying. Another false takeway.) The story did not note the conflict with previous information. It didn't note how many out of the vaxed and un-vaxed populations were infected, just reports on those already positive. It was bad statistics; it was bad journalism.
It's great to have a second study, from England, confirming the original numbers are changed only a little by the Delta Variant, as opposed to the Alpha Variant common during the first study.
The new study, taken after Delta had become dominant, found "50%-60% reduced risk of infection", almost as good as the 66% reduction for Alpha. 59% for actually getting any symptoms. At all. Across a random sample of people, 1.21% of the unvaccinated were actually positive, 0.4% of the vaccinated. Three to one.
The study also confirmed that "young people" are driving the UK wave, a quarter of the population with half the infections. They are the least-vaccinated cohort, and the most-likely to have unvaccinated "clusters" at workplaces and schools.
http://brander.ca/c19#provincetown
A private school in Miami banned teachers vaccinated against COVID-19 from contact with students because of its co-founder's misguided beliefs in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
...
She noted that vaccinated individuals "may be transmitting something from their bodies" that could harm others, particularly the "reproductive systems, fertility, and normal growth and development in women and children."
Amid recent surging coronavirus cases in Florida, a top Republican National Committee official in the state has spread anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation, comparing the Biden administration's vaccine efforts to Nazi-era "brown shirts," and twice calling the vaccines "the mark of the beast," comparable to a "false god."
Whether Jason Kenney deserves the "killer" jokes about him, at left, is pretty much still to be seen. Alberta hasn't had the best pandemic response, but the gross (very gross) numbers are about 400 deaths/million vs 350 for BC. He hasn't been awful, just bad when graded on a Canadian curve. His "Darwin Stampede" has been blamed for "only" a hundred-odd cases, probably not even the one death, since most over-65s don't hit the Stampede, are mostly vaccinated by now, even in low-vax Alberta.
His huge re-opening, amid high cases and Canada's worst vaccination drive, probably will get more people killed than a "Friday the 13th" movie, but, grading on an American curve, (see above), he's only poor, not terrible - like Doug Ford.
They are the worst we've got - and Canada now stands remarkably well in the CCCC standings. Most of the nations that have fewer deaths/million than Canada are either very small, more easily-isolated (Australia and NZ), or are Scandanavian.
We get to pity a lot of nations that you'd have thought would be really great at the pandemic: much of Western Europe, certainly, and of course the very proud one that always chants "#1, all the way" after their name.
http://brander.ca/c19#notamerica
Everybody knows the boat is leakingThis combination of facts makes Brazil out to be a clear and present danger to the entire rest of the world. By letting the disease run rampant, Bolsonaro bears responsibility for the existence of P1, a threat to human life much more serious than Iran could conjure with a dozen nuclear bombs. By letting it continue and not quarantining his country, he is, at one remove, staging a biological attack upon us all.
Everybody knows the captain lied
Everybody's got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
...
Everybody knows the Plague is coming
Everybody knows it's moving fast...
- Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows" excerptsEverybody knows the wave is coming. Certainly Tony Fauci knows there's more pain and suffering ahead. Tony's opposite number, Theresa Tam, knows, even if she's far too dry and disconnected from the patients to talk of "suffering", just "cases".
Global TV is interviewing the public health officers who know it's coming for the kids, including teenagers who do suffer the agony of "long covid" diseases.
None of this is having the slightest effect on re-opening plans, or creating any more urgency for vaccinations.
The "teenagers" interview on Global made me sit up. It may still be illegal to vaccinate under 12, but our rate for those 12-17 is just 37%. We really need to be talking about vaccination requirements for schools. Not what's now "The M Word" (mandates), just requirements that non-vaccinated kids have to distance, mask, and test constantly, as they were all last year. Make some noise about that, so that sane parents go "oh, hell, nah" and get those kids in to the clinic during summer. Point out that the rules will apply to all who aren't, say, 14 days past their second dose, that if they get in immediately, their kid can qualify September 7 if they get in this week. (Also, target children directly with advertising: they can come in on their own.)
Canadian fatalism is as nothing to American, certainly. Here's some really fatal fatalism for you: Florida's death count has mounted up past 50/day, lately, based on the ~4000 infections/day three weeks ago. It's now passing 20,000 per day, so you can fatalistically forecast 200+ dead/day in three weeks or so. They saw those numbers back in January, a few weeks after passing 20,000 cases/day back then. Florida history is not repeating as farce, just as another pile of dead bodies, probably about 10,000 of them in total before the "avoidable wave" subsides.
And everybody is fatalistic about the coming fatalities. Maybe its a kind of psychological immune system that we're developing instead of a physical one.
http://brander.ca/c19#fatalism
August 1: U of Sick
There was this low point in my university years I've never forgotten. It was my second degree, mid-80s, and I was working for The Gauntlet, the UofC student paper. I was sitting in on a presentation to the Student Council, I think, where liberal arts students that had been sent over to the Engineering Building for classes because of space limitations, wanted their classes moved to any other building. Or, rather, not to chemistry or physics buildings, either: a liberal-arts-only building with no labs.
They'd seen these plaques on doors, required by safety regulations, as seen at left. The laser one. But, especially the "radioactivity inside" sign. They complained that they were in danger. They said they shouldn't have to face danger, like the "students in the hard sciences". They shouldn't have to walk though halls that had radioactivity, just on the other side of a door.
I'll spare you the debate that ensued. Suffice to say that the point that there was no danger, that "hard science" students were emphatically not expected to face any danger to get their degree, that the signage was the first of several layers of protection that any worker or citizen of any kind was always protected by, just as are medical personnel and patients...leading to a zero radioactivity accident rate, then or since...none of it impressed them.
The low point was that the University administration agreed to let them move. I wanted them publicly flogged with embarrassment and mockery, apologized to that the University had failed to teach them critical thinking and simple arithmetic. It's a pretty recent thing, for me, that it's the crazed populist/fascist right-wing that are the anti-vaxxers. As recently as a few years ago, it was the liberal left that were the anti-science bunch, mistrusting nuclear and chemical industries. (I have a problem with a certain sort of liberal that says "follow the science" until the science says a small nuclear reactor should be very safe, then they start ranting about compromised, industry-shill "scientists", with insults added.)
This time, the University is going along with similarly-ignorant politics, even if much of the faculty isn't. The faculty, at least, are calling for vaccine requirements. It's a no-brainer. Vaccination rates go lower with younger groups. This is Canada, so even our 18-29 group are at 68%, and I like to think (don't want to know) that the University crowd are higher than that. But, it's not enough. A University, students sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in friggin' theatres, is a perfect transmission environment.
This note from one of the lab instructors is almost painful to read:
The fact that I'm not *allowed* to *require* masks in my lab course of 800 students feels dangerous. It's not a matter of if, but when my students get Covid, what's the protocol for their lab mates and TA?You shouldn't have to make plans for when something avoidable happens. You should be able to just make the plans to avoid it.Perhaps the thing to do is just slap another of those signs, only on the whole University. (Right).
http://brander.ca/c19#university
July 31: America Is Vaxxing Faster Now, For Some Reason
The CCCC news is that Canada got first doses of vaccine into an additional 1.7% of its population in the first half of July, dropping to just 1.4% in the second half; America only got 1.1% vaccinated, July 1-15, then it ticked up - to the same as Canada, 1.4% vaccinated, July 15-30.Every nation has been slowly declining in vaccination rates - except France and the other European nations that followed along with Macron's new policies, and now, America, despite a complete lack of vaccine requirements from government.
I'm looking forward to the end of my Washington Post subscription in 12 days, it'll be good for my mental health: way too much Washington Soap Opera about Evil Mitch vs Good Joe, and what are Susan Collins and Manchin thinking today. But I have to admit, they have the resources to get out there and investigate, sometimes.
The Washington Post story about "A Rush to Get Shots" are the anecdotes behind the CCCC statistic. The 25-year-old woman who'd be avoiding the shots because of false reports they cause infertility.
The lady running the vax clinics in a Houston hospital notes the increase "...correlates with delta's rise and hospitalizations". She adds "unfortunately", people don't make the decision until they have a personal encounter, a family member or other loved one sickened, even hospitalized.
There's one fair point in the anecdotes I'll concede: it's easier to not be the pioneer, that a month or two after a hundred million people got shots, it's easier to trust they aren't harmful.
But then the story is back to the Arkansas governor has had to combat the idea that the shots are a "bioweapon". (You'd think they'd be cheering on the hated liberals subjecting themselves to its terrible harms; America will be theirs for the taking after all the liberals die or turn into zombies.)
You have to sympathize with the 12-year-old that was led to believe the shot would magnetize her, based on TikTok videos of people with spoons stuck to them.
It's all too little, too late, of course: at 0.1% per day, America is about 250 days away from passing 80% vaccinated. At least by then, the kids will be getting it too, and it'll jump to 90%.
But 200 days is a long time for covid to run rampant. Too little, too late.
I looked up the one state mentioned. Oklahoma vaccinated 1% of her population, July 1-15, and 2% for July 15-30. It's at 47%, so it needs about another 30% to really reduce infection rates. If it could double the vaccinations again, to 8% per month, they'd be into Canada's territory by the end of October.
Too little, too late.
http://brander.ca/c19#usvaxup
July 30: Is This Another Forever War?
It's easy to get depressed this week, if you're a number-cruncher. Nothing but soaring numbers locally, and in Canada, upwards in general - despite all those vaccinations!
The sudden plunge in numbers in Britain may have reversed, again, even - case-counts straight upwards for three days in a row, now. Or is that a bump before the still-mysterious decline continues? Nobody even knows, and the honest experts are saying so.
Bad news across Europe, terrible news in Australia, China battling the worst outbreak since Wuhan, what happened to our happy vaccinated summer? (It's just over a year since CCCC declared the "maybe it will go away in the heat" theory dead. Well, now, it's dead, fed into a woodchipper, and used to fertilize the garden.)
But, take heart.
If you're vaccinated and not in really bad health, then the case-count is unimportant to your personal safety. Heck, walk through a COVID ward, get coughed on, go ahead and catch it. Your odds of hospitalization are still just 1%, your odds on that being for more than rest and some oxygen a tenth of that. Your life is now full of worse risks than COVID. Worry about traffic or drowning at the beach instead. All of the current pandemic fight is to save the lives of the unvaccinated.
We vaccinated types have actually won our war. Now we're fighting for others. That's a very Canadian thing to do, of course: we only ever had to fight for our own country 55 years before it existed, in 1812. Every Canadian fighter has died for some other guy's country.
While CCCC humbly recognizes that exactly nobody has gone along with the new terminology for variants (The BoJo Bug and the Modi Malady), it's needed to come up with a single, clear word for the unvaccinated, that avoids all judgement about anti-vaxxers, vs vaccine-"hesitant", vs vaccine-"procrastinating"... or other nuances.
They are all, of every stripe, generically the vaccine-wrong. Whatever their reasons, whether they are passionate or just lazy, they're wrong. And here we vaccine-right are having to put on masks to protect them.
But we do have the virus on the run. The Battle of the Bulge was horrendous, but Germany was already as good as defeated, it just took time to wear down the last resistance. Vaccines are coming for kids by spring at latest, and by then, I strongly suspect that vaccination rates will have crawled up to the 90% level for everybody else, at least in sane countries like ours. If even that doesn't mean herd immunity, it does mean so few people will be at serious risk that it finally will be "just a nasty flu".
It's a dark week, but have a little faith that dawn is coming. (He told himself, over and over.)
http://brander.ca/c19#forever
July 29: COVID Can Be Beaten
As we watch cases in BC and Alberta just soar higher every day, it's easy to get discouraged. Starting so late today, I'll just dash off a paragraph. Let's point out that both India and Brazil were written off as COVID basket-cases, with terrible leaders that denied the very problem and exacerbated the spread.Both nations are unquestionably beating the wave. Their awful leaders can lie about only so much, not about there being less than half the cases now than were there at peak. Without government regulation or help, people protected themselves, their families, their neighbourhoods, and those informal measures alone broke the pandemic.
The one I guess I can note, though I'm still a little skeptical, is that something bizarre is happening in the UK: it was having explosive case growth and was predicted to be going from 50,000/day to 100,000 or 200,000 soon. Instead, it seems not to be reporting error that cases have plummeted for the whole last week. Their experts are baffled, and offering very different explanations. One is just that the aborted wave already burned through the available "unvaccinated cluster" groups, leaving mostly well-vaccinated communities that hadn't already caught it.
Wouldn't that be nice.
http://brander.ca/c19#goingdown
July 28: As the Fourth Wave Starts: Who's Still At Risk? How much?
Well, the fourth wave is here, and I am heartily sick of monitoring its upswinging exponentials. Here's some simpler arithmetic. At right, the full table of vaccination-by-age from "health-infobase.canada", with some added columns.
The first column, giving percentage and number vaccinated in each age group, allows a quick calculation of how many are NOT vaccinated, in that age group.
Beside that column, the same numbers I keep using at CCCC, from the very first post, for the fraction of that age group that would die if they contracted COVID-19. The age/mortality numbers for the latest variants are not posted anywhere: but while new variants may be more deadly, we also have treatments now that Wuhan did not, so let's go with them.
Multiply it all together, and you get the hypothetical butcher's bill for the following (extreme, ridiculous) scenario: that every unvaccinated person gets the disease, with full mortality probability, and the vaccine is 100% protection for all of us that have had even a single dose. Oversimplified, but useful for estimation.
It's my own age group, the sixties, that's the worst contributor. There are twice as many 50-somethings not vaccinated, but they're a third as likely to die, so we're the biggest problem. If we could vaccinate as well as our elders (we're at 90%, the over-70s at 95%) we would cut our death-toll in half.
The 50-somethings are the worry, for society: these people are at the peak of their life's work: the last decade of the job, where they're senior and relied-upon, raising teenagers, and being community pillars. They're only at 82% vaccinated, and they should be cutting their deaths in half by getting past 90%, as well. Because of their much-higher mortality, I'd make them more of an outreach target than those darn 20-somethings that are still under 70%. (Shame on them for being less-vaccinated than their younger siblings in 12-17, who have almost no mortality at all, and are totally doing it for grandma.)
Keeping in mind that it's preposterous to imagine them all catching it in a fourth wave. The pandemic to-date has hit less than 4% of Canadians, tested, and almost surely less than 10% of the country, even counting cases that never knew they had it, or suffered through it without getting a test.
So a fourth wave, even supposing "total opening" and the virus running wild, would probably only have 10%-20% of the death-toll at left, about 3000-6000 Canadians added to the 27,000 dead already. We lose about that number to flu every year! However: flu kills very few in their fifties, whereas COVID-19 would charge us 500-1000 of those prime-earner parents and bosses.
So, I'd really rather see all those vaccination percentages get 5% added to them, probably cutting the toll in half again - and even some partial herd-immunity, perhaps, meaning "enough to slow it down", until the child vaccinations are approved, and we can maybe finally shut this bug down in 2022. Hope remains.
http://brander.ca/c19#popatrisk
July 27: Schadenfreude
I have to use that word at least once a year to confirm I still know how to spell it. The title of a song in a Broadway Musical ("Avenue Q"), the German word for "taking pleasure in the troubles of others", where you enjoy it at the end of the movie when the villain monologues their Evil Plan, and it turns out the TV cameras were watching them the whole time, and they have to explain, as the heroes tiptoe out for a beer and a laugh. Of schadenfreude.Paul Krugman's newsletter this morning:
It has also been amazing to watch many conservatives do a complete 180 on the rights of business owners. We've seen repeated court cases in which conservatives insisted that employers had the right to deny employees benefits based on the owners' religious beliefs, sellers could refuse to provide service to gay couples and so on. What you do with your business, the doctrine seemed to be, was up to you.But in the pandemic we suddenly had conservative politicians trying to prohibit stores from requiring that their customers wear masks, trying to prohibit cruise ships from requiring that passengers be vaccinated, and so on. All that rhetoric of freedom suddenly didn't apply ...
Meanwhile, multiple papers are running columns like the one at left. The anti-vaxxers have been treated meekly and solicitously so far, but now that they are revealed as a truly small minority - and now that Mr. Modi's "Delta" contribution to the situation has made even 25% non-vaccination a risk - they're in for more serious opposition. Italy and Greece have rapidly followed the courage of France in demanding vaccine "passports" for all hospitality venues!
Germany is lagging a bit on vaccination, so Ms. Merkel is only "expressing support" for passports until everybody has been offered the shot, but 60% of Germans want them. If Germany goes with them, that's it - the system will cross all Western Europe and set a world standard.
The new standard basically says that "anti-vaxxers" are not acceptable in the polite company of decent people. There's no more need to shout at them, or engage with them in any way. It's up to them to join society, or just be shut out of gathering places.
Which feels so good.
The pandemic has been very hard on all conservative economic philosophies; the conservatives inexplicably threw in their lot with the nutcases who've always plauged (heh) the public sphere with superstitions that got a lot of kids infected with measles and other defeated diseases. Now it's all crashing down on them and they can explain to the TV cameras why it's the places where they hold sway that have the only choked hospitals and dying citizens.
It's a serious situation, but I just can't help the schadenfreude.
http://brander.ca/c19#schadenfreude
July 26: Not a Great Day
Well, I had the most-frustrating day today, and did little on this. But, suffice to say that BC is now taking off. Infections did not continue to skyrocket over the weekend, staying around 100/day. But they stayed around 40/day for a week just a week or so back. There's no reason to imagine they won't go like other countries with their surges. Dr. Bonnie, far from being reassuring, actually assured us that infections will just continue to increase in coming days and weeks.As we watch infections explode all over the world right now, in Australia, France, Japan, it's clear that the old levels of protection aren't working any more. And the health authorities are all about managing it, rather than "Get To Zero", which is just abandoned as even an aspiration.
The only bright spot is purely competitive, and not practical: BC is, again, about to beat Quebec for "most-vaccinated large province", maybe even tomorrow, or certainly Wednesday. (Of course, I thought that before.) But this time, for sure!
Mind you, that requires a redefinition of "large province" from just excluding northern territories and PEI, to excluding the million-some people in Nova Scotia. At 75% vaccinated by next weekend, they're hard to catch.
And Canada has lost the hope of being "most vaccinated nation"; not only did United Arab Emirates suddenly declare themselves at 77%, Chile, of all places, has pulled ahead of us. Good for them. It's a silly thing to be competitive about (not as silly as several Olympic sports, of course), and the relevant thing is that none of us are particularly safe from outbreaks - until we get to 90% of adults and about 80% of all the kids.
On a depressing day like this, I can admit it's going to be a two-year pandemic. About all you can say for 2021 is that it'll teach us to vaccinate, overcome the "skeptics", the "hesitant" and even, the "stupid". By spring 2022, when we can vaccinate kids, the adults will probably be mostly in line. Or naturally immune. Or naturally dead.
http://brander.ca/c19#notgreat
July 25: Macron's Program Nearly Doubled Vaccination Rates
CCCC has already declared Macron of France a hero for his forthright, bold position on virtually-manadatory vaccinations.
Today, the word "effective" can be added to his laurels.
The CTV page on vaccinations (link from graphic) has the numbers from 'round the world, and just copying the last month of "first dose, population" numbers for France provides the two tracks at left. The slope jumped up from a quarter of a percent per day, to 0.43%. Multiply the difference (another 0.18%/day) and he's already stimulated an extra 2.4% of all France, one and a half million people, to get protected and saved from high risk of death.
It might have something to do with it that France has experienced another classic exponential increase in cases during those weeks (at right); but, like Britain before them, this has had no effect on the death-rate (yet), so CCCC figures that a distinctly minor part of the story.
Again: the French program is serious: medical workers won't be paid if unvaccinated past Sept 15; the "health pass" will be needed for most hospitality venues and transport; students and workers will need them, constantly pay for their own disease tests if unvaccinated. Fines are ruinous, and jail-time can result.
The health pass is so vital, this could actually drive vaccination up to that needed 90% level. We now have a template for a real hope to beat the virus, to finally win that "race". It's not without political risks: 161,000 demonstrated against it, yesterday. But people are complying, and if the demonstrations die away, but the vaccinations continue, Macron wins. The results will surely see him forgiven this, at election time - as long as France vaccinates itself all the way up to safety.
Or, as long as its safe for most. The health passes, even if they don't quell the case-load, will get all those bars and theatres and trains back into full business again. That will count for a lot.
I hope our leaders are listening and watching. They've taken opposite positions - most insanely, in BC, where Dr. B is just too nice to ask care-home workers to vaccinated - but the virus is going to school them on the folly of that.
France is still 13% behind Canada at first-dose-for-population, and I don't envy them. Yet. They may be ahead of us by September.
http://brander.ca/c19#francevax
July 24: The Price for Not Vaccinating Children
We will go into the fall, we can now see, with accelerating case-loads, the virus all about us, and the kids sent to the petri dish of school.
The unvaccinatable under-12s are 12% of the Canadian population, over 4 million people. The 5-11 group are more than half of that, at least two million. What if 5% of them catch COVID-19? Surely that's not a wildly high estimate, if the new variants are so transmissable.
The American CDC published their data on school-aged children last October.
I picked 5% not just because it's reasonable, but, as it happens, the CDC had data on just over 101,000 infections to kids aged 5-11. Yes, the outcomes were worse for non-white kids. Indeed, white kids were just 26% of the cases, probably half their representation in the population. No, it was not all about kids already very sick with underlying conditions. Only about one-third of the kids with dire outcomes had prior problems.
Of the 100,000, about 1000 had to go to hospital; 145 to ICU; twenty died.
On the other hand, the Canadian statistics are that the previous waves have "only" killed 14 youths, age 0-19, out of 275,000 cases in that age group. Less than a fifth as bad? Possibly, the American kids are just more-susceptible than ours - or, possibly, we keep worse statistics.
Calling those ends of a spectrum still gives us the concern that NOT vaccinating the schoolchildren may be a much bigger "experiment", with more-deadly results, than vaccinating them. It's hard to believe that vaccination would be as dangerous, from what we know with the 12-17 kids.
If the American figures are right, not-vaccinating all schoolkids is downright immoral. You don't avoid a small risk by taking a much-larger one. If the American figures are an order of magnitude high, and "only" two kids would die, a dozen go to ICU, it's more of a wash: maybe vaccines would be that bad. Even then, the additional risk the kids then pose to their elders, as disease vectors, should tip the decision.
I know this is pointless; the public health bureaucracy is just not going to bend its rules, because they understand very personally that they will not be blamed for COVID deaths resulting from their "cautious inaction", but they will be blamed for vaccine problems resulting from "incautious action".
So my proposal is merely to consider vaccinating the kids aged 10 and 11. Children get more gregarious, the older and more-confident they get: more friends, more activities, more independent action. We could probably eliminate over half the age 5-11 infections by vaccinating that 2/7ths of that cohort that are 10 and 11. If "bad outcomes" keep getting rarer with youth, then we might eliminate three-quarters of those.
The choice of "12" as the vaccine age-of-majority is arbitrary. No immunologist is going to claim there's a stark difference between 11 and 12. We've now vaccinated over a million of them in Canada - over 150,000 twelve-year-olds. We have, by the way, vaccinated over 10,000 kids in the 0-11 group already, presumably because they have conditions that gave them special consideration.
I'm just working from the sure fact that any bad vaccine reaction in a child would bring swift attention from the news, but I believe exactly none of this million have had scary reactions, save for a slight elevation in the background-rate of chest pains (heart inflammation), mostly in teen boys, and so far, without serious injury.
So, that's the CCCC proposal: open up vaccination to 11-year-olds in mid-August, before school even starts. If nothing bad happens to them in the following month, go down to 10-year-olds in mid-September, before the "school wave" can get going, as it surely will. Vaccinating kids nearest to the already-tested age-12 level is the smallest risk, and the biggest payback.
Canada led the world by being the first to approve 12-17 vaccinations; let's lead the world again.
http://brander.ca/c19#kidvax
July 23: Virus Wins Virus/Vax Race
The media attempted to gin up a "virus/vaccine race" some months ago. The latest variants have rendered the question moot. Yukon continues to be the world-wide poster-child for the phenomenon: it's not just the most-vaccinated place in North America, but it's up there with the best in the world: 79% of the total population, from 96% of the 12+ population. It's also the worst coronavirus hotspot in the country, with 156 cases/million, making it just below Texas, #14 on the list at left. All the other Canadian regions are down below #45. Yukon is incapable of having an epidemic in those over 12, so it's having one for the under-12s, leaving some pretty sick, but nobody in hospital.
The variants have ensured that no vaccination level that anybody is going to reach will stop a wave of infections. They're capable of explosive growth in the UK, with 68% of the population at one-dose, 54% at two. The UK has nothing on Vermont, the most-vaccinated US state, and better than all of Canada, save the Maritimes (right). But, at left, Vermont has the infection rate of Canada's second-worst vaccinator, Saskatchewan, which has 12% less population vaccinated than Vermont.
We are all behaving as if we could re-open because the vaccines have saved us, when they haven't, and can't. The impression has been fostered by examples like Canada vs the USA. As these three graphics sum up, Canada is much more-vaccinated than all but the best US states, and also has far lower infection rates than all but their lowest. This is a great example of correlation that is not causation! The common-cause is that places that had low infection because of good behaviours, are all also the places that have high vaccination, because that is a good behaviour, too.
Canada is clearly about to take off in infections, like the UK, moving on to the new, morally-disturbing "pandemic for the unvaccinated" phase of the story.
Yikes.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxrace
July 22: Deaths in the UK - Take the Log View
No, not the long view, the log view. Logarithmic graphs have been essential since the very start of the pandemic, since the first CCCC post. They're the only way to see the problem as the virus sees it, as the epidemiologists see it.
Those who are imagining that the UK death rate is now trivial, not worth staying closed over, are looking at the linear graphs, such as at left. Back in mid-January, there were three weeks of over a thousand per day dying, some 30,000 dead in all. The death rate this week has been about 35-40, it would take a month to equal one day's coffin-filling from six months back.
But pandemic-clueful readers know how deceptive low numbers can be. When the problem expands exponentially, they become big in no time. The death-count of today is based on the case-count of about three weeks ago, as usual: not today's 50,000/day, but early July's 25,000/day. Neil Ferguson, again, has predicted 100,000 and even 200,000 per day will come quickly, given the "Virus Freedom Day" that Johnson just engineered.
The log-graph makes what will clearly happen to the death-rate then quite plain, because on log-graph, that's just drawing a straight line.
The first few weeks of the straight line, as already predicted by Ferguson, are clear enough. When they today's infections are dying in three weeks, their rate will be hitting 90 deaths/day. By then, Ferguson's 100,000/day prediction for cases will be there, allowing anybody to guess that 200 bodies/day is in the offing, inevitable. (99% unvaccinated, of course.)
That's 6,000 dead per month, surely a figure to give pause to even the most-hardened pandemic-denier. There's no point predicting past the end of August, actually, because the numbers will become dramatic enough to arm-twist even Boris into change.
Again, CCCC must remind readers that Canada is in the same position, potentially: we have only 2% more first-vaccinations, and the same full-vaccinations. They just have Delta running wild, while our behaviours, not our vaccinations, kept Delta Down over here.
The UK is about to demonstrate, again, how foolish denial is, as a strategy. The virus will, again, patiently school them, handing Mr. Johnson his desired "bodies piled up", to drive home the lessons. It expands exponentially. Even with 20% of a population to work with, it can find enough people to kill to fill up the wards, much less the 30% of the UK that Johnson is feeding it. Again. Boris Johnson is that classic Fool: the one who will "learn in no other" school than experience.
Let's learn from the UK instead, and keep our Delta Down, while Vaccinating Up, all summer.
http://brander.ca/c19#ukdeathlog
July 21: If There Were Virus Generals, Reveling in Johnson's Mistake
Brevity is the soul of wit, and I have none. I tossed off a hopelessly-long, tedious punchline in an email to a Hugh Costello, and he 'tooned up a cartoon for it.
Not great humour, especially since the real "joke" will be upon us all if those million walking "labs" in Britain (it really hit 1 million active cases there, yesterday, see worldometers) succeed in their generals' campaign. They are all shedding viruses, probably each one sheds some mutated ones. Those batter on the vaccinated population, like a hacker trying millions of passwords per minute.
The chance of the viral hackers finding the password past the vaccinated is very small in Canada, providing only 5,000 human "labs" to work in, today. So it will be with most well-vaccinated countries that will also have low case-rates through good behaviours.
It takes the toxic combination of enough wealth to vaccinate, with enough authoritarian stupidity, lying fabulism, and cynicism, such as Boris Johnson or a Ron deSantis can produce, to somehow have a large sick population and a large vaccinated population, together in the petri dish.
They are handing a massive advantage to a common enemy, and undercutting the protection of us all.
http://brander.ca/c19#virusgenerals
July 20: Republicans: Call Them "Enemies of the Stock Market"
(If only Democrats could make speeches like this...but they can't. Just can't. I don't know why. Karl Rove could tell them that your most effective attack is against what your opponents imagine to be their strength.)
My Fellow Americans,
I must tell you with sorrow today that my Republican opponents are starting to succeed in their efforts to sabotage the stock market and your jobs. The stock market closed down on Monday, analysts blamed fears of a new wave of illness.The Republican's pet news organizations are pumping out anti-vaccine lies and propaganda, and my Republican opponents are tacitly supporting them. They claim that people don't trust the government, when they know that their own side is bombarding Americans with conspiracy-theory propaganda. Oh, they weasel away from it when you ask them a direct question, but try asking them to say these words:
"I got vaccinated; I made sure my whole family got vaccinated, to protect them. I urge everybody to get vaccinated, to protect us all. It is nonsense that vaccines are dangerous. The virus is the danger, to our lives, and to our economy, to our jobs."You'll find they weasel away from those statements, even though they are true. They are vaccinated. Their families are vaccinated. It's you they want to be sick, and afraid for your job, afraid of your own neighbours.And, now, their sabotage of America's economy is starting to take effect. They don't want it to be morning in America any more, they want it to be another hour of a long night, for America to be afraid in the dark. Well, we can step into the light, by following the truth. It can be morning in America, if you stop listening to their lies, and start listening to your doctor. Ask your doctor. Get the shot: For your job, for your family, for America.
Yes, that was silly. I just needed to vent some of that anger, holding over from yesterday. Telling a pack of lies, which will get huge numbers of people killed, is practically their signature move. Ask any Arab. Or Vietnamese.
http://brander.ca/c19#stockmarket
July 19: Anger
I can't even imagine their anger. I'd have to quit.I spent years, angry at work, at least angry whenever I wasn't distracted by getting the current job done, over mismanagement of a problem. I used - and had to develop - a municipal mapping system. Others who design them wanted a new one, very different from what I wanted. I knew their design would waste millions and make my job (and several other people's) more difficult - maybe even make some work-goals almost impossible, deny the organization their benefits.
That's it. It was a big deal to me - it was my job to save those millions, and especially, spending large sums in order to produce a worse system than we already had, like an expensive home reno that made one shower unusable and made two people in the kitchen trip over each other, drove me a little crazy.
The project was cancelled at the $8M-spent point, the money down the drain. And it was actually a relief, because at least that way we didn't get the functionality degraded. (The old mapping system, my mapping system, is still in use, 10 years later; it never really needed replacing. Eight million!)
But I still remember that feeling, it was awful: getting angry every time I thought about work, angry while I biked in to the office, angry after every meeting as I grimly did my job of cooperating with the project. It was a bad place to live in.
My anger, of course, would be as nothing compared to the utter fury I would feel, working in a UK COVID ward, today.
The author of The Guardian article is a better person than I, though. They (anonymous article, gender unknown) seem almost embarrassed to admit to anger; it starts with "It is hard to summarise exactly why I feel so angry", when I wouldn't find it hard at all.
The language is so faint, compared to the throat-hurting rants I'd be shouting on the roof: "..it is hard not to feel undermined by the relaxing of all restrictions..". "..levels of unhappiness in the staff are high..".
The word, "anger", only comes up after several paragraphs of such mildness:
"I think that the patients I see have been following the rules. But if people are allowed to do something, they will. And this is what makes me most angry. When rules are relaxed, people will quite reasonably relax their behaviour. Urging caution thereafter is as nonsensical as asking people to "stay alert". ... All that the current verbal gymnastics can do is to shift the blame away from those in power ... once again, we will be bearing the brunt of our leaders' mistakes."I never really had to bear the brunt of my leader's mistakes; except, man, what I could have done with that $8M. But I didn't have to watch people die, all the while admitting sadly they were "one of those idiots" who didn't get the shot; but now there's nothing more to do to save them.Speaking of vaccination, though, the article is reassuring, in a way. The author notes that half the admissions are vaccinated, but almost none of those go to the ICU. Unless you are very old and already-sick indeed, your COVID trip to the hospital, after vaccination and "breakthrough" infection, is almost certainly just for rest and some oxygen.
I'll just hold that thought, rather than imagining what it would feel like, if the top leaders above your whole bureaucracy sentenced you to another terrible winter of overwork, shifting schedules, watching people die.
I'd probably turn terrorist.
http://brander.ca/c19#anger
July 18: Neil Ferguson on the Real Population-Level Experiments
I'm glad to see Neil Ferguson is back in the headlines, predicting that BoJo's astonishingly stupid population-level experiment will result in 100,000 to 200,000 cases per day, before he has to give it up.
The experiment, of course, is "what if we watch the cases climb right back up where they were at Christmas, to 50,000 (left) per day, and then open up?"
It's one of those experiments up there with sticking your finger in an electric pencil sharpener to find out if the power is on.
There are other experiments of a similar vein going on in America, of course. Florida wants to know "What if we sneer at all public health measures and demonize public health officials, even as we become the most-infected state?".
Meanwhile, in Tennessee, they're experimenting with actively preventing vaccination ... for good measure, all vaccinations, not just COVID-19.
CCCC had previously written about the real population-level experiments are being run by the virus. This is providing more of them.
I strongly predict that the virus will find that people who are easy to infect, will turn out to be easily infected.
They didn't really need to run the experiments.
http://brander.ca/c19#ferguson2
July 17: A Simpler Option, for Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, and others
It was just a tasteless joke, but a friend said it was funny. The decision tipped when this stock photo came up at the top of the google search - it's something about the enthused, lets-go look on the model. Will be withdrawn if the stock photo company (linked) objects to the "borrow". (Gotta keep the name "dreamstime" on file, they have some awesome images.)
If you need a news link to make it more than a nasty joke, here's The Atlantic on the miseries of ICU staff in Missouri:
The grueling slog is harder now because it feels so needless, and because many patients don't realize their mistake until it's too late. On Tuesday, Hill spoke with an elderly man who had just been admitted and was very sick. "He said, 'I'm embarrassed that I'm here,'" she told me. "He wanted to talk about the vaccine, and in the back of my mind I'm thinking, You have a very high likelihood of not leaving the hospital." Other patients remain defiant. "We had someone spit in a nurse's eye because she told him he had COVID and he didn't believe her," Edwards said.
http://brander.ca/c19#euthansia
July 16: Death Race 2021: Nail-Biter Between USA and UK
I don't often write as if this blog were really about following a game, with the point-score in deaths-per-million. It's morbid and gross, and worst of all, it's easy to flip the scoring from golf (lowest wins), to a truly sardonic tone, when you'd swear that terrible leaders were actually competing to get their citizens killed. (Bolsonaro and Modi would be the "winners", there.)
Close runners-up, though, would be the Boris "Let the bodies pile up" Johnson regime in the UK, and the American Republicans, whether in or out of power. I hardly need provide links to the talk of the American town square in recent weeks, that all the most-Republican areas have their case-counts, and death-counts, rising again, the amazing levels of anti-vaccine ravings on Fox.
As the graph at left shows, the two countries have mostly matched each other, the UK usually ahead, but the USA quickly catching up, always, in their mortality rates.
At right, the difference between the two lines, so you can see how tight the race has become, as we presumably near the end. The USA was closing in on the UK at last, narrowing the gap down to just 10 deaths/million (1873 vs 1883) in early July. The American death rate is staying up above 300/day, rising by about 1 death/million/day, whereas the UK was down to below 1 per week, just a month back. But now, the UK case count is exponentially soaring, and when the death count follows it in a few weeks, the US will stop closing in; the UK might even pull ahead again.
See how easy it is? You just need to graph the numbers, watch the stats-grid change day by day, and you start "cheering for the team", quickly losing sight of it being the height of a pile of bodies.
My money is on the USA, though. Boris won't actually let the bodies pile up for too long, nor will the unvaxxed of Britain stay that way. Low vaccination in the UK isn't because of a sustained, quasi-official, regional-pride anti-vax campaign. It's mostly laziness. Over the pond, we have a nation that can ignore TV coverage of an invasion of the Capitol, call it vacationers, we have a TV network devoted to worsening the pandemic.
Nobody is about to beat the staggering death-toll in Peru, but in USA vs UK, it's going to be USA, USA, number one, all the way.
And they'll beat that Civil War death toll (~640,000) around the time they do, too. The only suspense is how they will blame it all on Joe Biden.
http://brander.ca/c19#deathrace
July 15: Vaccinate or Else
Well, finally, a leader with real courage. The courage to say "screw you" to the proponents of superstition, paranoia, and conspiracy.Emile Macron of France just flatly announced that you'll need vaccination or testing to enter a cafe, and 3 million appointments were booked the same day. 800,000 arms were jabbed, a record.
Damn Straight, Emile. You're my hero.
While I was noting Bastille Day yesterday, the French cranks were in the streets, waving signs about tyranny because of COVID-19 restrictions. Macron wasn't listening to them. He was looking at the graph at left, the one showing just the first few days of an exponential curve, now hitting 9,000 cases per day, about 12 times Canada's current case-rate, by population. Macron knows the upswing in coffins starts next week. His vaccination totals so far are 53%/38%, which isn't terrible, but isn't remotely good enough to hold down the Modi Malady, Delta.
Macron needed a game-changer, and picked the one that will get him called a fascist. Not by everybody: polls indicate 65% support, which I think is the minimum you'd see in Canada. Macron protests that he is not "making vaccination immediately obligatory for everyone ... but at pushing a maximum of you to go and get vaccinated".
If that 3 million are joined by another 3 million over the next week or so, that's a 10% jump, up into the sixties, a good start. But the UK experience - cases continued to soar, the last few days, up into the high 40,000s per day - shows that you have to at least reach up into the seventies for percent vaccinated, to suppress without restrictions.
I hope that Macron's bold strategy works - and then inspires other leaders to, well, lead. To listen to the majority of voices, not the loudest.
http://brander.ca/c19#macron
July 14: The Nightmare Race
It's a common nightmare to be running from some terrible pursuer, but to only be able to run in slow motion. The last post but one, about the UK being our future, if we don't vaccinate better, is continuing to come true. Since nine days back, daily cases have ticked up from 25,000 to over 33,000 on the 7-day average. Deaths, as predicted, continue to rise, now hitting 30/day as the 7-day, while Canada continues to push them down as our case-rate holds steady or declines a bit.The UK is still vaccinating, glacially, a slow-motion race against a fast pursuer. We are still just 2% ahead of them, although we will surpass them on second vaccinations in a week.
Our own first-dose race is the same speed: 0.75% per week of the population. But we are holding steady at that, there was no "plateau", just a slowing. At the end of August, we could have just continued up to 75% first-dose, 65% second-dose. Even that won't be enough, if Delta digs into us the way it has in the UK.
But so far, that's not happening, we're keeping Delta Down. If we can hold it down with good behaviours combined with the world-beating vaccination program forthe whole summer, we might be the one place to dodge a Delta Wave in the fall.
A vaccination Big Push, combined with a fall early-approval for vaccination down to age six would definitely save us, but I'm likely dreaming. For lack of that dream, we get the Nightmare Race. Best I should hope for is that it be put off until fall, and be a lot less-bad than Britain's, when it comes.
http://brander.ca/c19#ukscary
July 7: Well, MY Vaccine Lotto Would Have Worked (still could)
Another one-link day, there's some great appointment reading (again) in The Tyee, with a great article by Brian Owens about pandemic lessons. The headline on it is that an analysis of the Ohio lottery indicates that pandemic lottos don't work.But CCCC suggested one that had a chance to. The lotto they did try was to register you for an eventual spin of the wheel went you got your shot, would find out if you won months later. We have those lotto experiences weekly, and people pay $2-$3 for them. Not a big reward, really?
The CCCC suggestion was to budget several dollars per vaccination, and spin the wheel on the spot, with everybody in line seeing your spin. If your random number ends in one zero, $10, on the spot. Two zeros, $100, on the spot....six zeros, a million dollar cheque rushed to the scene. Since every tenth line-up member would get a crisp $10, and since at least a few in a long line would see $100 won, I think it would generate excitement, like everybody in a Vegas casino getting pumped when a slot machine vents a few pounds of quarters.
Just saying. Gambling experiences are designed by experts to create addictive behaviour, and you need some ruthless bastads like that manipulating the reluctant and the procrastinators with the best of nudging.
But there's much more. The extremely rare heart inflammations from mRNA are painful but so far, not deadly or even dangerous; they're to be shrugged at. Travel restrictions, like Canada's controversial ones, really were important at controlling outbreaks. And vaccine immunity lasts at least a year.
Don't miss The Tyee!
http://brander.ca/c19#lottong
July 5: Delta Dawn in the UK
I should say "The Modi Malady", in CCCC tradition, of course, but the old Helen Reddy pop tune came to mind. The Delta Variant, if you prefer, has come into its own in the UK, cases taking off like a rocket the last month or so. Just a classic exponential curve, again.
The kicker here is that this is Canada's future, unless we vaccinate another dozen percent or more, the minimum needed to quell Mr. Modi's gift to the world. As shown at right, Canada is only 2% more vaccinated than the UK - and much less double-vaccinated. They're undoubtedly more resistant to Delta than we are - it would sweep through Canada, better than the UK, right now.
Why are we not on that curve? Only because Delta never got a real foothold in Canada. It came to us when we were still distancing and curve-crushing. Delta cases were tracked with extra vigor, and it is still just a few percent of our total cases. Let Delta become 99% of all new cases, as with the UK several weeks back, and the UK curve will come to any country.
The UK, incredibly, is going ahead with complete re-opening in two weeks. What the hell? Well, that link has quotes from their health minister that the deaths are simply not tracking the new cases, here's the flat, near-zero chart for the deaths over the same month:
The explanation for the low level of deaths so far is at right. The UK may not have done quite as many first vaccinations as we have, but their vaccination rate above the age of 70 is basically 100%, for full vaccination. It's like ours for that age group, some 95%, for those 60-70. It's slashed the deadly effects of COVID-19 by about two orders of magnitude. Basically, BoJo and Co are figuring to go right ahead with a new raging wave, because it won't kill enough people to cause political mayhem. Screw those younger people who haven't vaccinated and will go through a nasty disease, and maybe some long COVID, and the fraction of a percent that will die.
Or will the death rate stay down? The chart at left seems to show no increase at all, but there already has been one. Their death rate was down to 5-8 per day in early June, three weeks after the cases-curve at top went through its minimum in mid-May. A month later, it's been 15, 17, 18, the last few days, it's doubled. That is three weeks after the cases went up from their minimum point, about 2500/day, to about 8000/day. It's tripled again since then, and it's hard not to forecast that 15-18 becoming 40-60, per day, a couple of thousand dead per month. Maybe that is politically acceptable. But how high will the cases go, up that exponential curve? Perhaps by the July 19 opening date in two weeks, the numbers will start to make them uncomfortable.
Canada should be very uncomfortable, right now. Early is the time to become uncomfortable with pandemic statistics. If anything could prove the epidemiologists correct, that we need 80-90% vaccination to beat this variant, the UK is our wake-up call.
Not uncomfortable? The UK doctors are currently crying out that BoJo's strategy is turning the unvaccinated into "variant factories", the million new cases that will happen in the next few weeks, each a chance to mutate a variant that can kill better, infect better, or beat vaccination. I may soon have to think up a new nickname for a new Boris Johnson variant; he seems not content to have killed thousands with his last one.
http://brander.ca/c19#ukourfuture
July 3: Old People Aren't As Dumb As We Sound
The very first post in this blog was about the exponential increase in mortality with decade of age. I thought of it again when I saw at the Canada Vaccination Tracker, that the vaccination rate went up steadily with age - 30-somethings higher than 20-somethings, all the way up. (Past 70, everybody is now 93% vaccinated or more).
The graph at left doesn't show the ages of the groups (though the dots are just 20s, 30s, 40s, etc, left to right), just their vaccinated percentage, on the horizontal, and their mortality probability if unvaccinated and going through the original COVID-19, on the vertical.
The vertical is, again, a log scale axis. But the correlation coefficient is still a stunningly high 0.98; not remotely a coincidence. Vaccination rate goes up linearly with age, though even the 20s are over 60% now in Canada. Actually, the last line on the tracker is quite unfair, giving the rate for "0-17", combining six years of kids that can get vaccinated with 11 years of kids that can't. You almost need to triple the number - and we're back in the 60% range again, even for kids.
Further, I'm delighted to see that a sixth of a percent of BC got their first shot on both July 1 and 2 - despite Canada Day, despite all the heat. I was sad when it fell to 0.16% per day, but it is holding there, and if it holds for all July, we're getting near the target.
How much does your odds of death affect your interest in vaccination? The graph is a log-relationship, so the factor of increase in death relates to the linear increase in vaccination percentage. For every 20% increase in their odds of dying, a one more percent of that group gets vaccinated. If one group only gets 50% vaccinated, another with double their odds of death will get 58% vaccinated. Double the odds of dying again, and it goes to 66%. At eight times the original odds, 74%. It really takes a lot more risk to get them out to the clinics, since the odds are so small to start with.
One has to wonder if people aware of other risks are affected the same way. If mid-30s diabetics have double the odds of healthy mid-30s, do 8% more of them get vaccinated? That's for people with way more data than I've got, to answer.
So, old people may have more conservative views, but if so, it's not holding them back from vaccination. Which means very few will die if we do have another wave. They'll be telling kids off their lawn for years yet.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxvsmort
July 1: Canada Day Re-opening, Ready or Not
The case-rate is stillabout half-again that of the last July 1. No, look it up (I won't be doing a lot of graphics while away from home), the total Canada case-load on July 1, 2020 was just 311, today is about 550. Our 550 feels like a bigger victory because of the huge mountain we've climbed down, compared to the little hill of wave #1. (The "Alberta Cliff" at left, is so dramatic I had to put in that graphic; still, the most amazingly fast case-reduction I've seen in the whole pandemic.)
The numbers haven't changed, of course. They say a fall wave will come, even at our current world-beating vaccination level. We are now down to a sixth of a percent per day at vaccination. If we really can vaccinate over 85% of the population, get to Modi/Delta Variant herd immunity, great. Maybe it's just a matter of time, because people will keep trickling in all summer (sixty days is 10%, if they keep showing up), we'll be new pandmic heros, up there with New Zealand and South Korea. If we do get a fall wave, hey, the last post pointed out that most won't care, outside the ICU, and surely that wave will bring in a bunch of "vaccine-procrastinators".
But here's how re-opened my own brain is. I'm here in Calgary, seeing multiple people. My oldest friend, my brother and his partner, my mother-in-law. We're ALL double-vaccinated. I hesitated about the few hours I spent in the house I'm dog-sitting, two kids are below twelve. My hosts were very reassuring: the kids are getting rapid-antigen tests regularly, everybody is notified if any kid they're in with is positive, much less the kids themselves. And the Alberta case-rate and positivity rates are so low that the probability per contact is very small indeed.
Not that I got that close. It'll be hard to break habits for a while to come.
But clearly, my brain is re-opening, regaining ease around people. It feels good. It's a Happy Canada Day.
http://brander.ca/c19#canadaday
June 29: Who Will Care About the Fall Wave?
It's both disturbing and familiar to read the timeline of events for April 2020 in this article about Republicans losing interest in the pandemic as soon as they found it disproportionally killed minorities and the poor.Familiar, because we know all that; disturbing because the timeline indicates they really spun on a dime - just days, some of them just hours, after that news went around, the Administration changed, the right-wing pundits changed their talking points. (Also disturbing, because they didn't seem to "get" that "disproportionate" didn't mean white people were safe, just only half as endangered as they'd thought. Still very dumb.)
It was almost like the point of the upcoming book, "The Sum of Us", by Heather McGhee. It tells the story of segregation taking away public services from Whites, because their government didn't want Blacks to have swimming pools, for instance - they were filled in, rather than be integrated. A lot of White people died of covid let run wild, too.
Today's story about the superspreader party in Australia has me thinking about it. At the party, 30 attended, 24 were infected, the other six were the only vaccinated. For Canada, at least, the only unvaccinated by fall will be that tiny number with medical issues with vaccination, kids, and (I hope) barely a fifth the adults that didn't want to, or didn't care enough to bother.
Those getting vaccinations, but understanding they also depend on everybody else too, are not likely to be sympathetic to them. A person of my aquaintance yesterday grumped that they should be denied hospital help, go get better at home. That will NOT happen, but the shoe may be on the other foot as to lockdowns to control a fall wave.
It's been assumed that the pandemic-deniers are both anti-lockdown, and anti-vax. That's not all of the non-vaccinators, but they're not about to change their spots just because they're now in a small minority at risk. Unless a great majority of the vaccinated, at almost no risk themselves, are good with a lockdown to benefit those they've been upset at for months, only suffering ICU staff are going to be able to talk anybody into one.
If we don't beat that 80% target, including required vaccinations for school attendance over 12 - and I'll repeat, maybe also, if we don't bend rules and vaccinate down to age six - Fall could bring the "Who Cares, You Deserve This" wave of deaths.
http://brander.ca/c19#whocares
June 28: Did I Say I Envied Australia?
Australia has done admirably at the COVID fight, held up as a model. As I've noted, they lockdown fast and hard and contact-trace like no other. Mr. Modi's Delta variant is challenging that, though, it requires hard lockdowns indeed, and how long can they keep it up? They're in an awkward place right now, ranking #93 on the CTV web page for the vaccination race. At 25% first-dose, and managing maybe 0.4% per day at the moment, they're two or three months away from vaccination quelling their pandemic to any great degree - though the death-count and ICU-count does drop after you vaccinate the old.Canada, for all our Ford/Legault screwups, is now #11, hitting 68% by tomorrow. We passed Kuwait on the weekend, are now the most-vaccinated country of more than a half-million population. I don't know if Mr. Trudeau deserves re-election, but he's certainly set himself up well for it.
CCCC has devoted itself for weeks to being cranky about not making it past 70%, where we do need to be to really win. But, reading about Australia does put things in perspective.
http://brander.ca/c19#australiavax
June 26: Vaccinate The Kids
But first, a word about the ludicrous understatements of public health officials. Theresa Tam's the other day was about the LXXXVIII edition of:
Delta poses more of a threat to those not fully vaccinated, Tam said Friday She means "a hundred times the threat", of course. "More", indeed. Always so careful not to say more than is needed, they couldn't sell water in Death Valley.The same modeling that produces the results we see all about us for two months, the declining cases and dwindling ICUs, suggests a fourth wave in the fall if we don't reach 80% of the whole population. Period.
In America, they've given up on that. As we continue to crawl, at a sixth of a percent per day, from 67% today, towards 70% of total population, we don't have to. We can practically see the goal from here. There seems to be enough "momentum" left in the first-dose dailies to get us to 70% by mid-to-late-July. But we'd need ninety percent of the over-12s to reach 80% of the total population.
I wish we didn't have to consider "rushing" the vaccination of those under 12. Last I heard, the trials with younger kids were going great, no problems yet, but the grind of regulated procedures means no shots for them until 2022. Of course, they all have to go back to school in September, or about a million parents will go frantically insane.
We could protect them if everybody around them were vaccinated, no holes in the wall. Rather than consider rushing their vaccinations ahead by four or more months - and starting in September itself, at school, like the polio and smallpox vaccinations I remember so well, would be soon enough - I'd press for all the programs I've already suggested at CCCC, redoubled:
- Vaccination requirements for all hospitality sites: bars, restaurants, theatres;
- Vaccination requirements for work;
- Vaccinations for pay, of every kind: lotteries, prizes, direct cash
Anything.
But if that doesn't happen, then let's talk about the rules, let's talk about special consent after a brief lecture about it being irregular, may come with some risks.
Yes, it comes with some risks. And you don't risk children.
But if your only other choice is the risk of COVID - and a whole COVID wave closing schools, sickening kids, and killing their elders - any sane parent would take the risk of the vax.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxkids
June 25: The Overlooked Novavax
Just the one link, today, but it's appointment reading. Linked from the image of a Novavax vial at left is the article by Hilda Bastian in The Atlantic, on how Novavax is the best vaccine yet tested.
It was simply overlooked by the media, the last week, because we're awash in vaccines that people aren't asking for. Who needs another? Not me, I admit, nor will Novavax reach approval and distribution before Canada and the States, at least, are full-up on second doses.
But it's going to be a big player in the global second act on the fight against the virus. Novavax is:
But the key point is that Novavax, last week turned in efficacy results the same as the mRNA vaccines. Remember the glee when they turned out to be over 90% effective? Well, old vaccine can do that, too.
- Easier to manufacture, will surely be cheaper;
- Is based on older vaccine technologies, familiar to all;
- It displays fewer side-effects, word of which has bad effects on uptake, is hard on people who have to get back to work.
- Did I mention cheaper?
(As a side-note, mRNA turns out not to be some new silver bullet. Another mRNA test showed less than 50% efficacy in a trial some weeks back; it'll be dropped from consideration. That's common, but shows the technology itself is no guarantee. All in the article.)
The virus, through evolution, does appear to be fighting back, coming up with more-infectious variants. It's nice to get a reminder that we keep coming back better, too. Onward to India.
http://brander.ca/c19#novavax
June 24: Travel Troubles?
Well, I'm just about outta here. My main "travel trouble" is trying to dodge the heat wave. I'm thinking of taking off late-afternoon Saturday, when the heat is already passing. I can take advantage of a clear night and a full moon to drive half-way there by late night. Then the trick is to be up before five, on the road well before six, and dodge both the heat and the construction.Then it hit me to wonder how legal it all was. There's legal and "legal" - the latter being, "if they don't have roadblocks up to stop you, it can't be all that illegal". I'm pretty sure it'll be that legal.
The BC page for travel is clear, travel "for essential reasons", is OK, just obey BC rules. My "89-year-old who hasn't had a hand around the house for 18 months" story should suffice.
The Alberta page is not clear, giving rules for outgoing travelers, incoming international travelers, and...that's it. No mention of what incoming Canadians should do.
So, silence gives consent. It's probably not there because the Kenney government would not risk a single tourist dollar over the pandemic they keep wishing away, and wouldn't even raise the issue.
My second vaccination will be 18 days old when I cross the border. Dora's, over a month. I'd cap it off with a test, but you can't get one on a whim, to this day. (Alberta has $40 rapid antigen tests at drugstores, but they're useless for the vaccianted.) I'll go back to worrying about the heat wave.
http://brander.ca/c19#traveltroubles
June 23: Scared in Sydney
News this morning from Australia has me appreciating those sweet, sweet vaccines. We talk about the "virus/vaccine race", but Sydney clears up that they're already saving us. First, a refresher about Australia: they rock at contact-tracing. That's a link to the sudden Melbourne "draconian lockdown", which was extended out to two weeks from five days, because of one outbreak of Delta.Melbourne and Victoria State are emerging, but over in Sydney, they just had to announce restrictions.
Their peerless contact tracing is confirming that remark about "fleeting contacts" in our previous Melbourne story. Here's a few quotes:
If you remember at the start of this pandemic, I spoke about 15 minutes of close contact being a concern. Now, it looks like it's five to 10 seconds that's a concern. So it's just the risk is so much higher now than it was only a year ago.- Queensland Chief Medical Officer Jeanette Young.
Young also confirmed ... genome sequencing had shown two people staying at the Brisbane Airport Novotel had caught the virus from another person staying in an adjacent room.Let's all cross our fingers, that one was the two sets of travelers meeting each other in the hall for a few moments. And not the virus wandering between rooms just via the hotel air system.
Of course, you just have to scroll down two days to June 21 to see the mini-graph of the uptick in cases in Britain, now 99% Modi Malady (Delta), and rising, despite 63% of the population vaccinated, only 3% less than Canada (and much more second-vaccinated).
Canada's cases are probably going down because of our behaviours, on top of the vaccine. As we re-open, we may be in for an ugly surprise. Or at least, our younger population may be. Indeed, the UK cases may be because of uneven vaccination, more than the virus defeating the vaccinated. That's for another day.
http://brander.ca/c19#sydneyscare
June 22: I Got Nuthin' (But Gripes)
I find myself busy with a family project , as I'm getting busy preparing to travel on the weekend. There was just nothing engaging in the news this morning, except the ugly details about how very bad it was in Quebec care homes, which I can't stand to comment on.But, I do have gripes, let's make them brief:
- Why should I care how many people over a certain age are vaccinated? That's a bureaucratic measure of "what we can do", not a medical measure that has any meaning. Only the whole-population percentage matters to the virus.
- The writer at the Toronto Star (no, no link) who did a front-page complaint about dutifully getting a double-shot of Astazeneca, like me, and now feeling all betrayed. By what? 92% protection from hospital rather than 96%? Most of the world has no vaccines at all, lady, and most of the value of them is there being no cases near you, not your personal protection. Just living in the most-highly-vaccinated large country is a huge #FirstWorldPrivilege. Shut up.
- Re-opening dates being described as provisional, depending on medical data, when they're clearly pre-selected, much-prepared-for, politically-necessary. Just admit you're going to throw the dice.
Actually, I'll finish with the reverse of a gripe: a celebration of good news, good news that nobody noticed because it's "no news", an absence. When's the last time you heard a "crazy anti-masker" story on the news, somebody screaming and assaulting staff? I think they've tired of it and given up!
http://brander.ca/c19#gripes
June 21: "Oh, You Don't Need to Diet" ... Or Vaccinate.
I wish I were a better example of it, but everybody who's kept their weight down on into a certain age, (or kept themselves really trim in youth and middle age), has heard the same refrain when they pick the fish and veggies, or turn down dessert: "Oh, you don't need to diet, you're so thin".And, worst of all, you can't say "That's because I keep making these choices, and every one is a struggle." It would come off all judge-y.
The US States that should care the least about vaccination would be the two that had the least-bad pandemic. If you sort the 50 states + DC by their deaths-per-million, the two that were barely touched by the pandemic (about half as bad as the Canadian average, i.e. the same numbers as BC) are Hawaii and Vermont. Maine, not far behind.
If you sort US states by the total percentage of population with at least one dose, guess who comes out on top?
Hawaii and Vermont, with Maine, again, not far behind.
It's hardly a perfect rule. I chopped off the next-best vaxxer, New Jersey, which had just about the worst pandemic. In Canada, the champion vaccinator province until this morning was Quebec, our worst-case pandemic province.
But, this morning, Quebec was overtaken: Nova Scotia, which had a New Zealand pandemic, with only 90 dead of 900,000, a only a third of even BC's death toll. Joining Nova Scotia and Quebec up on the podium of champions are pandemic-non-victims in the North and the rest of the Maritimes.
It's a common-cause phenomenon, of course: they had a least-bad pandemic because of their community-spirited Safe Behaviours (always capitalized words for CCCC), and they're having the best vax drive for the same reason.
I just wish BC could join them up there, with a few more percent, preferably five or six. Why? Because the UK is 64% first-dose vaccinated, has been for months; they've reached 46% fully vaccinated, too. At the graph at left is their case-rate, the last few weeks - in spite of all of that. Delta took over there, now all of the cases. Soon here, too. UK data is the main reason for that "90%" figure, yesterday.
You can be too rich or too thin: ask Midas, or Karen Carpenter. But you can't be too-highly vaccinated.
http://brander.ca/c19#dietvax
June 20: 90% Not Gonna Happen. But maybe 80%?
I cannot find it at Global News, so I get to do the other CCCC superpower, which is the ability to capture, edit, and re-present over-the-air TV, the way those with cable boxes cannot. Of course, this is just a 30-second "fair use", and all my readers should patronize Global News.They set me back last night, with the so-far new word from epidemiologists that the Modi Maladies (Delta and Kappa variants) are so catchy that we'd need 90% immunized to reach herd immunity.
That's not going to happen. Not from vaccination.
We have to try, though, save the most lives we can, and shorten the trip to herd immunity through waves of disease. Slow down those waves, and keep the most over-40s we can out of ICUs.
A couple of things give me hope. Quebec is just surging ahead, still getting a lot of first-vaccinations daily, has just hit the two milestones of 70% total-population and 80% of over-12s.
If the whole country could join them up there in the heights, we may not have herd immunity to totally shut down the new variants, but it will certainly slow it down make the waves non-emergencies.
I was delighted to read this morning that the 32-hour Surrey Vaxathonhad over 5000 vaccination slots booked up. The event is hoped to pull out people with no first dose yet, but we won't know for a day how many were first or second. Maybe BC was only about to plateau at 68% for lack of good clinic provision; I'd like to believe that.
In particular, I'd like to believe that BC and her population are at least as good a community as Quebec, and the three Martime provinces that have already breezed past us towards the Vaccination Cup. You read that correctly: we've been beaten by Newfies.
The public health authority has so little game when it comes to PR and sales. That's a good thing, really, they should be dedicated to dry recitation of facts, to protect their reputations, have no staff with an (ugh) Communications Degree. But the premiers should hob off the job of "selling vaccination" to a marketing firm that has nothing but game. And I keep saying "game" because they should activate provicial patriotism on this one: point out we're all being beating by Quebec, not just at hockey like usual, but at saving lives; at being good citizens; at community spirit.
And then Newfoundland. The humiliation should electrify the other provinces, especially proud Alberta, which really needs a vaccination kick.
People might show up to Beat Quebec, that can't get excited about Beating Covid. Just saying.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxsurge
June 19: The Darwin Stampede
So, the news media are pretty skeptical of Jason Kenney's most-aggressive re-opening by the least-vaccinated province. Me, too.
If enough unvaccinated people are present (40% of the population and 100% of the kids under 12) then the Stampede and other events (mostly, the other events, the ones in crowded tents with no wind and much drinking) will be able to function as transmission festivals, where the virus slips through the very large cracks in the vaccine wall, spreading it to those who will go home.
The death rate will never rise high again. Even in Alberta, the 80+ age-group is 81% fully-vaccinated, the 70-79 bunch at 70%. Both groups are past 90% for single-vaccinations. A Fall wave wouldn't have the death-rate be 1% of the case-rate anymore; barely a tenth of a percent.
It hit me that Jason Kenney has created the ideal situation to bump off anti-vaxxers, or at least give them a hospital trip from the nasty-cold of their lives. You vaccinate just enough to tell yourself you can re-open, but leave loads of anti-vaxxers still exposed when you do. The vaccinated get to read about the ICUs filling up with anti-vaxxers, some still unrepentant, some still unbelieving.
The vision had me thinking about going to the Stampede - as an anti-vaxxer activist, a killer one. I'll be fully-protected by then, and it's 100% effective in preventing severe disease and hospitalizations. (85-90% against any symptoms at all). So I can go, wandering the crowds with impunity, wondering if I'm asymptomatically infecting an unvaccinated person, starting a chain of events that puts them in a bed. Or a box. Poetic justice for anti-vaxxers? It's downright Darwinian, with "Acceptance of Vaccine Medicine" as a survival trait. Let the smart survive!
I'm not admitting to any evil glee at the thought. And it all comes crashing down when I remember that an asymptomatic case is the most dangerous of all; despite the vaccination making my case twice as hard to transmit (as well as three times as hard to catch it, really frustrating my Typhoid Mary ambitions), I could infect many. Including my 89-year-old host, herself double-Pfizer'd, but we know from a case of her age at the Foothills recently, that age-group is the one that can still have a bad, even deadly "breakthrough" case, so risks of that will not be taken. Also, those anti-vaxxers I'd assault with my virus particles, have old relatives, too.
I might just go to the last day or two, and head straight home, goodbye to Dora said through a mask. It really is the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth (if you grew up there, at least), and we've known since the Floyd Marches that "outdoor" is pretty darn safe - IF people stay at arm's length, aren't eating together, facing each other to talk. If the Stampede can hold down the indoor events, they'll probably get away with it.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxstampede
June 18: Once More With Feeling - Vaccine Risks and the "Time-Value of Risk"
For me, the second Astazeneca dose was all set up. I could have it about two days after they authorized them, because the pharmacy had been waiting for it, was ready, the doses lined up.I could already have gotten an appointment for mRNA, but that would have taken days, maybe weeks; 62 isn't a high-priority age.
So, what if yesterday's news that mRNA was actually recommended as a second-dose, because of those great synergy effects I was eager to try, had already come out? No difference. I already believed that, just based on vaccine history. It's in the linked post above.
Why was I unwilling to wait even a few days?
The numbers for a first dose to not be delayed, are as obvious as a pea on a plate, let's run them one more time:
If the vaccine risk is 1-in-100,000, then it's like the risk of going one day without it. Cutting that risk, even in half, should not be delayed two whole days while you dither about a one-time blood-clot risk. (Because I was very conservative above, the real time-value is in hours.)
- BC was aquiring 500 new cases/day at the time, or one resident in 10,000;
- For my age, round it to 10% odds of a disease I'd call an "injury" - either "long COVID" actual injury, or just hospitalization and near-death. Or even death. Round it all to 10% odds of something as bad as a blood clot.
- Per-DAY(!) risk without vaccination is 1/10,000 X 1/10 = 1/100,000.
- VERY CONSERVATIVELY assume that first-dose only drops that risk in half. It's much more.
It's distressing and eye-rolling to read stories of people now "frustrated" and "confused" by the announcment that mRNA is now recommended as a second-shot, for the additional protection, because they would have waited for it, or something.
People are only talking that way because they're ignoring the ongoing risk, in a pandemic, of not being vaccinated. Everybody understands "The time value of money" - the interest rate is huge news whenever its changed, the economy is regulated by it. People are not understanding the time-value of risk reduction.
You would feel the risk if people were shooting bullets at you, instead of invisible virus particles. Imagine a TV gunfight, everybody has clip after clip of 20 bullets. You were out in the open, were lucky not to be hit before you were able to dive behind a car. (First AZ shot). This gives you cover, and the engine block might even stop a bullet, but you still might be hit by four bullets of the 20 in his next clip.
When he reloads, and you have a second to move, do you spend it jumping behind a wall, (second AZ shot), which will stop bullets better, and only 2 from his next clip can hit you...or do you wait behind the car, risking four bullets, because during that clip, an armored car will pull up beside it, letting you get to cover that will stop all but one bullet? (Second shot with mRNA.)
From his next two clips, you can risk four bullets behind the wall, or four bullets behind the car, followed by one more behind the armored car?
Obviously, you get shot at with one less bullet to take the wall. It's a minor gain, but these are bullets. This is your life. If you had a decision to make between one bullet and none, it wouldn't be "minor" at all.
At this phase of a pandemic, the risk is dropping every day. Enduring risk today is much worse than enduring risk in a month.
So I took the shot. And dodged a bullet.
http://brander.ca/c19#2ndnow
June 17: Well, I guess it's just 68%
Man, I thought we could beat Quebec, the Maritimes, go on to beat the best in the USA: Vermont, barely a half-million population, mind you, with 72.6% of the whole population vaccinated. We seemed to be headed there. But today, the rest of the Maritimes will pass us, joining Quebec on, apparently, a trip to 70%, since they are all still going up at nearly half a percent per day.We staggered above 67% yesterday, having dropped again down to 0.17% in one day. That's been decreasing every day this week. If the decrease stops, we'd still need another whole week to make it to 68%. The decrease seems unlikely to stop, as everybody sees restrictions ending, creating a mental atmosphere of "it's over anyway"; the news crowing about the high rates doesn't help. So it'll probably be almost the end of the month when we hit 68%; that's our plateau, the way 62% was Israel's.
It's not bad, of course: that will take us just past the "sacred" 75% of all-over-12, the number the last model said was enough for partial re-opening. Of course, that model pre-dated the obviously-worse Modi Variants, Delta and Kappa. However, we have until fall to come up with some new sales pitches, some workarounds that hold back transmission in other ways. Obviously, we can lavish the now-unwanted Moderna waterfall on second doses, get that number way up.
It's a silly thing, me taking the "COVID Cup" concept so seriously, that I wanted, for provincial pride, to be up there with the best of the best at community spirit, at logistics, at common sense. But, maaaan, just 69% would have allowed us to also beat Hawaii, and large-population Massachussetts, which plateaued just above 68% a few weeks ago. We could claim to be better than all but the one small-population US state. I should take comfort that we at least are not in the Canadian remedial-reading dunce class of Alberta and Saskatchewan, fully eight percent behind us - they're worse than eight US states.
At least, there's some acknowledgement of it, on Global News, yesterday. It's weird that the piece describes the fall-off speculatively, as if it weren't already happening.
Lastly, my new-best-friend at The Tyee, Andrew Nikiforuk, was named commentator of the year. That links to a page with links to his best articles, but don't miss his first-person article "by COVID-19", explaining itself. Science meets dark humour, to the benefit of both.
http://brander.ca/c19#68
June 16: Different Day, Same Topic
Well, the news yesterday confirms my fears. The first-vaccination rate dropped again, down to 0.2% of population. It'll be today before we even hit 67%, then it will take at least until Monday to reach 68%. Unless it continues to drop, in which case it could take weeks to reach 68% - the British Columbia vaccine plateau number. We won't hit 70% until Fall. That's if we follow the sharp drop-off and plateau that Britain did, that Israel did.The total vaccinations dropped too, down to 50,000-ish again. Since the clinics can handle 70,000, I think it qualifies as a genuine drop in interest, and I'm wondering if those gallons of Moderna about to be delivered are going to sit in freezers.
It sounds like a minor complaint, it's a great number compared to those two nations, it's very close to the herd-immunity estimate numbers. But it's not enough to really go back to normal. You can have outbreaks at 82% vaccinated, like the Cottonwoods Care Home.
It's all a matter of degree. The Cottonwoods outbreak was slower, milder, nothing that would have made the news if it were flu. BC can handle those kind of events. But the difference between 82% and 68% is huge.
So far, I've been mentioning PR approaches like lotteries and promotions used to sell products. Clinical psychologists are for lotteries.
But the other approach is through the carrot of permissions. I know that the public health people don't want to issue passports (more fools they) and they certainly don't want bar owners making the case-by-case call on whom to let in.
Only at the actual border are we willing to check for vaccination and give people a perq (no hotel stay).
We can urge some kind of social/commercial benefits for the vaccinated, but if the government won't show some spine against the anti-vaxxer superstitions, the private sector will have to step up. Employers can require vaccination to return to the office. Schools for adults can require them, too.
Every gathering place (schools, work, entertainment) that can require vaccination, should. It's not just that those people would have to, every additional person on "our side" makes the other side smaller and stick out more, have fewer excuses.
In BC right now only 5% of residents are truly opposed to vaccination! But 23% have "some form of vaccine hesitancy". I could give you similar statistics on "losing weight". And we all know how many people are generally in favour of losing weight, but don't.
We have another 10% out there, at least, that can be persuaded, nudged, hectored, embarrassed into getting around to it. The government seems content to let them slip away, like a faint-hearted suitor that ne'er won a fair lady. The rest of us have to get in there and ask them for a date. At the clinic.
http://brander.ca/c19#sametopic
June 15: Will We Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?
Yes, I'm pessimistic. Yesterday's news of cases couldn't have been better. Dropping so suddenly below 100/day was a huge relief, proof that our current (mild) restrictions are still enough to push our current mix of variants - including the "P1" variant (The Bolsonaro Blight, which I'm happy to admit I and Gwynne Dyer were too scared of. Should have saved our wolf-crying for the Modi Misery.) down in numbers.But we haven't shut the door. We've snatched defeat from the jaws of victory before, every time we did not Get To Zero, and we won't get to zero this time, either. We can only get to a low number, then get enough vaccinations. Every other polity in the world is resigning itself to an endless, permanent covid fight. We, the most-vaccinated large country, have the possibility of really shutting the door on a comeback.
Imagine a tile floor, with big tiles, over half a metre square. Difficult but possible to step over one entirely. A two-thirds of the tiles become "lava", can you still cross the floor? Definitely.
That's the situation the virus is in, with a 70% vaccinated population. The virus can cross right past the vaccinated; we're more-difficult to infect, most of them are asymptomatic, and less-likely to transmit, but it can happen. That's the occasional stepping right over a tile. With a little of that, and a lot of stepping on adjacent tiles very possible, you can go right across the floor.
That gets exponentially more difficult, just lowering the remaining tiles from 30% to 25% and 20%. That really shuts the door. If the new variant didn't have an R of EIGHT, way up from the R=2.8 of the original, if vaccination made asymptomatic transmission impossible, we might have done it with 70%.
Vaccination does reduce transmission by a factor of six, but with an R of 8, even a vaccinated population would have an R of 8/6 = 1.33 (very roughly...the point is, it's over 1.0)
So, it would be great if BC could follow after Quebec, get back to catching up with them. But, as the graph above shows, our first-dose vaccination rate plummeted more over the weekend, down to 0.26% per day. If it doesn't drop further, we might hit 70% by Canada Day. But it keeps dropping. I'm not sure if it's second-doses crowding them out any more. The total vaccinations over the weekend dropped below 50,000 per day, from over 70,000 just before it.
We need to go on a full-court-press, advertisements, celebrity endorsements, special travelling clinics, "The VaxMobile!" The re-opening is the Enemy of the vaccination campaign. I'm reading articles about America's problem: the re-openings they've celebrating cause people who did intend to get vaccinated, to think "It's Over" and lose all urgency to get around to it.
Just one more push. Two more weeks of pressure and progress, and we really could shut the door, become the best place on Earth to visit, do business, move.
Even pessimists can have hope.
http://brander.ca/c19#snatchdefeat
June 14: Counting Health Care's Casualties: Worse than Afghanistan
It's been 50 weeks since I last linked to the site at left, an amateur effort by the nurse's unions of Canada to count their dead. Apparently, nobody else is. At the top of the list, a year ago was 16, now at 53, are the "Anonymous health care worker" listings, where the nurse's union volunteer spotted the news story, but it didn't have a name.
There's little question the list is not all of them, because so many are just those underpaid, often immigrant care-home-workers-of-colour that are the backbone of the care-home system. This is a follow-up to yesterday. They should all get that thousand-dollar bonus, as combat pay. Our health care system, if you count in the other workers, from surgeons to orderlies, has probably lost more than our military did in Afghanistan, with considerably more ceremony when they died.
That's the public reaction I pointed out a year ago, that even the paramilitary services like fire and police get enormously more public acknowledgement and mourning when they die on the job. Constable Patton receives a hero's mourning, but "Anonymous Hospital Cleaner, Ontario" was just a statistic in another CBC story 13 months back.
I'm guessing that we've really lost more than we did in Afghanistan, because America lost far more. Granted, they've had 3 times as bad a pandemic as we've had, but on the other hand, the worst part of ours was those care-homes. They were far more likely to die than staff in hospitals, nurses more likely than physicians.
The Guardian and Frontline put in a non-amateur effort at counting America's toll, over 12 months. They came up with much higher numbers than our nurse's union volunteers. The ABC News story at right notes that, as a group, health-care workers had three times the death rate of the general population. That makes it crystal clear: this profession is taking the same kinds of risks - and perhaps statistically higher risks - than police and soldiers. They should be remembered as well, on Rememberance Day, when we remember that people died protecting us.
That similarity - and the complete dissimilarity in how they are mourned and honoured - was plain enough last June 28. I'm just repeating myself, with a measure of "See? Prediction fulfilled". The care-home workers I advocated for yesterday deserve more than that bonus, but also, they deserve and need to be nudged, paid, cajoled into vaccination. They're taking risks for us, and we have a responsibility to protect them, however we can.
http://brander.ca/c19#casualties
June 13: Pay the Care-Home Workers to Vaccinate
At left, a link to the NY Times story about one unvaccinated health care worker setting off a COVID-19 outbreak of 26 infections in a care-home.Twenty-two were vaccinated, and most had only the mildest symptoms...but one vaccinated person died anyway. Care homes have very vulnerable people, even the to-others-mild flus every season kill thousands. Two unvaccinated residents also died, for a total of three dead, killed by the decision of their health-care worker.
Your first reaction, is the stick. How dare a health-care worker,of all people, expose fragile lives to such risks? This CityTV story lays out the case for vaccination being a mandatory job requirement and I agree with it. I'm dumbfounded they decided not to go with that, at least not yet.
(Just as I'm typing, my Washington Post page pops up the news that the tiny minority of staff in at Houston Methodist Hospital, that refused vaccine requirements, have just had their suit tossed out of court. The story links from the judge's words, at right.)
But, second reaction, remember how poorly-paid and treated these staff have been. They aren't considered "professionals", are lightly regulated (which means, unprotected). About 80-90% women, a third immigrant. A lot are part-time, meaning there are a lot of people needed for all those hours: 100,000 LTC workers in Ontario alone.
One wonders how much can be done with the carrot. We owe all these staff so much, they've been through so much. With the amounts being thrown around, I don't see an extra $1000 bonus for a couple of hundred thousand people as a wild extravagance. Let's try announcing a bonus that size, send cheques to all the ones that are already done, and dangle that carrot for the rest.
I'm not sure even one life would be saved per million spent, but, hell, they deserve it to start with. And it would get us started on admitting we need to be spending a lot more on LTC anyway, have for two decades since the shocked, shocked reports of conditions in LTC started coming out.
http://brander.ca/c19#pay4vax
June 12: Unconcerned about Rising Cases Because They're Young?
I sighed when yesterday's case-count was up, again, to 180. The news and officials hardly noticed. "Below 200 for X days in a row", "All trends are good", they all chortle. If you keep averaging higher numbers from weeks ago, averages look good. But if you graph just the last six days, (left), not so much.
Why aren't they getting alarmed? Are they drunk on yesterday's buckets of Moderna (below)? I've got a guess. They're getting cocky because they figure the cases aren't that scary.
The bar chart at right, quoted in a Kamloops paper on May 25, shows how well-vaccinated the old population of BC already is. The red line is just above 75%, where they're fairly sure of "herd immunity". If only you could keep old people from contacting younger ones, if only age groups were geographical communities, then all of BC over 60 would be there already.
But that's a real thing: by 60, so many are past going to work, can just stay home, and if they're careful about relatives, they kind of are in a herd where old people mostly socialize together. And, of course, the very high rates past age 70 mean that even an outbreak that hits them will most likely be survivable or even negligible - which also describes most cases for the under-50 cohort.
Overall, for the pandemic, by far the most cases have been in the 20-29 group, and their comparatively low vaccination rate, which now won't be rising very fast, suggests that they are a huge proportion of new cases now. (I couldn't find the daily-new-cases numbers broken down by age, not anywhere. Just by region.)
One needs to remember it isn't their job to prevent cases, just "severe illness". If either youth or vaccination prevent most of that, the public health people can kind of clock off work.
As long as yesterday's hopes for us actually taking in all that Moderna come true, they're very probably right. Right now, they're really focused on getting a million of us over the age of 65 to get that second shot, and letting only about 20,000 first-shots per day get through to the 800,000 people, age 18-50, that don't have a first shot yet. At 50,000 per day for the olds, that's 20 days; at 20,000 per day for the under-40, that's about the same time to get them from 50% to 70%.
It's a tough call, whether the reduced deaths from second-shots to the greyhairs are more than the reduced deaths from first-shots to the under-40s. The over-70s have almost 20X the death rate. If a first shot "only" protects them by 90% from death itself, then arguably, second-shots for over-70s do indeed save more lives than first shots for under-40s. But, the young have to work, take kids to school, socialize more widely; each shot to that group prevents more cases than second shots to the old.
The Moderna deliveries will eliminate the tough choice. Apparently, the first is not for a week yet, "next week" meant "next Friday". It can't come soon enough, and the ability to do over 100,000 per day needs to be ready by then. It's a race, one we can win.
http://brander.ca/c19#youngbc
June 11: Can We Soak Up the Vax Glut?
Clearly, CCCC is guilty of the blogging sin of Poor Research to have worried about whether the drop in first-doses per day was the result of sudden public loss of interest. The Vaccination Tracker last night was showing, for the BC row, some 73,000 doses administered yesterday. That's about the max they've ever done.
Dr. B has mentioned "The cohort that are coming up on sixteen weeks", are currently the top focus for appointments, they have to clear off the first-dose backlog. The page above shows that only the 80+ age group are even past 25%, for second-shots - and the rest of them and nearly all the 70-80 group were vaccinated when the graphs start at April 24, are at 10% second-shots.
We may not have to stretch out the first-dose schedule so much, we can have it all - catch up on second doses, get back to full-speed on first doses - if we can soak up the gallons of vaccine about to pour down upon us.
Yes, gallons. Yesterday's remarkable announcement that Modern intends to drop 7 million doses on us in the remaining two weeks of June, starting Monday, comes on top of 2.4 million per week, steadily coming from Pfizer.
So, 7 million over two weeks means the total is 2.4M/week + 3.5M/week = 5.9M/week, for Canada. The description page says they're all 0.5ml per dose, so that's 2950 litres per week, or 650 gallons. Canada has to soak up about 100 gallons per day of vaccines for the rest of the month.
BC is 13% of the population, that's 767,000 doses per week, or just under 110,000 per day. (Twelve gallons a day: the guy in the picture is being drenched with about six.) We've yet to manage 80,000, so it's a new challenge.
If we can meet it, we can step up the second-dose program further, and get back to full speed on first doses soon. I'm daring to get excited.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxglut
June 10: I'm Done. Now, Vaccinate Palestine!
I was warned that if my first Oxford/Astazeneca shot gave me 'reactions', then I was likely to be in for the same or worse on the second. I'm pleased to say that if I hadn't been "looking" for aches and pains, I barely would have noticed them. A slight headache, a little fatigue got me to bed early. I, alas, already had a "crick in my neck" from the previous day, and that did get worse for some hours instead of better; but as the 24-hour mark comes up soon, I'm about normal.The pharmacist gave me a current number of one life-threatening blood clot in 600,000 doses. Australia just had its second death, may have one or two more - out of 2.8 million doses. It really is a nearly one-in-a-million lottery. I told him I'd probably taken a higher risk walking the kilometre to the drug store. (Not quite: 300 Canadian pedestrian deaths per year, about one-in-a-million per month, not per kilometre...)
I'll have to put aside my yesterday worries over our vaccination rate dropping. Dora's Page has my photo of the line-up at Canada Place; that was reassuring. Canada is going to be more-OK than nearly any other large nation. We have to step up to help the rest of the world.
Yes, we should mostly just contribute generously to the Covax project of the WHO. But, Canada is big enough to tackle one small nation of just 2 million, on her own, as a special project. Let's vaccinate Palestine.
We have enough Moderna on the way to float the Bluenose. We could start skimming off our own supplies as we get down to nothing left to do but second doses for those under 60, that can be stretched out a bit.
Palestine is 1/7th the size of Canada; stretching out our second-dose program by one-eighth in time, would skim off enough to give them all a first. (They're at about 5% now.)
We should do this, without ever mentioning politics. The conflict with Israel should be ignored utterly. "Our sole concern is global public health, and this is a project where we can contribute to that." should be the answer of every PM, Minister, bureaucrat, doctor, nurse, and janitor connected with it.
Without saying a single word about Israel, we could speak with actions, instead of words, for once. Normally, you can only speak with bullets, or with dollars - dollars that can be called "support for", absolutely anything the beneficiary is doing, including "terrorism". But if you just give vaccine doses, nothing else, it's safe from all attack. The attacker just hurts their position.
(I had been thinking of recommending that every Canadian in the project reply to political questions, or will-this-cause-conflict-with-Israel questions, with a "Oh, is there some conflict in this region? I don't follow the news. I'm just here to vaccinate"... but the region is not noted for its sense of humour.)
America is already working hard to forget January sixth. It's quite forgotten it tortured anybody, that it bombed water treatment and power plants in Iraq, not to win the 1991 war, but to "create postwar leverage" against the cholera-and-typhus-ridden civilians. (Harvard estimated the death toll at 177,000.)
But Palestine is a part of the world where things are not forgotten. Let's do something they'll never forget.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxpalestine
June 9: BC Bows to Quebec. Shame!
Well, our vaccination rate fell off a cliff, yesterday. It had been trending down slowly, but then more quickly last week, from 0.7%/day to 0.6% over the weekend, then this jump down to 0.36% in one day.
This may just be the second-doses clogging the clinics and forcing them to schedule later. The total shots done yesterday were still nearly 50,000. I'm just not sure, because there was a day when they did 70,000, so I think the capacity is there. I've been waiting for a decline as we went past the points where UK, USA, and Israel had the lineups dry up.
Unlike the USA and UK, which have had terrible pandemics and probably have 30% of the population already immune from exposure, BC has only had a few percent of the population immunized through catching it. We really do need that 70% minimum, preferably 75%, or a Fall Wave is going to come.
The "abundance of caution" principle is really being applied to children under 12 - vaccinations for them are apparently not expected until 2022. It's so crucial for all parents that school go back in, in person, all the time, in September. All the parents I know, are at the end of their rope. So we have to protect those kids with a surrounding 90% of the population that's over 75% immune, between the Vax and the Virus, or we're all screwed.
Bring on the lotteries. Get Ryan Reynolds to give out autographs at Canada Place, with one shot in 10,000 awarded a crowd-scene walk-on in the next Deadpool movie. Free joints! Concert Tickets!
Oh, and I didn't get to the worst of it: Quebec is beating us. We touched their numbers, just one day, now they've pulled way ahead on vaccination, and are beating the whole Rest of Canada. So we need the Canucks, and other hockey teams, pointing out that we're all being beaten, by Quebec.
Maybe that'll work.
Addendum, 3:39 PM
Today's rate was "up" to 0.38%, while Quebec is still doing over 0.5% per day; we'll never catch them now. I went to BC Place, and it has a lineup. Nobody seems sure whether actual first-dose bookings are down that sharply, or just delayed by the second-dosers competing for slots. We really need the public health people to acknowledge the issue and bring on the incentives.
http://brander.ca/c19#bcbad
June 8: In Defense of Jason Kenney
Jason Kenney has been busted for running a red light at 3AM. Have we all done that? I have. I don't mean just driving through at speed, I mean stopping, looking with boredom down an empty cross-road, then just starting the car again and continuing, nobody in sight.
That's still a crime. A cop who did see it would have to bust me. Not because I created any risk of an accident, but because if I saw the cop not react, I'd think it was OK to run red lights. Cops have to enforce the law.
This is the key of the pandemic-restrictions-resistance problem: we say the rules are there to protect you from disease, and we enforce them because they're rules, people have to respect rules, or they don't work at all. We force people to obey them when they're clearly idiotic (the golf-course thing in Ontario is almost comically bad).
There was no significant transmission risk in that meeting - obviously! Nobody's even talking about that. Outdoors, up in the higher wind speeds, Kenney Klowns are either distant, or not facing each other as they speak. I'd have cheerfully sat down in that wide space at the back, next to the Jamesons, at least long enough to drink one, with no concerns.
But they broke the rules - when their job is to be leaders, to show how it's done. It's most important, because the rest of us have to obey stupid rules. Stupid rules are the ones that need the most leadership! You don't need leaders, TV campaigns, and police enforcement to make people not put their hands on hot stoves.
As the cases go down, and the risk declines, the rules effectively become stupider and stupider. I'm wearing a mask in a large, empty pet food store, save for one employee in a mask and behind a plastic shield at the counter. And we're both vaccinated. I know that my mask is as pointless as Jason breaking up that meeting into three tables. But, if I don't follow the rules, if I make up my own, others will make up their own, in situations where transmission really is possible, and cases would stop going down.
We just need a few more weeks of them going down - and another 10% vaccination.
So, having defended his rational risk analysis as quite correct, I still agree, for his dereliction of leadership: off with his head!
http://brander.ca/c19#kenneydef
June 7: A Dose in the Arm is Worth Two in the Experiments
Yes, if I had time, I'd be up to be a medical experiment. Or, I would have happily tried longer between-dose intervals.But. I've committed to something even those asking me can't be sure will happen, a vacation for them starting at the end of June, and they need a dog-sitter. And of course, I'm burning to go to Calgary and help out various friends and relatives I haven't seen in a year and a half. So when this hit:
...I realized my best move was to get that shot ASAP. My highest risk in months will be going to Calgary and seeing several people. My risk is most-lowered by being that full three weeks past a second shot by then. I'll be doing that, three weeks from today, as it happens.
With luck, I'll be in by my "10th-week-anniversary" this Thursday, close enough to the 12-week studies that showed it actually improved resistance compared to three weeks. And 17 days is about the point where others showed you have over 80% of the benefit at 21 days.
As much safety again would come from my environment simply having way lower cases and lower positivity rates over the next three weeks. We still have some work to do, and I'm on pins-and-needles that today's announcement of 3 days of data for BC, reassures me that we're back to an R below one. Let's just do that, get our second shots, and have a great summer.
http://brander.ca/c19#my2nd
June 6: Canada at Forefront of Sewer-Tracing Studies
CTV News this morning has an article about tracking COVID back through sewer networks, with a link to the peer-reviewed study from U of T and University of York (also linked from their graphic at left).
The advance they discuss at length is moving forward to the badly-needed next step: 7x24 monitoring of a set of chosen, far-downstream sewer manholes, with automatic alarms when COVID is detected. Then, the field work begins: working upstream from that manhole, a network search. They calculate the number you'd have to monitor permanently, so that a given search takes only one work-day. It's astonishingly small! (And therefore, affordable, the crucial engineering criterion for a project greenlight.)
The article is not that long, and accessible to the lay reader, particularly if you skip the bit in the middle with the math for faking up research data to study, by creating a randomly-generated network. The American town they worked with doesn't have a connected-network database map of their sewers.
Calgary does; I helped build it. The real work was done by the Drafting group, which faithfully recorded the direction-of-flow (that being "down" with sewage, there's a whole saying about it) and end-manholes of every sewer main since 1985. I merely built the SQL database on top of their work, 20 years later, and was able to do tracing through it for about the last 8 years.
"Upstream tracing" of a tree network (like a sewer) is a classic computer-science problem, given out to second-year students as an exercise. I was learning it about the time the draftsmen started storing manhole numbers in their new CAD computers. Twenty years later, I applied it to the sanitary and storm networks, and it worked perfectly within hours. At right, a click on the point where the storm network dumps multiple blocks of street catch-basins into a storm pond, and it traces through all the upstream mains and turns them red.
The computer then can also show a list of every main upstream...and every sewer service line, complete with building address. Calgary has had this capability since about 2013. I was doing regular traces of huge areas - 2000 pipes serving the whole downtown, say - just to check the integrity of our data. If there was a green pipe left in the downtown, it was because the pipe wasn't properly "connected" to the rest of them, in its database record.
So, Calgary, and by now other cities, I'm sure, can directly implement the ideas in this paper. Calgary could be monitored, 7x24, for signs of COVID anywhere in town, and the source-pipe tracked down within a day, by service personnel working their way up the tree with their laptops, or even their phones.
We read just this morning that a WHO official believes that eradicating COVID is not a "reasonable target", so we'll have many years to come where COVID is "absent", except for constant little outbreaks that have to be quelled.
If this system can even provide a day's earlier smackdown efforts, it could halve the number of cases.
Every city should install such a system. It's as cheap a health-monitoring system as can even be imagined. And if every city has to pull up their socks and get a proper sewer NIS (network information system) database as well as a GIS, then they should have done that already. Like Calgary.
http://brander.ca/c19#sewersensors
June 5: Victoria/Victoria: Take Warning
A dozen articles like this one are calling Canada the 'race of vaccines versus variants'; and vaccines might just do it despite our behaviours, but I'm nervous.It's a week since I was envying and studying Melbourne, because I was sure that their instant, very hard, lockdown, combined with awesome contact-tracing powers, would crush their outbreak in its cradle.
I was unaware that there was a second India-origin variant, this morning named "Kappa" by the WHO, and the "Modi Misery" by CCCC. Even worse? The whole state of Victoria just extended the lockdown; six more cases slipped through the lockdown on Wednesday. That excellent contact-tracing is verifying that people can catch the Modi Misery from "fleeting encounters".
While our vaccination rates are still high, higher than any other large country's by the time they passed 60%, there are signs of decrease. I think we'll make that supposedly-crucial 70%, but epidemiologists were clear that was barely enough, against the original, much less the "fleeting encounter" virus.
My nerves mainly arise, though, from how the BC new-cases number has stopped falling. Four days in a row with basically the same number is no blip. Yet, the media keeps spinning it as a positive, "Fourth Day in a Row Below 200", when it's four days in a row between 180 and 200. And it's clear everybody is feeling frisky, emboldened by the recent drops and soaring vaccinations.
We could still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, if our Victoria doesn't heed the warnings from their Victoria.
http://brander.ca/c19#vicvic
June 4: Fight the Fascist Flu
There needs to be a third side of this debate. One side wants to promote racism in a very sly way, by heaping blame upon entire countries, which of course just means whole peoples. Bluntly, if "Wuhan Flu", "Kung Flu", and "China Virus" were to only cause anger and condemnation of the fascist, racist, Uighur-and-Tibetan-killing, own-people-oppressing, leaders of the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China...I'd use them myself. But, of course, they don't work that way, they get fourth-generation Vancouverite senior citizens pushed to the sidewalk.
Location Name WHO name New Name CCCC Name Wuhan COVID-19 COVID-19 Xi Virus
UK (Kent) B.117 Alpha BoJo Bug
India Don't care anymore Delta Modi Malady
The other side doesn't want to blame a single soul, wants utterly neutral terminology: alpha, beta, gamma, delta. (Your mnemonic: India looks like a Delta).
But there are people to blame for variants, and I'm happy to heap blame on one Chinese dictator for the original. (It's just another variant these days, too, since it's now in the minority.) These leaders run at quasi-fascist regimes, even if elected; they at least partially meet the definition, of popularity through sexism, racism, and religious bigotry against scapegoat groups; violent suppression of opponents-as-traitors; incessant lying; chest-thumping their own personality cults. The pandemic brought out a common fascist trait in them all, flagrant lying about inconvenient reality, the worst pandemic response possible: denial it existed, denial it was serious, denial that proven public health measures worked, promotion of "herd immunity" that science showed to be a mass-murdering fantasy.
Not in the table: Beta, from South Africa. Leader Cyril Ramphosa is a far from perfect leader running a far from perfect state, but his pandemic performance has won wide praise, doing very well with very little money. Beta did not arise because they let the disease go out of control, were reluctant to lock-down, despite their grinding poverty. They had a bad second wave, quickly controlled. It was just bad luck.
The other variants, we could literally have done without, could have escaped, save for terrible leaders brought to power through lies, demonization of immigrants, appeals to racist concepts of patriotism (and religious bigotry, in the case of Modi and Xi).
If we get a fourth wave in fall, because the Modi Malady overcomes our counterattack, say its name.
http://brander.ca/c19#fascistflu
June 3: British Columbia and Canada: Champion Vaccinators!
I've been aching to write this post for three days, because I could see it coming, but it doesn't do to count one's vaccinations before the needle sinks home.
Of course, the party could have stopped at any point, too: Israel was vaccinating at nearly a percent per day in late February; two weeks and five percent later, the clinics were like ghost towns. They finally made it to 63% this morning, six weeks after they reached 62%. It's over.
The USA and UK slowed down over a longer period, and are still vaccinating at a little over a percent per week, but there's no chance of Mr. Biden's "70% by July 4" plan, not at 50% today.
These percentages will all leap up when shots for children under 12 are approved. About 10% of the population, and if most get it, that'll be several percent in a few weeks, across most nations.
For now, though, Canada surpassed the UK a few days ago. The only nation with a population greater than Hamilton (~500K) that is more-(first dose)-vaccinated than Canada is Israel. If you take the CCCC political position that Israel has a moral, if not legal (Oslo Accords) responsibility to vaccinate Palestine, then Israel is actually well under 50%, and Canada is Grand Champion World Vaccinator, Non-Tiny-Nations Division. (Gibraltar is 116% vaccinated, with 77,000 people done, because they vaccinated Spanish day workers.)
The upper-left graphic shows that BC is really the Champion Vaccinator for Canada, (non-tiny division: territories under 100,000 people are excluded). At least, every afternoon. When I went to grab the graphic this morning, we were back to second-place, behind Quebec, because they report first thing in our morning, BC late in our afternoon. We've been creeping up on them by a quarter-percent per day, or so, and at this rate, we be far enough ahead to stay there all day at some point into the weekend. Quebec will be ahead in the 'race' all weekend, because BC won't report for 3 days; but on Monday, we'll take the lead and stay there. A day or two later, Canada should be ahead of Israel by any reckoning, Premier on the Planet.
So far, there's only a slight sign of Canada falling-off in vaccination rates. I've been expecting us to follow the pattern of USA and UK for weeks now, and it's simply not happening. I could do a whole post on that, for real number nerds, and may, especially if we just keep going.
I sure hope.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxmax
June 2: Good Story on the Wuhan Lab Theory in The Tyee
If you want to read a really proper pandemic blog, by a lifelong journalist (and a long life; hitting 80 this summer) Crawford Kilian, who knows how to run one, try his blog, "H5N1" which has been on the public health beat for some time. He's been in BC journalism forever, is a professor, and SF paperback author (which for me, is the most endearing thing of all).This week, he's added to the excellent pandemic coverage at The Tyee, with a simple reporter's reaction to the Wuhan-Lab-Leak theory.
By "reporter's reaction", I actually mean a lite version of a police detective's reaction, a judge's reaction to a story in court, an academic's reaction to a historical theory.
We disparage journalism (and so much of it deserves it), but the core function of journalism is still the same as science itself: get to the truth. To do this, every journalist, like detectives and judges, have to ask whether the facts "add up", whether they make sense.
Kilian takes more time disposing of the probability that the pandemic is an actual attack, and act of bio-warfare, than I could be bothered to, but I'm glad he expended 400 words. Because that's the only one I cared about.
My reaction, to the "accidental lab leak", here on May 27, is best articulated by Bill Murray, in Meatballs, 1979: It Just Doesn't Matter. (If it's been a while, take a minute for the clip; Bill at his best; I spent a minute fantasizing about drowing out a conspiracy theorist ranter with this clip).
One more time, I think it's China's fault even if not a lab leak. So the exact incompetent screw-up (in labs or food markets, or superstitions about wild-animals-as-Viagra) is boring.
But I wouldn't have taken a post just to point to another Lab Leak story. The article goes on to an excellent summary of good reasons why the UN and WHO are not trusted when they speak, not anymore: the stupid cover-up of UN Peacekeeper guilt in the cholera epidemic in Haiti. "The cholera outbreak in Haiti should have ruined the authority of WHO and perhaps even of the UN itself. But as it is a small, very poor Black country...".
And then there is more, about the origins of automatically assuming Asians are sources of plague in America, and a review of some early COVID history I'd only glanced at: the indications that COVID might have been around many months or even a year before, and a discussion of how badly the Chinese government needs to be seen as "competent", if they don't want to finish up like Mussolini.
As a bonus, go to The Tyee today, and see up front an article by Andrew Nikiforuk on the guy who tried to stop residential schools. As you read, note the complete lack of ads, pop-ups, and web crap. They're reader-supported journalism, and I'm supporting.
http://brander.ca/c19#tyeelableak
June 1: News Round-Up
I'm undecided between multiple news stories this morning, I think I'll just do a quick-hit on them all:
- BC Back On Track:
It was a relief and satisfying that the BC case-count did the same as Alberta's: shoot way up for just two days last week, and come right back down again over the weekend. No sign of a continued "bump" because of the minor re-openings last Tuesday. At left, the "R" value for BC, which hasn't dropped to Alberta's planet-beating lows of 0.63, just the 0.78 mentioned yesterday. The "bump" is working its way through the "R" calculation just as a temporary increase up to 0.81, which is still good.
- Manitoba Can't Do Much More:
"Manitoba doctors call for complete lockdown as hospitals reach breaking point" on Global News. Alas, the CCCC-method of calculating "R" gives a Manitoba number of 0.75, which is really good. The problem is that the plummet, from 480 cases to 336 cases, is just nine days old. The Manitoba ICUs unfortunately are a python with large pig to digest, a lump of cases that must make their way through the system, to home, or grave.
- Peru Couldn't Have Done Much Less:
The CCCC arbiter of Covid-Cup position, Worldometers, hasn't yet processed the news that Peru's death count is actually almost triple that announced. They'll handily "beat" the world with over 5000 dead per million. The country is not in the CCCC "major league" of course, won't be "graded" against countries that can afford modern health care. Apparently, part of the problem was an inability to do even simple messaging. Keep in mind that very poor countries like Cuba did so much better.
- I'll STILL take Astazeneca:
So I'll surely be offered both Pfizer and Ox/AZ for my second shot, with today's news about mix-and-match being OK. The one Spanish study even makes it sound desirable, as immune response may be higher by mixing as I'd hoped. However, if me picking Pfizer meant any chance of any vaccine being wasted, I'd take the Ox/AZ. If it means getting my shot before I leave for Calgary, I'll take Ox/AZ. If it means getting a shot a few day's earlier, I'd take Ox/AZ. The thing is, when the basic protection is very high, improving on that can't do much more good. It's just not a big decision.http://brander.ca/c19#newsroundup
May 31: Props for the Alberta Cliff
Belatedly, I have to admire Israel, if not for their foreign policy, then that they did finally produce that "cliff"-shaped falloff in cases I was expecting when they vaccinated at great speed.
As you can see in the cases graph at right, Israel was falling off very rapidly, when Purim Parties hit and the cases levelled right off for weeks. I was looking away in April, when the cases finally fell off a cliff, with a CCCC-type "R" of 0.64. (CCCC just takes 7-day average of cases, five days apart, and divides, to get a rough "R" estimate. I haven't heard any news about the "average time between infections" being changed from about five days.)
I had been celebrating the recent continued drops in the "R" value for BC. At first, it was something over 0.8, but over the last few weeks, kept dropping - that is, we were restricting transmission better and better, either through continuous improvements in behaviour (maybe) or the growing power of vaccinations, especially those "smart" vaccinations a month back, when they targeted "hotspots" and workplace outbreaks. Just before that "bump" in cases from the long weekend, BC had actually dropped below 0.8 to about an R of 0.78.
Then I looked over at Alberta, and holy cowboys, they were even better. Except for Israel for about three weeks there, I haven't seen a drop like that in any polity on Earth. Alberta is rocking the lockdown.
The evil, dastardly rodeo actually was only associated with the one infection! I wondered about that. It was a very outdoor experience, like the George Floyd Marches that infected few. More to the point, I think this shows that Alberta, actually Canada's most-educated province, actually has a solid majority that don't agree with the antics of a few preachers and activists. The Alberta cliff started too early to credit vaccination: it was at that "R" on May 14, when only 33% of the province was more than a week since their shot. There were some safe behaviours going on.
It's great to see that Alberta's "bump" up to 500+ cases a day for two days, five days after the long weekend, swiftly fell back to just over 400 and now under 400 yesterday. The "bump" was only for the weekend, it was right back to crushing the curve last Monday. Today, BC will give the three weekend days' figures, and I hold high hopes we'll do the same. (We need to.)
This week will tell if all this wonderful news will continue: will the already-started re-openings push R back up? Will our vaccination rates continue upwards when America, UK, and Israel fell off, right about this point? If the answer to both is actually "yes" (I hardly dare get hopes up), then when the Summer of '21 starts in 22 days, and it's going to be awesome.
http://brander.ca/c19#ABcliff
May 30: The Real "Population-Level Experiments"
When I first saw the phrase, I thought it was anti-vaxxer rhetoric; they're always ranting on about a 200-year-old technology being "experimental". (I don't wish these people polio, but I do wish they could spend an hour inside my Mom's head, worrying about her two kids in 1956, then another as she saw them vaccinated against it. I mean, our next-door neighbour, and the guy across the alley: my brothers dodged a bullet.)
You know who's doing the serious "population-level experiments"? The virus. It's constantly experimenting, not on individuals, but on the overall population, through its mutations, and now, hybridizations. Here are its experiments: "If I change spike proteins a bit - let's try a thousand different ways - do any of them propagate faster?", "What if I mix characteristics from two faster strains, will they find synergy and improve on both?". Well, that particular series of experiments just found a winner (for the virus) in Vietnam.
An admission, before I start with the ranting: I joined the many who experessed great concern about the P1 variant from Brazil, but it seems to have been contained well-enough to have not taken over the world. It's good to be concerned, bad to panic. Maybe the Vietnam Hybrid won't be much worse than our current problems.
The new hybrid may cause terrible problems around the world, certainly in unvaccinated countries. If one of these "experiments" turns out to not just be more-transmissable (which evolution will tend to press for) but more deadly (which would just be bad-luck), the world could lose many millions.
The connection is that the virus gets to keep on doing population-level experiments until we take its toys away: the populations it's experimenting with all need to be vaccinated. If we just vaccinate the First World, the virus still has a massive, 5-billion-person lab to play in, until it figures out how to come back, and kill us anyway.
So, far, its experiments have turned up faster-spreading, and we have heaved sigh after sigh of relief that one variant after another is still fairly suppressed by our current vaccines. If we let it keep experimenting for another year, it may well crack that research problem.
We need to vacciate the whole world, or we won't be safe from the real Mad Scientist.
http://brander.ca/c19#poplevel
May 29: The Price of the Long Weekend (Statistically Happy, Though).
Alberta's cases were almost in free-fall; dropping at several percent per day. Our "R" value was dropping below 0.8 into the high 0.7s, the shrinkage-rate improving, even. Then the last days of the week went: 289, 250, 378(!), and 317.Daily numbers can go down and up: if the next day had been again, about 250, or a little more, instead of dropping, that would have been unsurprising. But a jump-upward of 30% from the even the 289 of day before 250, was clearly because five days earlier, the Saturday of the long weekend had some socializing and other activities that caused maybe a hundred extra cases, compared to previous Saturdays.
BC has over a million households; if 1% of them - 10,000 - had held BBQs, and 1% of those caused one extra case each, that's all the explanation needed.
The 317 of yesterday was also up about 30 from where the trendline would have had it. (I'm estimating very casually here; again, the CCCC superpower: it's irresponsibility.) Those 130 cases will have secondary cases; even an "R" of 0.7 means another 90, and those have tertiaries. I think I'm really compensating for the casual estimation, with conservate rounding-down, to say the long weekend cost us an extra 200 cases or so.
Which means a life. The vaccinations of the old have dropped our case mortality rate from over 1% down to about 0.5% - 200 cases, one dies. We don't know who died for our long weekend. He'll just be one of many that week, it might be any of them that would never have caught it.
Stalin probably never uttered the line, that "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic." But here, we have the death of one man (most likely male, and over 70) as our statistic. He's still with us, won't die until mid-June - if he's a tertiary infection, he hasn't even caught it yet, still blissfully healthy. Sorry you're going to die, buddy.
There's at least one more in Alberta, whose case-counts this last few days were: 452, 387, 390, 512, 513...clearly up a hundred on Thursday and Friday, each. Another death.
But you know something? It's absolutely typical and normal. The long weekends always killed a few people with traffic accidents. It was a routine Tuesday morning news report, the long weekend traffic deaths, several times per year. Traffic accidents, industrial accidents, vaccine accidents, just the prices we pay for the benefits of modern technology, transportation, medicine, good jobs.
Or even a good weekend.
The 3-day report on Monday will tell us how expensive it was in total, but I suspect that the above "bump" in cases, is about it. The larger picture - the statistics Stalin would notice - is looking good, so tomorrow's post will be positive.
http://brander.ca/c19#weekendcost
May 28: Envying Melbourne. Studying Melbourne, for Next Time
I wanted Friday data before I breathed out that the long weekend didn't cause a spike. Since yesterday's numbers, the usual five incubation days after Saturday, abruptly jumped up 50% from the day before, I know I need it. That post will have to await tomorrow.
In the meantime let's all just envy the every-single-person contact tracing they've already done in Melbourne to stop their outbreak. From the news last night, the "15 cases" of the link are already 26. They've traced out some 10,000(!!) contacts-of-contacts-of-contacts already, getting them all tested. Compared to our tracing system, they're awesome.
At right, the graphic from the story showing how the public health has not only done the trace out through multiple connections, but revealed all to the papers, though with privacy for the patients.
Consider that they just did a hard, severe, stay-home lockdown on seven million people, based on five cases when they did it. That's how you respond to this thing. You have to move fast, and you have to really restrict, hard. Then it can be brief.
10,000 contacts traced in sixty hours, about forty waking hours? They must have dozens of people working the phones all day. That sheer effort means they have a high probability of running them all down in days, getting them quarantined and tested, being able to end the lockdown, early next week.
That's what every country needs to do, next pandemic. It needs to be the policy. It needs to be a standard operating procedure that a weak-kneed, ideological, science-denying politician can't undermine, any more than they could order a change of surgical procedures on kidneys.
We all need to study and admire and emulate how Australia and New Zealand and South Korea, and so few others, have handled this pandemic, for decades to come, and build a pandemic-response bureaucracy and body of practice that can't be turned into political pawns, next time.
Next time.
http://brander.ca/c19#melbourne
May 27: Of Course It's China's Fault. Not Important.
I'm baffled by the sudden concern over whether COVID-19 really came from a lab error, rather than terrible food-handling with wild game. Neither one is a really "natural" explanation, both are the fault of humans and their bad behaviour.
The food-handling, we were kind of used to, I guess, after SARS and MERS and others: we put up with China being a ruthless, murderous dictatorship that behaves genocidally towards Tibetans and Uighurs; with international bullying and crimes against dissidents abroad, environmental poisonings, with currency manipulation and cyberwarfare and industrial espionage, and...never mind. We put up with oceans of awfulness from China, because they make us so much money. Full stop.
What would one more screwup matter, after all that? Surely, it was an unintended accident, either way; they lost thousands of dead, too.
If it were on purpose, it's the stupidest "attack" in history. The biggest harm was to our economies, from lockdowns, though least to those who followed medical science, like Australia is today, with a one-week lockdown over 15 cases in Melbourne. (They've just found the hole was in the hotel quarantine system.)
But those lockdowns hurt China nearly as much. Their whole economy is based on selling stuff to our economies. The real underpinning of my "D-fund D-fens" post just below, is that the business model of war is failing, what with your opponent being your biggest customer in a globalized world.
Cui bono? Who benefits from the pandemic? Nobody. If it was deliberate, it was stupid. If it was not deliberate, it doesn't matter much what dumb mistake caused it. They probably need both: better food-handling, and end to the superstitition that wild animal parts are some kind of Viagra, and, also, great care in disease labs. That said, I'm happy to see China beaten like a gong, see the second paragraph.
The guy you'd really suspect of doing it deliberately are all the lukewarm "socialists" that have been proven right about everything they've been saying for so many years. I just can't figure out how Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn did it.
I will be posting late afternoon tomorrow. I'm afraid to really believe in how good the case-counts have been so far this week, after a long weekend, and don't want to post on it without two more days of data.
http://brander.ca/c19#chinasfault
May 26: Income Inequality, Vaccine Inequality
State or Province by Percentage with 1 Vaccine
It's been over a year since I mentioned The book, "The Spirit Level" in a CCCC post. Confession: I had the book, then, and really meant to read it soon, but I just got around to it the last week.
It really is excellent. It's full of graphs, but they make them a quick-glance by not including any numbers at all; each just shows that just about every bad thing, from teen pregnancy to bad health to crime and punishment, goes up with income inequality. The richer people do worse in income-inequal places, too; it infects the whole of society.
I thought to see how vaccination percentages for a state or province related. I'm pleased to note that American vaccinations don't just track with average state income. There's a relationship there, but not a strong one.
What you really notice is that the vaccine rollout has been much more even across Canada. I have rudely excluded PEI from my red box around the Provinces, because PEI is just 140,000 people that hardly had a pandemic. I think their case-rate peaked at THREE per day, the equivalent of BC getting 80. They are being really good to show up at the vaccine clinic at all.
Even if I included PEI, then 40% of the US states are less-vaccinated than the least of Canadian provinces. Nearly 50% of them are lower than the other nine.
But also, a quarter of US states are more-vaccinated than the best Canadian province, Quebec.
Canadians have stuck together tighter in the pandemic, in every way. Despite the huge area, the great social differences, we look pretty unified, when you compare us.
It's really the US that sticks out, here. On all those dozens of graphs in "The Spirit Level", Canada is generally in the middle of the pack of developed nations. Better off than the UK and Portugal, (Europe's least-equal), not as great as Scandanavia.
On such graphs, the US is generally way out in its own space, far from the others, with worse health, worse prisons, worse obesity - by a distinct amount. The link above to my Spirit Level post shows one such graph.
What you'd probably find, if I could dig up the stats that "The Spirit Level" used, would be that it isn't so much average income, as the amount of income inequality inside the state that would show a correlation with higher or lower vaccine success.
The more unequal any culture is, the less trust there is, the fewer public services, the less public spending on anything good - like health systems. There is also greater mistrust of others, all others. People surveyed have higher percentage of saying they'd take their coat to the washroom in a restaurant, for fear of theft. Imagine the fear of vaccines - the ones that come from the government that pays cops to keep your whole neighbourhood down.
Canadians are showing a much higher surveyed intention to get vaccinated, and I'm hoping, this week, that vaccination rates per day don't slow down, the way they did in the USA at the 40% mark. Just think, every person getting vaccinated is basically saying "I trust my government to make sure this injection is safe". That's just a more-likely statement in Canada than the USA, and the next few weeks will tell, by how much.
America beat us by a large amount at immunizing her population by getting them sick and risking their lives. They've probably got a 20% "advantage" on us, paid for with an extra 400,000 dead, but we can catch up by vaccinating to 70%.
Which would be so great. Come on.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxinequality
May 25: A Different View From India
I noticed that India has really fallen from our newspaper pages, after all that agony and attention, just a few weeks ago. Less than two weeks since CCCC posted about the real death-rate possibly in the tens of thousands per day, but, once the case-rate finally went down, and the shots of people fighting for oxygen tanks had all been done, we looked away again.
Abruptly, it hit me that in the 21st century, I'm not dependent on our news. India has more English speakers than Europe, and the Times of India is a venerable and respected newspaper. Off I went, and I recommend it.
As you can see, the front page is NOT full of covid death stories; the big news is the appointment to the head of their version of the FBI. But it's not some cover-up, the Times subservient to the Modi government's insane deprecation of the pandemic. You can see, at lower right, the headline about "India seeks to restore image", and they have a whole Coronavirus section, like most newspapers.
Indeed, here I finally bothered to read up on the "black fungus" stories from India, which I hadn't, because it hadn't appeared here, and I was right. The story is about doctors wanting a study on how overuse of zinc might be causing the 8000 cases so far, not just overuse of steroids. It notes "India is already the mucor (generic for these kinds of fungus) capital of the world", with 70x the global rate. In short, this problem is small compared to 3,000 dead per day, and will not be reaching much farther than India.
I've been remiss in pandemic coverage: I often follow foreign stories without reading the foreign papers. Still adapting to the 21st.
http://brander.ca/c19#timesofindia
May 24: D-Fund D-Fens
I'm anxiously awaiting the verdict of the weekend: have May 24 social activities caused a "bump" in infection rates, even to the extent of just cutting down on the rate-of-decline? I'm really hoping to get to Calgary in late June...While I'm waiting, this is not really off-topic, honest: never mind police for now: lets just defund our defense department. Mostly, anyway, then re-build it with a lot of new hires. A lot more women.
Yes, the proximate cause of my ire is the excellent Canadaland Podcast on Military Sexual Assault. Do listen, (and do help Canadaland!), it's a grim tale of a bureaucracy that is deeply entrenched. The rot goes all the way to the top, it will, well, D-Fend itself from change until severe measures are taken.
Even cutting their budget sharply for a while, preserving the equipment, and firing a lot of the officer ranks, would be a great start. Listen to the podcast, if you want to join my vengeful, "times-up" mood. This is beyond your feelings on the actual issue, and goes into whether our military are respectful of civilian control. They can't become an untouchable institution, a law unto themselves.
But the connection to the pandemic, actually pre-dates this blog. I got the idea for the blog after doing a second pandemic essay, about the "COVID Cup", but the first was "US Military Kills a Million Americans", though I'm certainly glad they'll only get to 2/3rds of a million. (604,000 this morning, up 20,000 in the last month. It's not over.)
It's all about how the military get a trillion a year (literally, when you add up various budgets) to defend the US against largely imaginary threats, while the real threats to life and property: pandemic, and cyberattacks respectively, are all but ignored.
Canada could d-fund that d-fens department, which soaks up $20B a year right now, by literally billions per year, to fund public health with. Vaccine factories that do just sit there, if necessary, for "resilience", for next time.
We could also use a "battalion" of cybersecurity warriors. (Mostly, they'd work in concert with the private firms securing all our infrastructure and companies, providing communication, tools, and back-tracking of attacks.) No reason for that new military arm to be even half male.
The Americans are ready for more imaginary threats with "Space Force": the real needs are for "BioForce" and "CyberForce". They'd need very few military traditions and culture, but they could sure use those military-sized budgets.
There's no room here to get into a topic Gwynne Dyer has devoted whole books to: The Canadian Military have never defended Canada. It only needed defense once (1812), 55 years before we were a country. They have only ever fought for other countries, to maintain our foreign alliances. Chretien was smart and lucky to have Afghanistan to send them all to: a legal, UN-sanctioned war... and have an excuse for not going to Iraq, the illegal one, as our foreign ally would have demanded. Having a military now can get you into foreign trouble.
Iraq really showed the limits of what violence can accomplish in the modern world. What struck me as amazing is how much better the American war machine got for 20 years straight. Drones hardly existed in 2001, now they're incredibly effective, and they have thousands of them, to kill specific people they can find by surveiling every phone and radio wave on the planet. Their commandos are super-professionals.
And none of that made the slightest difference. They still lost! (As Kurt Vonnegut wrote after Vietnam, "Let there be a deathly silence as our armada sails home".)
If the mighty USA couldn't beat a bunch of rice farmers 50 years back, and couldn't beat goatherds for the last 20 years, what's the point of an army? Nobody is stupid enough to oppose us with armies any more, so we find ourselves fighting the wind. The US spent $2.2 trillion on Afghanistan alone; for most of the time, the war was costing three times the Afghan GDP. It would have been 60% cheaper to pay them to lockdown like a pandemic, let the crops go fallow, import all food. Think of that. The war was three times more expensive than the entire civilian economy. The 10,000-year-old "business model" of war is dead.
If they'd invested the $2.2 trillion, the interest would provide the current Afghan GDP, for free: they'd have Universal Basic Income. Future conflicts may be cheaper to solve with money and kindness, than paying for the defense gold-plated Cadillacs.
For instance, would Palestine have launched 4500 rockets over those evictions in Jerusalem, if there were a lot of goodwill circulating, if Israel had vaccinated 2 million Palestinians in the previous two months? Wouldn't that have been cheaper?
Having circled back to the pandemic, I rest my case.
http://brander.ca/c19#dfunddfens
May 23: Oh, BULLS#!T, Brian!
How full of it is Brian Pallister? If you just read the lead paragraphs, or just catch the TV news 3-minute story, you might think he's not completely full of it. It must be frustrating to be vaccinating away, (at an already-impressive pace of 0.8% of his population per day), and know there are even more vaccines just south of the border. Pallister claimed he could be going faster if he had that additional supply.
Credit to Pallister's opposition, NDP Leader Wab Kinew, who busted him by pointing out there were a mere 55,000 spare vaccines available in North Dakota, according to their own dashboard.
But Pallister is truly humiliated by his own appearance on our dashboard, at right. He's used one of the lowest percentages in Canada, (82.7%, second-last column) of the vaccines distributed, meaning he has 152,063 patiently waiting in Manitoba freezers; nearly three times as many as North Dakota.
He's been shipped vaccines equal to 68% of the population he has to reach. Alberta, just 63%, but they're two days ahead of him on vaccination progress. In BC, we've received a percent less, by population, but at 50.5% reached, we're five days ahead of Manitoba.
Wab Kinew probably has the right of it, saying that it's a "desperate attempt to distract". Pallister is embarrassed by Manitoba's new status as the worst hotspot on the continent, and wants to talk about anything except bulging ICUs.
Lastly, even his notion that he can vaccinate his way out of a wave, is nuts like a squirrel. Restrictions can get your R down to 0.8, many places have done it. That's a drop of 50% every 15 days. Super-fast vaccinations might reach 20% of the population in 15 days, and only the first day would be starting to kick in at the end of it, relief still weeks away. (Manitoba managed an R of 0.8 for the last week of February, the first of March, halving cases.)
Pallister isn't up there with the outright liars that have caused pandemic nightmares around the world. But his nickname is now "BS Brian" around here.
http://brander.ca/c19#bsbrian
May 22: Times-Colonist Covers Privacy Commissioner on Vaccine Passports
The name is starting to sound like an insult, but the Victoria Times-Colonist is still around. The link is to their story I haven't seen elsewhere this morning: the BC privacy commissioner has confirmed that the Province is exploring vaccine passport ideas.Wonderful.
Frankly, I want one of those QR codes. I might tattoo it on my forehead. The restaurant the other night hates menus (unsanitary!); they have a QR code on the table, and it opens up a Web PDF...just the worst way of putting up a document, of course, it should be a nice HTML app... but it works.
A bar or theatre owner should be able to grab my QR code and see from a reliable provincial database that I'm covid-safe. (Either vaccinated, or both positive and negative tests on file from the last year. If you didn't get tested, you can go get an antibody test and a negative test. Proof you've had it.)
The fascinating thing about phone-app based identification is that it could be a civil libertarian's delight. I remember a Libertarian surprising an audience with the statement that your driver's license should not contain your name: "What do they need your name for? They need to know you are licensed to drive, period. Being able to check your warrants for laughs is nowhere in the Highway Traffic Act."
Well, the QR code could lead you to (1) my photograph from two angles, and (2) confirmation of safety. No names.
We won't get that, of course, (nor do I care; obviously, any blogger is pathetically begging for attention).
But I'm so glad to hear of passports not being deprecated as some unfair social pressure on the differently-mentally-abled-about-vaccines. I'm sure that bar owners and theatres will be happy, too, because it was going to be much, much longer before I went to one, without them.
Let's get them going. We need at least a public-health order, and probably a law. Get going, Mr. Horgan.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxppt
May 21: V for Vax Victory
We nearly made it yesterday, at least for the CTV tracking page that had us just a hundredth of a percent behind America. Today, we'll breeze right past them.
There's not much 'yippie' in that 'contest', which isn't. One could only wish the US was vaccinating better, it's our primary source of infections!
Nope, the "victory" is the other numerical event to celebrate today: even as I write, BC is passing the 50% mark for vaccinations. Canada will follow by the end of the weekend, holiday and all. 21 US states will actually still be ahead of us, many may stay there. Vermont is at 66%!
CCCC should probably join those graphing their state vaccination successes against income inequality, income, percent White people, etc - Vermont is probably their Whitest state. (But Hawaii, their State-of-Most-Colour, is at 63%. It's not race. It's how race is treated there.)
Some places there may be struggling to get above 50% vaccinated for years yet, and others, around the world. I don't understand Europe. Why is Switzerland less vaccinated (28%), than Mississippi, America's least (32%)?
For a real harsh comparison between Canada and the US, compare the differences across the country: America varying from 66% to 32%, but - if you'll just except the North from the counting, because it has under 100,000 people - then the variance across Canada is from 42% to 52%. Our income inequality is less, but our vaccination inequality is way, way, less.
The big V-for-Victory as we pass 50% on our start-of-summer weekend is actually the first derivative, the direction, of our vaccination chart: it's still going up, faster than ever. We are past where America slowed down at 40%, covered 3 weeks ago. Since then, our rates kept up as we passed 45%, where the UK rate abruptly slowed. We seem to have appointment booking to take us at least to the 55% mark, where Israel suddenly slowed down.
When Canada slows down, is yet to be seen. We seem to be booking appointments like crazy, so far. Again, to repeat: the US and UK had very bad pandemics, courtesy of very bad governments: they obtained at least 20% immunity through infection, Canada at most 10%. We need to pass them, we really do need that 70%.
So, come on. Onward to Victory.
http://brander.ca/c19#v4vaxvic
May 20: Astazeneca Equal to mRNA, Let's Not Waste It
I'd still love to be sold off for medical experiments, like those Monty Python kids in Yorkshire, as long as the experiment was a vaccine mix.But recent statistical innumeracy has Ox/AZ in the doghouse, and I'll also stick my hand up to take a second dose of it, and leave the allegedly-safer products for the fearful.
This morning brings us tentative, but still great, news from the UK via Reuters, that Ox/AZ is 85-90% effective, upon a second dose, statistically equal to both Pfizer and Moderna. It had been imagined to be somewhat-less effective until this study, and then the clot issue really kneecapped it.
What a year for vaccines, you can't get over it. We have two distinct new technologies for making them, proven and used in the widest practice. Not that the old method wasn't still available; we're just richer.
When it really sinks in, that the risk is, once again, comparable to two weeks of life in Canada using our roads and risking "normal" injury and death from traffic, people may react the way they did to polio vaccine, exultant.
People used to be afraid of flying. The airline industry really put in years and decades of work, with astonishing success: speaking of traffic deaths, it's far more risky to drive to the airports, than fly between them.
If you look at the vaccine news correctly, even the side-effect reports have been good, because those numbers are so low; and the effectiveness reports are just spellbinding. Certainly this one.
The report also indicates that it might be time to start thinking about the second dose as early as 10 weeks, though 12 is definitely fine. Since I'm at seven weeks now, I'm eager to hear their plans for mid-June.
http://brander.ca/c19#azgood
May 19: The Other Way to Kill Palestinians
Israel has no legal obligation to vaccinate Gaza and the West Bank. It's right there in the Oslo Accords. Principal drafters of them do believe there's a moral obligation, and an epidemiological self-interest, but Israel doesn't feel like it, so there's been basically none.
The story at right, from Feb 22 by Doctors Without Borders, was published when Israel had already hit 50% vaccinated, eight weeks from scratch. Palestine is still at 5%, three months later. That was also the week that dying started to spike up in the territories, a few weeks after cases did, and some 1,500 Palestinians have died of COVID-19 in those three months.
Deaths go on, because vaccination is still not even started, and the war (offer me another word) will, as always, make plague worse. The number of dead from it will far dwarf any from military attacks. (The reported case-rate was down, before the new war, but I suspect the coughing has already started in those "UN Schools" that people are packed into, their homes destroyed.)
About half-way through that three-month period, the story at left came out. Israel did have this sudden fall-off in vaccination rates when they hit 50% in late February; by late March, the clinics were empty, the country stalled at 60%.
So, they just didn't pay Pfizer for the last 2.5M doses of vaccine delivered, causing Pfizer to withold the next shipment of 700,000. I'm not sure how that story finished, nor care. The point was just how much spare, already-ordered vaccine they had lying around. Who knows? They might well have gotten away with these recent evictions that started all the backlash, if they'd made heros of themselves by vaccinating Palestine. The whole war might have been averted, not to mention the 1,500 extra Palestinian deaths.
I have to admit that I'm looking forward to two expected developments by the early 2030s. We will have converted a lot of our transportation away from oil, the industry in decline, and the world need for Arab dictator oil, disappearing. Meanwhile, immigration to both North American countries and Europe will continue to be high from Arab nations, Muslims in general. Oh, and the percentage of diaspora Jews who approve of Israeli politics will continue to decline, that's a third development.
Where we'll be then, I can't predict, but my gut-feel is that we'll be capable of a more-honest foreign policy. Anyway, "just thought I'd mention", those 1,500 dead. Nobody else is.
http://brander.ca/c19#palestine
May 18: One Day, Two Round Numbers
CCCC has always been a little numbers-obsessed (it's a blog on the Spectrum), and its attachment to Worldometers is in the blurb. But it's been a while since posts about "OMG look what a large number have died" (a round number, or something worse than some war).But I'll haul it out, just one more time, because two of them hit on one day, by pure coincidence, and they're sure a dramatic comparison:
Canadian news announced our total had reached 25,000 dead, the same day that Worldometers showed 600,000 American dead. Slide your eye right, and they also passed another round number, on the CCCC pandemic score metric of deaths per million: 1800. This vaults them past previous badness-champions Spain, France and Portugal in recent days, and, as UK deaths drop to 1-per-million-per-month, while the US continues to rise by 1-per-million-per-DAY, they may actually pass the hideous Boris Johnson per-capita in Old Blighty.
Canada, mind you, has the same per-capita death rate, at present. But, we're an awful long way ahead: just over a third their overall death rate. (Far right column.)
Which is my cue to subtract the "care-home pandemic" from the total to get "community-only" pandemic. (Besides, we know at least one governor undercounted their care-home deaths. Was Cuomo the only such governor? Four of the last seven governors of Illinois went to jail. These are not trustworthy people.)
The American total up to age 65 is 113,651.
Canada, about 2000. Say, 17,000, American-population-equivalent. Less than one-sixth as many.
We have laurels, but no reason to rest on them. The American death-rate is slowly, but steadily going down, and they may not pass the UK if they can keep crushing. Canada, of course, went UP for two weeks recently, thanks to Ford and Kenney, and it won't even start to go down for a bit yet, as the now-shrinking-at-last Ford/Kenney wave is processed through the ICUs and into the graveyards.
http://brander.ca/c19#tworound
May 17: Just Avoid One Of These, and Get That Astazeneca
I will again be celebrating another excellent Guardian column by David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters, "How Big Are the Risks from the Astazeneca Jab?" by cribbing some of their data.Their column uses the now-prevalent figure of one case of blood clots for every 100,000 doses administered. I can't find some reports I read about a week ago, of a study that found blood clots as often as one every 29,000. I think the difference there is that they were looking for any blood clot, as opposed to those serious enough to cause pain and have recipient report a blood clot. So, the news is about the 1-in-100,000 figure.
Many of that 1-in-100,000 just go away, or require some treatment and hospital, first. Maybe half(?) cause real injury and loss, the most frightening being clots in the brain, and the most famous now being the guy here in BC that got a huge blood clot in his intestines, such that 2m of them had to be removed. And somewhere between one-fifth and one-tenth, either one person in a million, or two in a million, die.
But, we'll just talk about 1-in-100,000. And to give Astazeneca a five (or ten) to one handicap, we'll compare clot risks to death risks. (This is like having your local hockey team play the Canucks, by requiring the Canucks to score 5 or 10 goals for every one your team scores.)
You can undo your total risk level, by just not taking a similar risk that you're already taking.
If you are a parachutist, skip one jump. They all come with a 1-in-100,000 risk of death. Per jump.
If you ever go near a Canadian road, as a driver, cyclist, or pedestrian, stay away from them for ten weeks. One Canadian in 21,000 dies every year on the roads. (And five times as many are "seriously injured", so the real comparison is to avoiding the roads for two weeks.)
Skip plastic surgery, or any other voluntary surgery where you'd go under general anaesthesia. Risk of 1-in-100,000 per hour spent under.
If you are on birth-control pills, switch to another contraceptive, for a week. That actually is just a blood-clot risk (most minor), not a death risk, but it is one in 100,000. PER WEEK.
Lower your risk of getting COVID by just 8%. Twelve times the risk of getting a blood clot with the disease than with the jab.
We take a lot of risks. This is a new one, and focus on the "reverse lottery winners" can make them seem larger that those we are surrounded with daily, but they aren't.
The news needs to be telling these stories, along with the horror stories of lost intestines. And the government really should establish that "sympathy fund" that would not be "compensation". That was my most serious suggestion, yesterday.
http://brander.ca/c19#AZriskcompensation
May 16: I Can Quit Now, You Can Just Read the Professionals
I kind of hoped to quit around the 1-year mark, last April Fool's Day.
I'm still having enjoying it, blogging random outrages and fun ideas like yesterday, but the original conceit of CCCC was to follow the pandemic as a national game, compare national responses and outcomes. Alas, I knew I had only rough data, from worldometers.
I did write, early on, that excess deaths were clearly much higher than the "covid" figures, that we'd only know good numbers when we really did that math.
Too deep for CCCC data, and amateur effort, with amateur tools. But I've found my professional, that I'll be reading.
David Spiegelhalter is the best stats commentator I've found. He's chair of the "Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication", at Cambridge. He's been writing for The Guardian for some months now, and I've been remiss to take this long to find him. He usually co-writes with Anthony Masters in a feature "The Weekly Stats Uncovered", and several in a row are gems:
It's a full month since they published the answer to the great CCCC question, Which Countries Have Fared Worst in the Pandemic?. They link to a deep, huge report from the Office of National Statistics that just goes straight to the "Excess Death" figures for countries, since so many have different covid reporting systems. Deeper, they "normalize" the meaning of the numbers to how many old people the country has. Britain fares very badly, when you limit the statistics to "deaths under age 65". It's a better metric for how your "community pandemic" went, than only your "care-home pandemic".
They give a clear, explained answer to the burning, vital, can-I-rip-this-mask-off question Will Vaccines Reduce Virus Transmission? And oh, yeah, the answer is: By a Factor of Six.
We already knew it protected you 2/3rds from even being infected. Turns out it makes you half as infectious, when you are. It's only 1/6th the risk to have a beer with a vaccinated person as un-vaccinated. Bars take note.
We know from "The Pareto Pandemic" that 80% of transmissions come from 20% of the spreaders, that those gregarious types infected a dozen others. Vaccinated, they can still infect two, which explains why we need both herd-immunity, and restrictions while getting there, why 75% is barely enough to get R down to 1.
So, repeat repeat repeat: another month (or so) of restrictions, and get everybody vaxxed. The professionals are lighting the route home.
http://brander.ca/c19#spiegelhalter
May 15: When the Momentum Flags, Haul Out the Cash Rewards
In response to a reader question, I have to say that I'm an earnest, over-the-top proponent of free swag to vaccine acceptors. Economists agree: money, amazingly small amounts of it, will get people to things they wouldn't quite find the time for, otherwise.I'd thought of a budget of $10 per vaccination, just enough for a minimal cheap T-shirt, but consider two things: The cost of the pandemic, the economic benefits of ending it one month earlier, and the joyous, marvellous fact that Canada is currently vaccinating up a storm, bonus free. We knocked off nearly 450,000 shots, yesterday. The USA at its best was doing about 2.5M a day, equivalent to us doing 275,000. We're rocking. We'll only have to "encourage" the last five million.
The story from every other country, says that enthusiasm flags at the 50% mark, and we're about to hit it. I think we'll get to 60%, because I'm comparing to nations that couldn't vaccinate kids, yet, and we can.
But when we hit that wall, when the clinics go quiet, I want a budget of at least $20, of federal money, allocated to get the last 5 million done. That would take us from 60% to 73%, roughly, and as done as you'll get, since about 14% just won't, and the 12% under age 12 won't be approved soon.
I wrote my reader that we should be hiring ad agencies, pollsters, and the most PT-Barnum-like sales huckster Canada can find. I want a "panic", as in "panic buying". So, I'm all for the Ohio Vaccine Lottery concept, only much bigger.
$20 per vaccination would be divided into three lotteries (says the guy who is not PT Barnum, and is just guessing):
- $10/person would pay for a $1M prize for every 100,000th shot.
- Another $5/person would pay for a $50,000 prize on every 10,000th shot.
- Then $4/person would hand out a $4000 prize on every 1000,
- and the last buck would hand a nice, quality "Vax Summer 2021" T-shirt to every 15th person. Or nearly everybody, if we could get some corporate sponsors, the back of the T-shirt covered with all-Canadian company names like Loblaws and The Bay.
I said I'm not PT Barnum, but think about it: they'd be announcing a $1M prize at noon. Another in the evening. That's with just 200,000 per day. (We'd start the lottery when it fell below 150,000.) They'd be announcing the $50,000 prizes in every large city, and some small towns - every day. The $4000 prizes would be handed out by every clinic, every few hours.
I don't think we can apply it to the under-18s. I think, legally, it's probably still gambling in some fashion. Rather than risk a court-call on that, the under-18s simply all get T-shirts.
Panic (the good kind) would be drummed up by the immediacy: the prize would be handed out on the spot. This would be a computer lottery: with every patient submitted to the database, a random number would be generated, and you'd win right then, with full social-media coverage. (That system means the number of prizes would not be exact. Might be more or less than the average. Even more fun.)
This is what I mean by "panic", which did not have an original meaning of "afraid": Black Friday is the ultimate panic, the Fear Of Missing Out. Because we'd only let it go on for a week, before the PM announced it was just too expensive, we'll have to consult the cabinet, probably cancel it after the weekend. Monday might be too late to win. I'm figuring we go right past 450,000 per day, that whole weekend. Then, Sunday night after crowds demand the clinics stay open late, the PM announces the lottery will continue another week.
$20 for each of five million people, would cost us $100M. To end the pandemic, that's nothing.
(Of course, another $100M should be budgeted to offer "sympathy gestures", that would emphatically not be any compensation or admission of fault, to those who suffer blood clots or other illness from vaccination.)
I'm encouraged in this fantasy by an excellent article on CBC News just now, by Data Analyst John Santos. My God, it's so good when barely-numerate reporters ask a real data scientist to take over. Santos plys his trade of multiple regression analysis, picks out which characteristics really associate with anti-vaxxing. Conservatism is NOT! Populism is. The two have been much-confused in recent years, with Our Ford, and Their Dumpsterfire. I read about the anti-vaxxers, and thought, "Half these people are the kind that love lotteries." Convince me I'm wrong.
http://brander.ca/c19#moneymomentum
May 14: Keeping Up the Vaccine Momentum
I could hardly be happier with the progress on vaccination, the last week. All my family and close friends are now protected, including a 12-year-old, getting his shot today.If you're me, this little table is thrilling:
BC basically didn't report for two days last week, but the upshot for both province and country are the same: nearly a whole wonderful percent of the population - thus, about 1.2% of the eligible population - are coming in to get that shot, every single day. Six percent in a week.
Date Canada Total Vax Canada Last Day BC Total BC Last Day May 7 37.14 1.02 37.74 0.84 May 8 37.93 0.79 37.74 0 May 9 38.6 0.67 37.74 0 May 10 39.45 0.85 39.88 1.14 May 11 40.21 0.76 40.98 1.1 May 12 41.04 0.83 42.0 1.02 May 13 42.00 0.96 43.04 1.04 May 14 42.61 0.61 44 0.96 America is down to less than two percent per week. If we can only keep up this momentum - at a point where so many nations began to flag and fail - we'll pass them in another week(!) - after trailing them badly for two months.
America will keep the repuation of the country that can move out logistics fastest, get there "firstest with the mostest" - but Canada will be the nation that can enjoy the results better, because we have better people, better culture.
If Canada could only just keep up this momentum for two weeks, we'd pass the UK's 53%, and be the most-vaccinated large nation, save for the ten million of Israel. (62%) All the heavily-vaccinated places that have actually reached 70% numbers are tiny.
- Push it for children. They'll be able to play at will, you'll feel safe with them at school. And they have the least reactions to vaccines.
- Sweep through work campuses with stickers and treats Peer pressure is powerful. Where essential workers have to be present, hit each workplace with a vaccine "clinic" be it only a store with 10 employees. Offer injection, but also just stickers and swag, free corporate sweatshirts, anything. This has to be done in partnership with the corporation. They can't fire people for not being vaccinated, but they can make them stand out like a sore thumb, and not receiving small backpat awards. This stuff works.
- Jason Kenney Has to Fire People (See below.)
Albertans have been poorly led on this issue for months. Now, 18 Alberta Caucus members are doing negative leadership. They're also challenging their own leader, and Ken Boessenkool of The Line is calling for a purge of Kenney's disloyal.
Kenney actually has no choice. He looks very weak already. If he puts up with challenges without response, it's almost a resignation, because his threat of five weeks ago will be humiliated.
I feel like a sports fan, whose underdog team has made it to the finals, and I have so much hope that Canada can beat the world at vaccine uptake. C'mon, we can do this.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxmomentum
May 13: The Virus is a Harsh Schoolmistress
"We can do this the easy way, or the hard way", the old threat of superior force that says, "you're losing, no matter what, I can always just beat you up".We have such a civil-disobedience-tolerant society that it's actually a fun outing to have a demonstration. More-so, after prolonged confinement.
It's much harder to sass back at something willing to kill you.
I heard a story so horrifying yesterday that I hesitate to repeat it. I heard from a friend yesterday who's still at work, though he could have retired five years back when I did. He said that he worked with three younger women, all new Canadians from India, whose parents were around our age, well into their sixties.
All three women, he reported, had lost both parents to covid, in recent weeks.
I'm still wondering if I heard that right, if he got the story correct, it's so staggering. I've just written about how India is much worse than recorded, but here's today's link, a longer-form New Yorker article from inside India:
"It's a war zone," Laxminarayan said. "It's worse than what you're reading in the papers or seeing on TV. Whatever the numbers are, they don't tell the full story. The human toll is devastating." The current surge differs fundamentally from India's experience last year. "This is truly a national wave," Laxminarayan said. "It's not urban. It’s not rural. It’s not north or south. It's everywhere." He went on, "During the first wave, the poor suffered the bulk of the health and economic toll. Now everyone is affected. I personally don't know a single family that doesn't have COVID in it right now. I don't mean in their extended family. I mean in their nuclear family."In late April, after his dentist's parents both died and after a colleague fell ill and couldn’t get oxygen...
That explains why behaviour in India has changed, after all those confident festivals and rallies:
New Delhi is roughly as dense as New York City, with some thirty thousand residents per square mile. But now Laxminarayan passes just a few scattered people; almost everyone stays inside if they can, venturing out only in search of food, medication, or medical care. Before the surge, mask-wearing had declined, but now everyone's face is covered again. "You need public-health enforcement when the pandemic is invisible," Laxminarayan told me. "Now fear is the dominant force changing people's behavior."There you have it. Eventually, every population gives in to disease-avoidance behaviour. Certainly, they did during the Middle Ages, with no medical advice at all.
It's fair enough to cheer on the free-speech rights of pandemic protesters; as long as you remember that they are campaigning to have us become the next India. The notion that something is a "hoax" fades fast when it comes into your house and kills both your parents.
http://brander.ca/c19#indialearns
May 12: Vax Populi: Everybody's Gettin' It, (In My World)
My wife will be getting her jab, if on-schedule, about the time I hit the publish command on this. I spoke with three different friends of my age group in the last week, all had gotten theirs, so had children and a few grandchildren. The one 12-year-old I know is scheduled for Friday.I did have a few words, urging a reluctant neighbour in my building, but she got hers when the 'dreaded' Ox/AZ option was replaced with Pfizer. Only the two youngest residents of my building haven't gone, I think.
It's a little frustrating. I wish I knew more vax-avoiders, so I could do my bit. I suspect this is like those elections where "Nobody I know is voting Conservative" (shortly before they win). We just live in a part of a Venn Diagram circle that doesn't overlap with the other one.
I'm frustrated by the meek and gentle words of the public sales pitches, I want to browbeat and insult people, threaten career consequences, no theatres, no bars. (It's probably a good thing I'm not involved in sales, of this, or anything else.)
As I noted a few days back, we're right at the uptake point where enthusiasm started to flag, and I want to keep up the momentum. Here's hoping that getting kids in will help it stay in motion.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxpopuli
May 11: Can I Be a Medical Experiment? Pleeeeze?
When I was little, I subjected myself to a lot of medical experiments. Salt, sugar, vinegar, baking soda, green food colouring: will they give you superpowers?And now, I have the opportunity to be part of experiments that will benefit for the whole world, possibly conferring disease-fighting superpowers...and the experiment is at roughly the same risk level as my superpower formula.
I'm already accepting the risk of blood clots and any other negatives that Oxford/Astazeneca can throw at me. They're orders of magnitude smaller than the risk they prevent, we've been over that, repeatedly. The only additional risk I'd be taking is whether the two might have some synergy at causing blood-clots, which is very unlikely. It's very likely, though, that they have synergies in doing their main job of getting me to crank up some antibodies.
The big experiment(s) now are, can we mix vaccines?. Does it work the same? Less well? Does it work better? That's actually the most-likely outcome!. As the linked CTV article notes, this is standard practice, in vaccination studies where the problem is old, and well-understood. It's routine to mix mulitple vaccines together for synergistic effect. Since the Ox/AZ and mRNA vaccines use completely different mechanisms, the possibilities for synergy, and no interference with each other, are excellent.
Some of the experiments are driven by necessity, as with that article from Dhaka, Bangladesh, where they are considering mix and match out of a lack of supply.
Canada kind of applies, too: Alberta is restricting Astazeneca supplies to second doses, because we can't get any more right now.
Well, I say, screw that. Give all the remaining Ox/AZ in Alberta to Pfizer first-dosers, and second-dose us(!) Ox/AZ cases with Pfizer. Or anything else. Let's make Alberta, BC, heck, Canada, a World Centre of Excellence for vaccine testing. Let's not have more than 25% of our population get two same-product doses.
I'm so excited by the possibility of this doing the world some good, that I'd volunteer for a clinical trial where I'd have a 50/50 chance of being given placebo. It would be a privilege. (After one dose, I'm offering very cheap, small, "heroism": my odds of a really bad case of COVID are tiny. This is precisely the kind of sensible heroism to offer, of course.)
But, ultimately, proper clinical trials are mostly about maximizing the data from a smaller dataset. You could just try everything on a much larger group than a miserable 30,000, and find out how good all the mixes are from sheer large numbers, without any placebo tests.
I nearly cracked up LOL the other day, when a very old friend who posts memes to Facebook about four times a day sent me a link to the video: Dr. Lee Merritt Interviewed by a Health Ranger: Forced Vaccines Are A Holocaust-Level Crime Against Humanity!.
I only lasted a few minutes, because of the mentioned crack-up when she got to the part about them being "experiments on whole populations". Because, you see, the real experiment is the one that the virus is running: what percentage will survive me?. You don't have a choice but to participate in that experiment, because COVID doesn't ask your permission to infect you, like the nice needle lady at Super Drug Mart.
The vaccines give you the option to experiment on your body with a vaccine. (Or two!!) Or, to experiment on your body with a virus, and by surprise. I'm picking any door, except Door #5, Monty.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxmix
May 10: Canada Will Have to Vaccinate More Than The USA
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Reader Alan Beairsto gets the hat-tip for pointing out that the USA just hit the milestone of 100,000 cases per million. 10% of the USA has contracted coronavirus, for certain, and we know that the ratio of known-to-unknown cases is at least 2:1, may be over 3:1, even in advanced economies with lots of testing.
The USA is ninth-worst in the world on this metric, and the worst of countries with high incomes population over a few million. Canada rates far, far better, down at 80th in the world. I've included Greece, #79, to rub it in that it doesn't take money to win a pandemic.
Partly, this is about testing. For instance, you can see in the top chart that Belgium, bottom, has had 13% fewer cases/million, but, ahem, 13% more deaths/million, which of course implies they've actually had 13% more cases/million, too.
Not an accusation to level at Canada: we've had 34% as many cases, and taken 36% as many deaths. We really, truly have done three times better. Fifty thousand Canadians are alive because we weren't as badly-run as America in 2020. (We pause to reflect when people die, so take a moment to reflect on 50,000 alive.)
However, this means that a lot more Americans and Israelis are immune from surviving the disease. Maybe less than 10% of Canadians got immunity that way, and over a quarter of them!
So, we probably have to vaccinate another 10% or more of Canada, that Americans vaccinate their population, because they probably have at least that many immunized through disease. The good news, is that we seem to be on track to do that.
Vaccinations in Israel are already dead in the water: not even a percent more of their population vaccinated in the whole last month. The USA is clearly slowing, and struggling to keep their clinics busy. I seem to have stumbled into one point where their rate dropped, just doing the graph at left.
It shows both countries, adjusted so they hit 39% on the same day. That'll be later today for Canada, and was April 19th, for the USA. In dark blue, the actual vaccinations for USA, in orange, Canada.
What I noticed was that 39% was an inflection point in the American vaccination curve. The light blue line is drawn through the days after April 19th, the green line through the days before it. They cross at April 19th. The slope dropped, the USA going down from 4.5% gained in 9 days to 2.5% gained each 9 days. It's a sharp drop.
Canada, by contrast, hits the same 39% milestone at a higher rate still, some 7% vaccinated over the 9 day width of the graph.
Go, Canada! The two situations aren't entirely comparable. Doug Ford and Jason Kenney have thoughtfully supplied Canadians with a terrifying 3rd wave to keep them moving to the clinics, and another 3 weeks of time have allowed Canada to be first in the world to approve vaccinations for minors. So the customers will be plentiful.
Do your part. Urge people, shame people, and consider getting them drunk - so that they will get vaccinated on a dare. It's all good. Unlike the much-diseased Israel and USA, Canada probably really does need 70% vaccination. Let's do it.
http://brander.ca/c19#canvsusa
May 9: Do I Need To Say More?
Congratulations to The Tyee, article by Kaitlyn Fung, for spotting this clear fact from the new, more granular data issued by Vancouver Coastal Health, that at least indicates to the neighbourhood level whether the neighbourhood is considered a "hotspot" or not. (The story doesn't offer a definition. Hotspots are getting higher vaccine priority. Good.)
Alas, The Tyee only thought to publish a table of numbers, and not an HTML table, forcing me to basically re-type the thing, the cut/paste all mangled. So, I have put in a contribution here, graphing their data so that the picture slaps you in the face.
I don't need the thousand words, I trust, to say how clearly this pounds it home, that minorities and "frontline workers" are basically the same thing, at least to the accuracy needed for public health. We don't have to debate whether vaccines are deserved by the colour of your skin, just the content of your job, and it works just as well.
The degree to which White people have been sitting comfortably inside, serving the, ah, White Collar economy with "Zoom" (a dynamic name for a product used on one's butt), while our Blue Collar Workers of Colour took most of the risks, as they continued to do all our society's hard work.
The "Hot Spot" vaccine program is the first appreciation they've really been shown. It should be expanded. Go door to door. Anything. It's so deserved, and the situation so unfair.
http://brander.ca/c19#YVRhotspots
May 8: Searching for Good News
After India, I really need some. Let's see what I can find in the news if I look only for the good:
Alberta may finally have peaked in case-growth. The 7-day average was 2058 on Thursday and 2054 on Friday. 2054 is lower than 2058. Fingers crossed.
Maybe so have Alberta hospitalizations. This is odd, because normally you'd see hospitalizations going up until a few weeks after the peak in cases. But it's possible: suppose most of the recent cases have been very young and not headed for the hospital - older people having taken restrictions a few weeks back, more seriously. Fingers and toes crossed!
BC has the lowest "R" in Canada. Don't let those last two days of higher counts fool you: the 7-day average is still down, and in fact, the R of 0.9 that CCCC celebrated last week, is actually down to 0.88. Tiny differences in R are significant. Ontario is struggling at 0.93. Our 0.88 will cut cases in half in about a month, whereas Ontario would still be at two-thirds.
One percent of all Canada was vaccinated. YESTERDAY!. Now that's what I call good news. That month it will take to halve the case-rate in BC? We'll also be at 70% vaccination by then, if only we could keep it up.
Canada makes headlines around the world as the first to authorize vaccination down to age 12. Which makes us look forward, dynamic, scientifically smart, and stuff. But, mostly, it protects people and will help end the pandemic. That, too.
http://brander.ca/c19#goodnews
May 7: First Indications from India of Actual Death-Count
We have the problem ourselves, of course, and it cuts both ways: if somebody was dying of cancer for the last year, and contracts the disease from a nurse on what was already their deathbed, is it a COVID death? But if somebody dies of pneumonia in a care-home and never got tested - at the same time six others in the home also died of "pneumonia" - were they 'missed' COVID deaths?
In countries with well-funded medical systems, there's been both problems, but I believe those just looking at "Excess Deaths", months ago, concluded we were certainly undercounting our actual COVID losses, by tens of percent.
Then we come to a country without a well-funded medical system. It was eye-opening to see a horrifying story from India yesterday on a small, local, community hospital, where the staff had been instructed to run from their posts when the oxygen ran out...because without oxygen, the patients would die whether they stayed on not, and there had been multiple incidents of families assaulting doctors when this happened. The story was appalling, of course, but the eye-opener was the hospital. It was not temporary, tossed together for the pandemic; itwas what that neighbourhood called a "hospital". And it was what you or I would put together, if you gave us a worn-out strip mall and a dozen-odd beds from Ikea, an assortment of medical equipment.
So the official death-counts would be very low, even if the country weren't run by a fascist religious bigot that lies like, well, lies like a fascist: it's what they do. ("Democracy relies on shared truths, fascism on shared lies")
I've been waiting for somebody to count all those open-field crematoria, get a rough count of their business, publish some kind of idea how many people are really dying. All that real journalism had to be done across India, by many journalists across a hundred cities and towns, of course. The Washington Post gets the click, however, with this first article about it.
The graphic, from the story, is from the city of Rajkot (pop. 2M), some of 240 obits currently being published: Four times the usual number.
The story notes that nobody is releasing official statistics on all deaths, so the "excess death" phenomenon cannot be properly studied. Even the Post won't pick a coefficient, just demurring that "considerably higher" and "state authorities appeared to capture only a fraction".
This is a job for CCCC! This blog's superpower is its willingness to brut about rough numbers that real journalists would never commit to. So, we have four times the obits in Rajkot;
Cremations in Bhopal are 34-100 per day, with official figures at 10. Let's apply "CCCC math" and call that five.
In Agra, in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, the second-largest crematorium has also been handling 100 bodies a day, implying at least 200, if there's a larger one. Official count was never over 13. That multiplier is more like twenty. (A second Agra story implied at least that multiplier.)
The state of Gujarat, where Rajkot is just one city, reporters have indiciated they believe the multiplier is at least 10, between official and real deaths. Their story notes that doctors report being told to keep the count low; it's only a covid death if a committee rules it was. Any comorbidity makes it a non-covid death.
The multiplier is at least five, is probably ten, and may well be higher.
This, as we hit 4,000 official deaths per day. A real number of 40,000 would mean a million will die in the next 25 days, and the wave is so intense that 25 days seems a conservative estimate for the length of it.
Can some of this be applied to India's existing 240,000 deaths? Probably, though the multiplier would be much higher now, with so many cases not even reaching a real hospital. They've probably lost over a half a million already, will lose over a million more.
One can only hope it turns India away from fascism.
http://brander.ca/c19#indiaobits
May 6: Pandemic Crashed Canada's Immigration Almost Down to Biden Levels
It's funny how Canadian news stories about America's immigration controversies rarely put them in Canadian context. To us, they should be just little stories about a little project.
As a reminder, immigration crashed under the last administration, of course, particularly refugee admissions. Theatrically, Canada took in an extra 50,000 Syrian refugees early on, providing this sharp contrast. The photo at left is from Trudeau's "Welcome Home" at the airport, a ratings smash.
Biden is now hesitant as he un-does the changes, hesitated to lift the "refugee cap" (the very term breathes their reluctance and distaste) from about 15,000 to 62,000...admitting they just won't make it to that last number this year, too hard to do.
Canada is one-ninth their size. So, to keep the numbers easily compared, I will multply all Canada's numbers by nine henceforth, followed by "(AmEquiv)" for "American Equivalent".
Canada took in 81,000 (AmEquiv) refugees in 2020, during a pandemic. The pandemic really knocked us down. We normally take in over three times that, and have a target of 324,000 (AmEquiv) in 2021, so we can catch up a bit.
Our acceptance of those 50,000 Syrians...sorry, "450,000 (Amequiv)"...was an extra, on top of that.
As for non-refugees, America might take in a million legal immigrants, in a good year. Canada is aiming for 3.6 million (AmEquiv), going forward.
It's sobering to think that our crushed-down pandemic work exceeds America's best efforts in a good year. The funny thing, is that if Americans want to go outward into the world, invade somebody, that, they can find resources for. Declare an invasion, and they can drop $100 billion in a year flat, put 100,000 troops and all the materiel they need on the far side of the world.
This skill has made them poorer - $2.2T poorer, for nothing, in Afghanistan. Canada's superpower has made her richer. There are multiple economic studies now showing that, and of course our "livability" is better, usually the highest in the world. So much for the 'costs' of refugees and immigrants.
It's kind of funny to me that Canadian broadcasters covering these numbers don't snort at the end of the article and say, "62,500?
C'mon Man, that's pathetic"...and turn abruptly to hockey.
http://brander.ca/c19#immigration
May 5: Cinco de Mayo, Get Angry at our Treatment of Immigrants
What? Our treatment of immigrants? No kids in cages, here. But worse, we make ours work in meat-plants. (OK, in the States, they also go to meat-plants, after being let out of the cages.)
Cameras are not allowed, of course, but the movie "Fast Food Nation", available at your library, provides a simulation. The book, by Eric Scholsser, is also required reading. (But only for people who eat food in our society. If you live off the garden, you can skip it.) The image at left is actually from the movie, not real life.
Meat-plants are the awful dark corner of the free-market system. It relentlessly demands that meat be made a little cheaper, a little more, a nickel per burger cheaper, until the only way to do it is with human bodies abused by crowding and RSI-causing robotic work. Only the most-desperate will take the job. I recall when times were really good in Alberta, just before the 2014 Crash, an Olds meat-plant owner complained about having to hire actual citizens. He really preferred people who'd go straight back to Africa if they gave him any trouble. He put it just short of that plainly, right on the news. Nobody even pretends.
Well, the CBC has at least done some nice long-form journalism on our pandemic disgrace. Well, our other disgrace, after the care-home debacle. Two outbreaks, with death-counts. They let it happen again.
Ultimately, the whole industry needs reform. They couldn't do much except shut down the meat-plants (and shoot all the animals queueing up for them, in a line that stretches back to the animal's birth) and drive us all vegetarian. The way to make them pandemic-safe is also the way to redesign them from scratch, to make them somewhat humane workplaces in non-pandemic times. Less crowding. Better ventilation. Less speed.
I won't even start in on sick-pay, the dead-obvious stuff that the news has been all over for months. It speaks volumes that this minimal step is still controversial with goverment regulators. The government regulators, the CBC story makes painfully clear, are worthless. They were willing to let Cargill stay open, when Cargill itself knew they had to close - shortly before cases spiked from 326 to 500 in a matter of days. Worthless. Reform the inspectors first.
A culture that, in my lifetime, went from coffee being coffee, to having endless grades of perfection, and breeding, and "terroir", has already discovered upscale meat: organic; free-range; grass-fed. It's great the free-range chickens experience less cruelty.
Let's all be willing to pay more for meat that relies on less cruelty - and death - for human beings.
http://brander.ca/c19#getangry
May 4: Vaccinate Iqaluit. Today.
We could. The vaccines have just arrived for the week, and the Feds could absolutely tell the provinces that the expected doubling of Pfizer doses will be 0.4% light this week. Then carve out 8,000 doses and send them straight to Iqaluit. Military plane. Today.That's physically possible, but bureaucracies never seem able to do such things, no matter how dynamic and action-figure the politician at the top, would love to be. We can respond quickly to things like fires, but only because a "fast response bureaucracy" has been built to deliver it.
The problem, check your CBC News, is that Iqaluit has declared a state of emergency, as it scrambles to contain a major outbreak. They're at 85 cases, enough to put people in hospital and ICU..of which they barely have any.
This should provide clear warning about the limits of vaccination: Nunavut is already at 41% vaccinated, but it's not nearly enough.
The town is a mere 8,000 people. I bet, being in town, more than 41% are vaccinated already, and only 4,000-odd doses would get them to 100%. They are now doing studies of vaccine in children. Let this be a great location for one of those tests.
These remote, hard-to-reach locations are such perfect places for vaccination. Other small communities, like Gibraltar, the Falklands, the Seychelles have become the world's first truly post-pandemic places. Canada's North could join them. Starting with Nunavut, today.
Remember: if there's bad news out of Nunavut in the next few weeks, it's all because we didn't just stop it, when we could have, with one plane-load.
I wanted to write about the abominable situation at the Cargill meat-plant this morning, but it's as well the Iqaluit story caught my eye. The meat-plant pandemic has been so infuriating, that I need a day to save up bile.
http://brander.ca/c19#iqaluit
May 3: I Finally Lose It on Facebook
I didn't lose my cool in anger, but of suppressed need for sarcasm. I'm a naturally sarcastic person, needed decades to realize what a bad thing that was, and rein it in. (Mostly.) It builds up a need to vent some sarcasm now and then.
This particular Facebook post - a claim that India(!!!) was not really having a wave of death due to COVID-19, set me off on a total stranger I will never meet (with luck). I felt better, but I need to get that grip back. There's too much of this stuff to address.
http://brander.ca/c19#facebook
May 2: Unbelievable, Twice
They're interpreters, not translators. My relatives that work in the field smack me on that one, every time. Those who work on texts are translators; those who work live audio in real-time, are the elite, they're interpreters. It's like regular doctors and specialist doctors, they're a cut above.
It's bewildering that Parliament would treat them this way. It's beyond stupid. What kind of message do they want to send, this allegedly "liberal" government? That they agree wholeheartedly with Doug Ford on this issue?
It's an issue of employment standards and fairness, and an issue of pandemic safety, all in one.
But, beyond political stupidity, the sheer arrogance of thinking yourself not vulnerable. Parliament is utterly dependent on just 80 interpreters that are required for Parliament to sit. They can't do their job without them. So, they gave them, not permanent jobs, but freelance gigs, and told them they have no sick pay, no coverage for requirements to isolate.
The second thing that is unbelievable is that just 80 people can't form a union. No formalities, no union vote, just everybody walk off the job the same day. Parliament would be brought to its knees within hours.
I'll chip in to the strike fund.
http://brander.ca/c19#interpreters
May 1: Fascist Losers
Is Modi a "fascist"? Is Bolsonaro? How about Boris Johnson, who sold Brexit by basically promising to stop letting in so many brown people?
The F-word is not to be thrown around lightly. Here. In Spain, where I've vacationed for at least a year or so of my life, out of dozens of visits, my relatives use the term quite casually, and so do most of the Left (of various parties, they have a few on left and right, each). In Spain, they know their fascists well. They were governed by quite open fascists for decades, and are perfectly aware that the successors of Franco are completely fascist in outlook and opinion, restrained only by implied threat of force when they get power.
Can I take a note from autism discussions and just call them all on the "Fascist Spectrum"? The Faspecs, let's say, are the world's most consistent losers. When did they ever win a war? When the United States stopped prosecuting torturers at Nuremberg, and started learning from them in the Vietnamese jungle, they stopped winning wars. The nation of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib couldn't even beat the poorest country on Earth, not in 20 years of trying with thousands of drones. (Not saying they're a fascist country; but if the connecting thread of fascism is lies, then America's wars were started with them, and continued endlessly because they couldn't face the truth on the ground. It's pretty fascist-type behaviour...)
And now, the Faspec leaders are doing the absolute worst at the war with the virus. The United States was a global hotspot, when government changed hands, (to one that accepted the truth, from one who kept calling it a hoax), and the case-load plummeted that week. The UK has had one of the worst pandemics in Europe. As their case-load finally stops, we were reminded of that this morning, by this article about Johnson's charge sheet.
And then we come to Brazil and India, where it may not be possible for foreign aid to bring in mass supplies of oxygen, medicine, and equipment, fast enough to save even half the lives that their fascist leaders have as good as murdered.
The follies of Modi and Bolsonaro are now covering the news, no need to repeat them - I'll just note, that this morning, Modi's whole party is denying there's even a problem(!)
A lot of my political comprehension comes from one very defining book for me, "The Dictator's Handbook", by Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquite. The authors spend most of it explaining how dictators are men with very few choices: they have to be brutal thieves (who distribute the booty to supporters), or their supporters will toss them out for somebody who is. A later chapter digs into considerable historical record, about the Third Reich, to explain that fascists don't actually have the belly for a fight. Since they're in government for themselves, they run the moment a fight begins to turn, and abandon their countries. (So much for their super-nationalism and hyperpatriotism.) The wealthiest of Germany began pulling their money out soon after D-Day, and the German war funding shrank exponentially as they fled.
Modi and Bolsonaro will continue shouting that there's nothing really wrong, to the very end. Fascists cannot face the truth, cannot handle reality. Others will have to clean up their messes, and bury their dead.
http://brander.ca/c19#fascists
April 30: Revised and Heartening BC Vaccination Schedule
It implies about the same for Alberta: similar-sized provinces with similar systems, and identical per-person vaccine access.It's all from one article in CTV news, promising "every BC adult could get vaccine by mid-June".
I really have to snipe at Fraser McDonald of The Line, who baffled me with the criticism, "If this is a diversified portfolio of vaccines, it's not working great". It's just brilliant that we bought heavily into every vaccine product from Western companies.
At the moment, three of the four are not there for us. Johnson and Johnson is about to send enough to vaccinate 0.77% of the country, then nothing until June. Moderna has stopped deliveries, has no timeline for resumption. Astazeneca, exactly the same. Three out of four have failed us, at least, for May.
But the fourth is about to double delivery! That's the substance of the article: Pfizer is about to bump up Canadian deliveries:
Period Doses/Week, BC % BC Pop/Week Up to now 138,060 2.7% May 274,950 5.3% June 337,000 6.5% June - JJ? 40,000? 0.8%? We end April, this afternoon, with almost precisely 33% of BC's population vaccinated, a small minority of them twice. We only need to give second doses to 1% or 2% of the BC population in early June, as we were at very low vaccination up to four months before that. (We went from 2.5% to 3.5% single-dosed in February, and must give them a second dose four months later, in June.)
By Monday, the "start of May" in weeks, we'll be at almost exactly 34%. Alberta will be a smidge under 30%. Then we have four straight Mondays of going up by over 5%, over 21% in total, to over 55% on May 31.
Then, with luck, things pick up. If we're getting 6.5% per week from Pfizer, and nearly a percent from the Johnsons (I'm assuming the same weekly dump as we get one time this week, then it goes up to 63% and 70% on those next two Mondays.
And that's the end of the model, because nobody on Earth, in a polity of millions, gotten to 70%, yet. As noted yesterday, everybody hits vaccine no-shows at 60% at most, so far.
That's why they're saying that "every Canadian adult will have access" by mid-June, though they couldn't say that if everybody actually showed up. It's like a bank promising to have your money, knowing there'll be no run on the bank.
The revised schedule makes a great June possible. If every dose is grabbed up the moment it's available, even the variants will be on the run by early June, and the last of the curve will be crushed as we cruise on up past 75% by the end of the month.
That's statistically unlikely, given other places not doing it, but why not Canada, why not BC and Alberta, for the win? Urge everybody you know.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxbc
April 29: Will Canada Break the Vaccination Limit?
It's so heartening to see stories about people lining up for vaccine, making great efforts to get it.
The story, so far, from nations that have faster vaccination programs than ours, is not encouraging. Nobody vaccinated faster than Israel, they were the envy of the world. And the UK redeemed itself, somewhat, for incredibly stupid pandemic behaviour, by a remarkably fast vaccination program.
And then, they both faltered, and...just...stopped. Not because the governments were incompetent (for once), but because people just stopped showing up. And now, in the US, there are signs of the same thing, as they pass the 40% mark. (In the last week, a gain of 2%, from 40.6 to 42.6. The week before was a gain of 3%.) There are Americans skipping their second shot, even.
In Israel, business slowed right after 50%, was dead by 58%, has taken over two months to reach 62%. In the UK, it began to slow at 45%, has now almost stopped at barely 50%. UK vaccinations remained stale even as their infections soared past any previous peak, just last week. I don't know what to think about such stupidity. It's like reading that the new reality show is a stick-your-finger-in-your-eye competition.
I'm pretty contemptuous of the vaccination-promotion efforts to date, everywhere. I'd be advocating something pretty aggressive, involving major employers on TV, talking about how important vaccination is to their workplace, that unvaccinated employees may have to continue working from home, while vaccinated can return to the office. I'd have stories about how unvaccinated workers won't be able to do renovations for people, or go on construction worksites, how all warehouses and factories will require vaccination for on-site work.
I'd be requiring it for school, or a doctor's note explaining the medical condition,which would also go on file, so the workplace could protect that employee.
Oh, and obviously, politicians should announce that a major re-opening will occur the moment a province hits 70%, and Trudeau should announce a billion-dollar prize of parks funding to the province that reaches it first.
And I'm totally down with "vaccine passports" to bars, restaurants, and theatres. None of that forces anybody to get a vaccine, just like nobody is forced to get a social insurance number. So it's legal, which is all I care about. I have no interest in whether it triggers conspiracy nuts.
Screw them. They'll get people killed.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxmax
April 28: A Depressing History of the Next Nine Weeks
I'm a hard guy to please. The great news, clear a few days ago, is that we are for sure on the downside of the case-rate curve, as Alberta, Manitoba, and even Nova Scotia, are not, yet.The bad news is that we have enough days of trend to estimate an "R", and it's 0.9. I'll spare you the tan-coloured graph image from CTV, you've seen them before. It's point-nine.
We could have done better, Quebec is a very impressive 0.8! But, I have a grim suspicion that point-nine is the best we're going to do, because BC has never done better than 0.88 in the whole pandemic.
There's no news about more vaccines coming. It's unlikely that BC will add at more than 5% per week to the percent vaccinated. Rounding down today's figure of 30.72% to 30%, to be conservative, here's the next nine weeks. The cases/day are the 7-day average for that day, not the daily.
The calculations assume a drop to 0.86 of the last week's figure every week, at first. I lower that slightly as vaccinations hit 50% and the first real effects of it are felt. Then the R is dropped a little more every week for the last three; I'm estimating an R for five days of 0.7, a weekly drop to 60% of previous, at the end.
The other phenomenon I have to account for, though, is the sad fact, from the UK, and other countries, that even sane, well-educated populations seem to fall off on vaccination as their country approaches 60%. The UK has leveled off at 62% for some weeks now, and the US is already faltering. This is crushingly disappointing (even infuriating), but it must be accounted for in the model.
The depressing thing is that it's June before we are down below the bottom of the valley between our fall and winter waves, the point from which we took off in November.
Date Cases/Day,BC Vaccination% Comments Apr 28 883 30% May 5 761 35% May 12 657 40% May 19 567 45% May 26 489 49% Vaccine uptake slows June 2 422 53% Vaccines begin to reduce R June 9 360 57% R down to 0.8 June 16 337 60% Vaccine uptake begins to plateau June 23 235 62% June 30 141 64% R down to 0.7 It's really hard to read a fun June into this table. The weather will be pure summer, school will be ending, people will want to be gathering at the barbeques, but we'll still be spending the month, 50% vaccinations and all, getting the numbers down from 400/day to 300/day, which is still a rate from which you could take off to ICUs-full in a few weeks.
I hope this is depressing because it's pessimistic. Maybe this "vaccinate the hotspots, vaccinate the businesses" strategy will pay off big. Maybe the R-value will plummet in a few weeks. Maybe well-educated, liberal, not-much-lied-to BC will keep getting those vaccines and be at 70% by the end of June, and R down below 0.5 - down below 1.0 even with a re-opening on Canada Day.
One can hope, and I will. But if trends from our own past, and vaccination trends in several countries, predict our future, this, alas, is it.
In the movies, the "fix" is always quick. The snake antivenom begins to make them breathe easier while you watch. Even the movie "Contagion" started to move time more quickly when the big vaccine clinics started, the drama was about over. For us, the fight is a patient, wearying slugfest to the end.
http://brander.ca/c19#next5
April 27: The Vaccine Wisdom of Crowds
As one of my graph sub-titles says, well, duh. Hey, the regular news gets to fill space with boilerplate reports on the current hospital statistics (they must have an MS-Word macro that writes the story by now), so I get a day just reporting the obvious. But I'm doing it with statistical rigor.
This blog will have to end soon, not just because the pandemic hopefully will, but because it's all a single HTML file, now 396 posts long. The very first, for April Fool's Day, 2020, was about "You Chance of Dying Grows Exponentially With Age", and you can jump down there for the log graph, rather than this post repeating it.
The fun news just in, about the Calgary/Edmonton Battle-of-Alberta for vaccination rates, had a tidbit at the end of the story that made me perk up:
Vaccine uptake has ranged from 80 to almost 85 per cent in people over the age of 70, the numbers show, and between 54 and 77 per cent amongst 60 to 74-year-olds.I did a little interpolation with those numbers, and produced the graph at upper right.
...However, vaccine uptake in the 55-59 age group is just 41 per cent, 30 per cent in 50-54, 25 per cent in 45-49, and 23 per cent in people aged 40-44.
The vaccination rates don't quite go up linearly, there's a bit of a curve to it. If you throw out the age variable, and just graph the vaccination rates against the log-of-mortality as your XY, you get a very good agreement, an R-squared of 0.95, at left. You graph log-of-mortality, because that mortality goes up exponentially with age, so it's log is linear with age.
But, I noted that the graph of vaccination uptake was also a little curved, could it have a slight exponential to it as well? The "Wisdom of Crowds" phenomenon would suggest that, in statistically large numbers, people do have a strong sense of their risk level, and act to address it. If the risk goes up exponentially, the desire for vaccination should, as well. What happens if we graph the two logs against each other?
At this point, the graph is kind of meaningless numbers: no ages or raw rates left, just two logs against each other. But the meaningful number is the R-squared in the trendline. It's gone up from 0.95 to 0.98, which is significant. (The degree to which a prediction using the trendline would be wrong, has dropped by half.)
It's a pretty faint signal, I wouldn't write a paper on it, especially since my data are interpolated and approximate. But it's definitely worth a blog post, or an argument over a beer. If I could have an argument over a beer. Maybe after the vaccination rates pick up.
I now fully support frightening young people about COVID-19 with the most fulsome news coverage and overheated rhetoric about "they're coming in younger and sicker" that the journos can stand to write. I want those "young people" as worried as 80-somethings are today. It drives vaccination. Duh.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxmort
April 26: Good News From Brazil
No, really. Well, relatively good news. Since "Good News is No News", CCCC would like to be your source for good pandemic news, on occasion, when the regular media have moved on to cover the next tragedy.
Brazil is an ongoing tragedy, of course, but when all the cameras moved over to the pathos of India, they missed a remarkably heartening phenomenon: Brazil's cases, and soon, its deaths, were going down. Cases are down a good 20%, and deaths already down 15%.
This is so heartening, because the Brazilians are doing it alone. The government is not only no help, it's a hinderance. Nobody is getting pandemic money relief; they're under the highest-possible pressure to keep risking themselves to work, most were desperately poor before this wave started.
But they're fighting back, and winning. Brazil (and, now, India) must both remained quarantined, of course. But we must offer any help we can. Their fight against the virus is our fight against the development of new variants.
Brazil's beginning-of-the-end (we hope) gives us reasons for hope in India, itself burdened with a quasi-fascist government that lies incessantly. Even when "led" by such fools and swine, people's common sense eventually triumphs over the lies, and they fight the plague the way they've been fought since ancient times. Stay in.
If only Doug Ford and Jason Kenney had such common sense.
http://brander.ca/c19#brazilgood
April 25: New Kids on the Block?
It's a Younger Pandemic. HOW much younger?
Another Friday, another weekly news round up at the national statistics site, the one that had the data-glitch last week, where the number of people that had been hospitalized with COVID-19, Age 59-59, went down, so I could hardly show graphs with negative people. This week, it seems to be OK, and I'll just do stats for the last two weeks, versus the grand average for all the pandemic weeks before that, basically a year from March, 2020 to March 26, 2021.It is indeed a younger pandemic, but the graphs are not exactly shocking in their sudden leaps and bounds of young people flooding into ICUs and subsequent graveyards. The rhetoric on the news is not accompanied by numbers: I suspect, not because the TV news crews are unable to get them - certainly, they're able to get the same numbers I am, at least weekly - but because they don't look very dramatic. It's TV: they prefer drama to data.
The graphs below are very different from the ususal pandemic statistics, which focus on absolute numbers. The absolute counts of deaths and cases are the important metric for following the pandemic, assessing your risk. And of course, the absolute numbers of deaths have plummeted with the vaccination of the care-homes and the elderly in general. By March 26, that much was done, and the orange bars on the right of the charts reflect the new elderly-vaccinated pandemic.
Cases This is showing that the vaccines actually prevent becoming a case, at all. The over-80s are down from 7% to 2% of cases. Yes, they were only ever 7% of cases. The 70-80 gang that are mostly not in care homes are only down a little, and we 60-69-ers are barely down at all. The big jump in percent of cases, is actually the really young, the under-20s. But all of these changes are pretty minor, save the over-80 change.
Hospitalizations Hospitalizations, the same only more so for all the younger demographics. The change for the old is actually smaller than the drop in cases: cases dropped by more than two-thirds, but hospitalizations only by about half, for the over-80s - probably indicating that the ones that are getting it, are often not yet vaccinated, so when they get it, they get it full-force.
Still, for the first time, hospitalization doesn't just keep going up and up with age. It goes up and up until you get to the age where we've vaccinated, then down and even further down for the oldest(!) because they're more-vaccinated.
Where you hear "they're coming in younger and sicker" in the news over and over, well, the percentage of age 40-60 is up from 19% of their beds to 40% of their beds. The number of people they see with decades left to them, has doubled. A very slight majority of COVID-19 hospitalizations are now under age sixty: 52%.
ICU Admissions The drop in ICU admissions for the very old mirrors the drop in hospitalization: to less than half. The 70-79 have dropped somewhat, but the over-80s have dropped so much the 70-79 are a slightly higher percentage, as of everybody else: al l those younger than 80 are now a higher proportion of the ICU.
The "New Kids on the Block", of my truly tasteless title, is that those under 60 are now up to 44% of an ICU: not a majority, but up from 39% for the overall pandemic. Yup, it's gone up from 39% to 44%. That's why the actual number isn't in the news. It's not all that dramatic.
The undramatic numbers, if you're under 80, is that everybody is up a few percent, except the over-80s. Not a long story.
Deaths And, of course, we come to the end of the story with death, which has a less-dramatic drop than the drop in cases. The over-80s have gone from 69% of the dead, to 44%, a drop of less than half, when the drop in cases was by two-thirds.
But still, those under age 70 are only up to 28% of the dead. It is still very, very dangerous to be an unvaccinated old person in Canada. We have heard of so few "breakthrough" cases, where a fully vaccinated person gets a bad case (a few have even died, but very few) that basically all those 72% of the dead that are over 70, are all from the minority that are unvaccinated.
If you know people in that demographic who are holding back from the vaccine, stress to them that we may never chase away all the variants, that vaccination around the world is topping out at 60%, not enough to ever be sure. Tell them they have to protect themselves, that this is their life. It is.
http://brander.ca/c19#deltas
April 24: On the Downside, We May Not Be On The Downside
Alberta and Manitoba don't appear in the summary at left, because they're still going straight up in case-counts. Quebec, I really think is on the downside, down 20% over ten days of pretty steady decline.
BC, however, seemed to be heading down, then, two days in a row back up over 1000. It'll be into next week before I have any surety that the current restrictions are enough. I thought we were restricted enough back in February, too, but the decline stopped, we hung "on a shelf" at 400-500 cases per day, then headed back up, all in basically the same restrictions level.
As the sensible continue to scream for a "get to zero" approach, nearly every health system outside the Maritimes (and North) is so weak-kneed and tentative about every restriction, that we seem to be doomed to, at the best, a slow, halting decline in cases. And, at not best, to have people get "tired" and non-compliant, and not opposed, and to have the decline just go onto a shelf again, this time at 700 cases per day.
Folks, the vaccines are not the cavalry just barely over the hill. That particular cavalry is still stuck in traffic, and we shouldn't expect much for a month. This article is unintentionally pathetic, with it's title of "Canada's supply of vaccines set to ramp up in coming weeks, despite supply cut from India".
I mean, that sounded good, because all we've heard lately is 15M Johnson doses lost, India holding back its own output. So I eagerly clicked, hoping to read that we'd soon be at not just 2 million doses per week, but, say, 3.8 million, which would be 10% of Canada per week. (Well, 5%, since two doses needed, ultimately).
The actual facts:
With the cut in Moderna, nothing new expected from AZ or JJ, we'll be lucky to see the continuance of 2M doses per week, for the forseeable future. It's a month yet before half of them are "lost" to second doses, so our vaccination rate should go up by 5% per week. 33% by the end of April, and over 50% by the end of May. That's the point where the vaccines will start to make a real difference in transmission rates.
- The one-dose JJ product, 300,000 doses next week, not even a one-day supply, and then nothing until JUNE.
- Moderna is being cut next week, and it will accelerate "in short order", which sounds like the last two month's vague promises of "next month".
- Oxford/AZ supply from India is cut, and direct shipments from AZ itself are expected in, wait for it, JUNE.
- Pfizer didn't come up in the story. Presumably, they, at least are not cut, but we also can't get more to substitute. We can expecte 1M doses per week through May 10, enough to vaccinate 2.5% of Canadians.
For those next five weeks to the end of May, though, it's all about the restrictions, which are weak and timid for the problem at hand.
http://brander.ca/c19#downside
April 23: Ox/AZ is the Real Gold Standard, But the Mask Stays On
Yesterday afternoon, I hit 21 days since the Oxford/Astazeneca shot went in, and I had all the protection I'm going to get from the stuff, for the next 100 days. (Unless, we, too, are soon "awash" in vaccines, and they tighten up the 4-month dosing gap.)
Some fresh data just hit The Guardian: "One dose of Pfizer or Oxford jab reduces Covid infection rate by 65%"
The article notes that the risk of symptoms bad enough to cause hospitalization drops by 94% with Oxford/Astazeneca, but only 85% with Pfizer. Yes, you got that correctly: despite journalists rushing to declare Pfizer/Moderna as "The Gold Standard" for their "greater efficacy", it turns out to be Ox/AZ that has the real goods you want: not to go to the hospital.
I don't care much if I get a day, or a week, in bed; I don't care at all about an asymptotic infection, obviously: I care if I get so sick I need hospital. And that's more than twice as likely with Pfizer than with Ox/AZ. It's "94% reduction" in hospitalizations leaves only 6% of us in beeping beds, not the 15% you get with the inferior brand. So there. (All figures for first jab only.)
A 6% chance of becoming one of those tortured bodies on my nightly TV news, is still too high. Currently, over 100 people in their sixties are going into hospital beds every day. Six per day is still a bit much, for me. My real route back to normality is to participate in crushing the disease out of prevalence. Then the vaccines, and a little good behaviour, can keep it crushed down.
It will take both vaccines and behaviours. Think about that "65% reduction in infection" for a second: the original "R" was 2.8. The variants are definitely over 3.0, so they're above 1.0 when reduced by 65%. When we all get a second jab, it might be below 1.0, depending on how bad the variants have gotten in four months. Until then, I'm still an infection risk to others.
http://brander.ca/c19#azgold
April 22: Rush to Blame Politics for Vaccination
America finally had a drop-off in vaccination rates last week (11%) and CBC quickly got an article out on it: "...will demand keep up?". Why would anybody be reluctant to show up for a shot? CBC is quick to do a bunch of work to show off a keen graph, and blame You-Know-Who:
It's a lovely bit of graphic design, with many of the state names beside the data-point, the Biden-winning states in blue. The trend line is terribly important, here; I used them myself to make graphs more-pursuasive at work. The trend line draws the eye along with the argument, the lower vaccination-rate as you go from left to right into the red states.
Without that line though, it's a fairly plump, diffuse cloud of points, and the angle of decline is pretty low: big Biden state Oregon has a lower rate than over half the red dots. I recommend clicking on the graph to jump to the CBC article, where you can get the exact figures for each dot by just touching it with a mouse-tip. Which I decided to do, for all fifty, and typed them in, so you don't have to: CCCC double-checking the CBC.
After I got those into a spreadsheet, it was off to a nice stats website that gave me average income for each state.
So, at right, the CBC graph all over again, basically; it's the same data. The difference is that I had my spreadsheet label it with the formula for that trend line. The "-1.921 x" means that the GOP vote margin goes down 1.9% for every 1% the vaccination rate for the same state goes up. Or, another way, for every extra percent voting Republican, half a percent haven't been vaccinated.
The more-imporant number is that "R-squared" below it. The "correlation coefficiant" is 1.0 if every dot were exactly on the line. If it's 0.9, the graph is considered very predictive, you could learn a state's voting or vaxxing number and predict the other with good confidence. Anything over 0.7 is often pretty useful, too.
But 0.273 kind of sucks. It's saying, mathematically, what I just said about Oregon being lower than most of the GOP states: don't use the vote to predict the vax, or vice-versa.
So, let's try the same vaccination numbers for those states, with the state's average income. This time, the graph slants upward, as the more money your state has washing around, the more vaccinations are going on.
To my eye, it's a slightly "tighter" cloud of points, but it isn't, very: notice the R-squared has only gone up from 0.273 to 0.292, which still sucks. Income isn't a very good way to predict vaccination rates, either, at least not at a state levl. I would very much bet that it is a better predictor at an individual level. We know that society's least-powerful have had the worst pandemic, and of course, they're having the worst vaccination. The correlation we are seeing is probably not because people making $60,000 get vaccinated less often than those making $70,000: it's because the low-income states have a lot more people making $30,000 - from two jobs they have to commute to on a bus.
Reporters just love, love, politics, and their first thought with so many public issues, is to make it political. The vaccination-rate story did not have to go political. It's a crappy correlation, and there are better ones that are more-neutral. Never mind income, how does it correlate to the state medical expenditures, the budget for their public health department? How does it correlate with rural-vs-urban ratio?
Politics really is so often to blame, especially for public health problems. There's no need to go drumming up extra examples.
http://brander.ca/c19#politivax
April 21: Day Off, Apparently
Sorry, got busy with a project today, and the day's about over. I'll have to put off my cool data-reduction, complaining about CBC blaming American politics for poor vaccine uptake, until tomorrow.In the meantime, all I can offer with short time to write is that, once again, I have to promote Andrew Nikiforuk in the Tyee. I'm still shaking my head over how a guy I'd written off some time ago, because I really disagreed with his take on the AIDS epidemic, is doing the best writing anywhere, on the Canadian COVID pandemic. Again, credit where due: Andrew Nikiforuk's article on "Canada's Crazy Pandemic Reponse", in The Tyee, is an excellent fact/opinion piece.
Maybe nobody beats Andre' Picard on pure daily reportage, but for the weekly (or so) sum-up and opinion pieces, Nikiforuk slices them fine with the sword of facts, then puts the slices on the griddle of his acid opinion prose, so scorching, that it's entertaining, at least for those not the target.
Some original work tomorrow, promise.
http://brander.ca/c19#dayoff
April 20: Oh, I Know How To Shut Down 4/20...
At left, the problem. How to get a bunch of stoners to not congregate at Sunset Beach in about six hours? The police have already noted that they didn't hand out tickets at English Bay Beach for two nights in a row of condemned, if pretty outdoor and mostly-distanced, partying.
I'm not all that stressed about it, really: every time they study outdoor transmission, they get more reassuring about how difficult it is: most of the "outdoor transmission" has been at patios, with people sitting across from each other, doing that "speaking moistly" thing as they eat and drink. Continuing the party after sunset is bad, they're also finding outdoor transmission is multiple times more common at night. But 4/20, at least, has always been a daytime thing, the tents fold at sunset.
At right, the solution. We were roused by more pounding construction equipment, this morning, as they laid down that asphalt patch and tamped it. But it was as nothing to the sheer racket of the vacuum excavator ("Hydrovac") that dug the hole. For hours. Yesterday morning. Right outside our window. We had endured months of that, for nearly two years. It's tolerable, but hugely annoying.
This pain can be inflicted on any city resident, if they have water pipes nearby. A beach doesn't need them, but Sunset Beach has some doozies, massive "feedermains" that supply whole neighbourhoods:
This is the Sunset Beach area where 4/20 always congregates. The huge mains run not just through it, and across False Creek: one runs along the beach.
The number after the material type, the "1800" in "Steel 1800" is the diameter in millimetres. 1800, six feet in diameter, would serve half of Vancouver. It's the same main that goes past our house, and was the subject of so much work since early 2019.
In my opinion, it's about time the VPD called up the Vancouver Water District to express concerns those mains might be leaking. They're very important! The only way to be really sure they aren't is to dig some holes and inspect. Time is of the essence, we want to be done by sunset, so let's bring out three vacuum excavators and dig three test-inspection holes simultaneously, from 2:30PM-6:30PM this afternoon.
An aggressive construction schedule will be helped by various trucks moving back and forth with equipment, workers, and supplies, though for some reason, they will have to be driving backwards, nearly all the time, adding three different BEEP....BEEEP....BEEEEP... singers to the construction song.
Loud rock music annoying? Hah; such children have no idea about annoying - these people would be professionals at it. The noise would be annoying to the condos up on Beach Avenue, but it's much further away than our condo was from our two years of construction noise: only about as loud as we had to put up with.
It's any beachgoers that would be chased away.
4/20 is Vancouver's summer kickoff, a month earlier than the May weekend that the rest of Canada uses (we're a month warmer), and I'm sorry to lose it a second time. Like Easter, it was perfectly positioned on the calendar to be hit twice.
Just above, the official message from the Vancouver 420 organization. It's a unique circumstance where they and the Authorita are sending the same message; never happened before, and won't again. Let's listen this year.
http://brander.ca/c19#shutdown420
April 19: Don't Delay, Not Even a Day
There's little doubt, any more, that Oxford/Astazeneca shots are correlated with later blood clots. The probability may be as high as 1-in-100,000, a one-time risk. That's the risk of blood clots; about a sixth, or even fifth, die of them.But there are chronic risks, too: every day you live is another risk you'll get hit by that bus everybody talks about. The risk of dying in traffic is 1-in-100,000 every ten weeks. Just living a normal life that includes going on or near roads, in Canada, is one Astazeneca shot every two weeks. (Every ten weeks is the chance of dying; like the blood clots, 5/6ths of car accidents just injure you.)
What's the risk of COVID? Well, today is the last day that AZ is confined to the 55-65 band that Calgary was having trouble getting out to the clinics, just yesterday, so let's look at our risks.
There are 5.3 million of us 55-65 cohort in Canada. That cohort, last week, had about 6500 new cases. So, your odds on becoming a COVID-19 case work out to 1-in-819, per week. If you get COVID-19, your odds of blood clots are about 15%, so, just being a 55-65 Canadian, in the current infection environment, are odds of about 1-in-5500, per week, of both getting COVID, and then getting blood clots.
We have reached the title of the blog post, when we divide by seven: your odds of getting blood clots because you didn't take the shot, are 1-in-38,000 PER DAY. On the day that you take the shot, you receive a risk of 1-in-100,000 of getting blood clots, and let go of a 1-in-38,000 risk of getting blood clots. Your vaccination-risk is "paid back" in nine hours.
I assumed total mitigation of COVID clot risk. The shot gives near 100% protection against having a disease that serious, close enough to be a fraction of a percent, so I can neglect it.
Skipping blood clots, and just going straight to "death", well, if one-fifth of the blood-clot cases die, then that would be 1-in-500,000 from taking the shot. Our odds of getting COVID, and dying of it, from blood clots or twelve other horrible things, mostly your lungs, are about 1-in-200,000, per week, right now. So that same 1-in-500,000 risk of dying is from not getting protected for 3 days.
To avoid death, don't wait three more days. To avoid great sickness from blood clots, don't wait a day. Don't wait nine hours.
Just get the shot. Protect yourself. Protect everybody else.
http://brander.ca/c19#notaday
April 18: Frustrating Screwups in Health Stats
I remember a great truth mentioned in a discussion of violence against women, asthey struggled with the question of whether the phenomenon itself was increasing, or whether it was just being reported more. A criminologist pointed out that the murder rate was not rising, and "murder will out": it produces a body that somebody has to deal with, and records are kept of that, if nothing else. Other, lesser harms tend to rise and fall along with murder itself, so the other harms were probably not rising. This has been great advice in attempting to follow statistics about the pandemic, as it's much easier to lie (or screw up) figures of cases, tests, hospitalizations, than it is to lose count of dead bodies.
So the death statistics are upper left are about the only ones I can trust from Health Canada, this week. They screwed up very badly on the similar charts to the one above, which track hospital admissions and ICU admissions: the number for the 40-49 group went DOWN substantially in one week. Not the numbers of new cases, the pandemic total went down. Somebody both screwed up the data input, and didn't check against previous numbers. (They even went down compared to the totals of three weeks ago.) So, I can't, not for sure, tell you whether "young" people, under sixty, are now crowding the ICUs of Canada. (Unless you'd like a reassuring report that "-209" people, aged 40-49, entered an ICU.)
I can tell you that nearly as many people of all ages entered hospital, or into an ICU, in the last week as in the two previous weeks, except for the oldest groups, the two over 70: they added somewhat fewer in one week than two previous.
For dying itself, the data at upper left tell us that we're down from the over-70s doing 88% of the dying, down to 75%. The 50-59 gang are up from 4% to 7%. (Less terrified now?)
But because "death will out", I'm getting the impression that the news is exaggerating somewhat. Listening to the nightly anchors interviewing exhausted ICU doctors, you'd get the impression that most of the beds were essential-services workers in the prime of life. I think it's closer to say, it's gone up from a third to just over half that are 30-59. And the 20-29 crowd, that they'd like to scare into not having parties, are still just a few percent of the ICUs. "Just" six of them died in the last week (up from 38 last week to 44, shown in graph). Worth noting though, that the six in the last week, is one-seventh of all the 20-29 Canadians that have died in the last year. It would be fair to describe their death-rate per week, as up by a factor of seven!
And having found a scare number to promote, I'll sign off, and mutter my disgust at Health Canada's incompetence. Maybe they'll fix it next week. The numbers will keep getting worse for at least 2 more weeks, so that'll be a more dramatic post anyway. I'd really planned on this post, I like finding numbers that are not making the news, show something you can't get anywhere else. So, in part, I'm posting about the frustrations in reporting on a pandemic: so dependent on good data that often is not there, or clearly erroneous.
http://brander.ca/c19#youthstats
April 17: How Full of Crap is Doug Ford?
I have a bunch of new data to crunch today, but that's for posting tomorrow. I hope to get clear numbers on just how much younger those younger ICU patients are getting.
For today, I'm basically taking the day off by just piling-on Doug Ford. It's not needed; the least-useful thing a blog can do is point at mainstream news and say, "Yeah, what she said". I wish I'd noted the name of the CBC analyst who followed Doug Ford on TV this morning with his rant about "how this wouldn't be happening if we had 300,000 vaccines a day back in February".
Doug, we didn't even approve Oxford/Astazeneca until February 26, and I think every Canadian is aware that we had bad vaccine deliveries before mid-March. (Blame the feds or not; most look at other countries, and don't.)
Ford's "It's all their fault" doesn't pass the laugh-test, of course; all the other provinces have the same Feds, the same vaccine situation. CBC brought on an analyst who sounded more like a prosecutor cutting a weak defense to shreds with fact after fact:
It's as if Ford expected the Feds to bail him out...with a time machine.
- The current rise is just what was predicted by epidemiologists if Ontario didn't shut down more in response to the variants increasing;
- The government didn't listen, kept travel and business going.
- Ford was warned about the vaccine situation all along, knew what he had to work with.
- Doug is asking for 300,000 vaccines a day, but has never delivered more than half that into Ontarian arms. There's no proof at all he could have used 300,000 per day.
At upper left, the mountain Doug Ford has built with his pandemic response rules. Way back on March 11th, CCCC hilariously worried whether variants could give Ontario 2,000 cases per day, in a month?. It in fact took just 16 days. Everybody else has done better, Doug.
What if Doug got his wish, starting today, and could fully act on it, deliver 300,000 per day? Well, that would, for sure, get Ontario from 22% vaccinated to 50% vaccinated in two weeks. That's not herd immunity, but the curve would certainly begin to bend. The reduction would be visible by the end of April, and by a month from now, it would be going very well.
But, what would happen in the next two weeks, under Doug's old restrictions level? Well, obviously, cases would go up another 58%, just like the last two weeks. That would be 7,000 cases per day. It would be another 84,000 cases, total, and many hundreds dead.
And it would all be Doug Ford's fault. I don't believe this was medical-officer incompetence. I believe that public health has been overruled in nearly every case where a province has behaved badly: BC, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec: I blame the politicians, not the doctors.
And certainly not the vaccine-delivery operation, which has performed multiple miracles, exceeded every expectation. Dunking on them is really low.
http://brander.ca/c19#fordcrap
April 16: Graphically, How Well Vaccinations Work
I guess it's OK to publish this, though if you click on the graphic, you'll be led the URL at its lower-right corner, which is entirely in Hebrew, and has no obvious path to find the chart, or supporting data. At least not if you don't read Hebrew. The graphic actually comes by way of friend Mike Babulic, who put it up on Facebook (Roy admitted, with a blush). I found that it was also put up on a Quebec Reddit Forum and on Twitter by one Eric Topol, physician and author. So I don't think it's made-up, just hard to find, buried in a Hebrew-language government data report.
Yet another picture worth a thousand words, you can't even be bothered wanting the scale to give you the exact numbers on the risk-reduction. What's plain to me, is that I was a little wacky even having short-timer syndrome in the second week after my vaccination. The bar is so short even for the "under two weeks" at far left.
The Twitter post is answered by a Yair Lewis, who provided the "raw data":
57% of population received at least 1 dose; over 5 million people.Out of 458,503 COVID cases in this period:
- 388,789 (84.8%) unvaccinated
- 65,916 (14.3%) partially vaxed
- Only 3,798 (0.8%) fully vaxed
And I write this on Day 15, now part of the cohort in the second column, half as tall. What's interesting about those tiny columns is that the studies show just 50% protection after two weeks. Why aren't the columns half as tall, instead of such a small fraction?
I've got a theory, at least: the article notes that the effectiveness numbers come from those first vaccinations of medical staff - heavily exposed, so you get good numbers for effectiveness. But medical staff are also much better symptom-reporters and test-takers than the general population. General population that get a day of mild chills, and some headache, have certainly become part of the 50% that "weren't protected". But did they bother to call their doctor, report a case, get a test? It was over by morning. They just got on with their day. A nurse, on the other hand, is hypersensitive to those symptoms, gets a test within hours, and takes time off work.
Just a theory. If your standard for "protection" is that the disease doesn't even slow you down, then I suspect that the graph at left is the accurate picture, for you. It's not like 50% protection: more like 95%. And 99.5% against hospital.
Get the shot.
http://brander.ca/c19#israelvax
April 15: Can the Canucks Take a Dive, Please?
I haven't had a hockey hero in decades; but Canuck Forward JT Miller just qualified, with his "brutally honest" answer about not being "ready at all" to hit the boards.
No Canucks have been hospitalized, which I, with no grace or decency at all, will kind of regret. A bad thing to wish on anybody, but the public service of it would have been awesome. We'll have to content ourselves with JT's honesty. Miller wasn't speaking for anybody else, but it was clear that a number of Canucks have had a rough couple of weeks: "...skating a couple of times, my lungs are screaming and definitely not in game-shape at all right now..."
Miller's response is rare in sports, where "suck it up" and "walk it off" are mantras, along, always, with "play with pain". Except for Boris Johnson, we've not had the public spectacle of a prominent person really struggling with COVID, clearly down from it for weeks on end. Since that's a real thing, it could use some celebrity dramatization that we get with every other problem in our culture.
So, I'm asking: could the Canucks, as a public service, take the same kind of dive that hockey players a famous for taking when an opposing skater elbows them? Could they just, again, over-do the pain and suffering a bit, really moan and whine into a TV camera? We really need it right now, really need to change people's behaviour, and on a dime.
Season's over anyways, guys, this is the best thing you can do for your town and your country.
http://brander.ca/c19#canucks
April 14: Vaccine-Hesitation is Like Titanic Lifeboat Hesitation
How would you like to be crowded in with dozens of other people in a wooden shell that was then hand-crank-lowered down a building some seven stories tall, and into the ocean?
That was what the staff on-board the Titanic urged people to do, and they quailed at the risky-looking idea. They didn't line up, held back. When the owner of the ship, Bruce Ismay, was criticized for getting aboard a lifeboat, when so many were lost, he defended himself by pointing out that he boarded a lifeboat with seats left when nobody else wanted aboard, no women in sight - after he'd urged other people to board it the whole time it was loading.
In the end, the total lifeboat seating, of nearly 1100, saved just 706 people. That was 109 years ago tonight: 1500 people died, April 14, 1912 - some hundreds of them because they didn't get in the boat.
There were other screwups: it didn't help that one lifeboat was nearly lowered on top of another. (The Lusitania sinking had that actually happen, too: this is why you have lifeboat drills, which they did not.) And some of the lifeboats got tangled in the ropes and were never deployed.
But the biggest problem was that the lifeboats looked riskier than the big, solid, iron boat you were leaving. Alas, there was no time to give everybody a tour of the lower decks, where water was gushing in at great speed, just like we can't give everybody a tour of the ICUs just now.
But the risk, see my last few posts, of not getting in the vaccine lifeboat, is much, much higher than the vaccine lifeboat.
Get in the boat.
http://brander.ca/c19#titanic
April 13: Blood Clots and Gender - Risk Calculations
So now it's the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that may be held up due to blood clots. So far, that's based, in America, on six cases out of seven million. The odds are probably higher than one-in-a-million, however: all six were women, aged 18-48. That cohort is halved by gender, and again by age, so for them, the risk is perhaps one in a quarter-million. Of the seven, one dead, one in critical condition.There may be similar associations for Pfizer or Moderna. This article in StatNews keeps coming up with those million-to-one ratios, however. The numbers are so small that separating "causation" from "correlation" is difficult.
If we had confidence that some vaccines didn't have the risk, the solution seems simple: confine younger women to those products, and give the AZ and JJ to men. I have no idea whether that causes social side-effects (one can imagine areas where only one vaccine is available, so only one gender is getting jabbed); but surely we can work it out. Ship them in pairs.
I knew nothing about gender, of course, when I very cheerfully accepted the blood-clot risk to get my own AZ jab. I think most people would prefer the clot-risk from the vaccine to the clot-risk and sixteen-other-risks from the disease. The risk is so high that patients that make it to ICU are routinely put on anti-blood-clotting on the spot. The referenced article notes that clotting problems were found in 10% of the patients that enter hospital. (Not ICU, hospital.)
Run that math: about 10% of cases wind up in hospital, so abou 1% of COVID-19 sufferers get blood clots. Several percent of BC has how had COVID-19, so that's a few percent of 1%, or a few citizens out of 100,000 that have already had blood clots, because of COVID. When I took that AZ jab, therefore, my odds on getting blood clots in 2021 dropped ninety percent, from one in 25,000 to one in 250,000...if I'd been younger, and female. Those were my odds, as far as I knew, then.
Most of those COVID blood clots were survived without damage, as were most of the clots that may have come from the JJ jab; but the risk is still ten times higher. For every percent of the BC population (it's already probably 3% or more), a hundred people, at least, will get blood clots; only a few if we jabbed 3 million people with Johnson and Johnson.
The pauses and concerns thus sound crazy. They're all about the way we process risk, a topic for tomorrow.
http://brander.ca/c19#xxclots
April 12: Is Israel Showing 60% is Good Enough?
I'm still grumpy about whatever data-glitch (was it just at CTV? I didn't check anybody else) that had me thinking Israel was nearly all vaccinated, when the numbers suddenly jumped down to 50% last February.
The story gets weirder: it wasn't data-trouble, but a sudden loss of interest in vaccination by Israelis, that stalled the vaccination at about 60%. The linked story, from two months ago, stresses that Israel had not "beaten the pandemic", that it still had high case-counts, some 5500 per day at the time - basically, you get Canadian equivalents by multiplying by four, so that's like us having 22,000 cases/day, three times as bad as our current troubles. Imagine having 3X Canada's cases, and still down to having the GP phone patients individually to beg them to get vaccinated at the empty clinics!
My post then, of "Israel, WTF?" was almost too weak. Or was it?
Israel, in two freaking months, only went from 58% to 61% vaccinated, a total stall. And yet, that case-count dropped from over 5000 to just 280, now. The death-rate is down to a few per day, like seasonal flu. The pandemic, by gross evidence, is over for them. They still have some restrictions, are moving schools away from bubble systems bit-by-bit, and they are using some kind of vaccine passport, as story in Haaretz notes that they have "re-opened commerce and culture for vaccinated people" (italics mine), which makes the reluctance of that last 40% even more puzzling.
But the decline in cases, while not that dramatic "cliff" I was hoping for, shows that restrictions and vaccinations can work together to end the pandemic, long before you reach that 70% "herd immunity" point. They still have some restrictions, but I scanned over the whole main pages for The Jerusalem Post, and Ha'aretz, and the only pandemic stories were about Pfizer not shipping any more vaccine, because Israel didn't pay for the last 2.5 million doses, and Israel now making masks.
Canada hits 20% today, and should rise at nearly 1% per day, soon. Six weeks until we hit Israeli numbers.
http://brander.ca/c19#israel60
April 11: How to Throw a Pandemic Funeral
It turns out that you follow public health guidelines. Sorry, I guess that makes for a pretty short post. I could expand, I suppose, but I'd just be just repeating my August 25th post.
Which bears repeating, not because of the doddering, raving, former politician needs any more dumping on, but because the newspapers do.
Given the antipathy between the very-ex-president and the press, given the seriousness of the American pandemic last August, and given the election ongoing at the time...I still can't believe the utter lack of criticism for the sense of entitlement in holding a 150-person funeral in the White House..
Those links, I just googled up today. I couldn't find ONE article where the journalist took the White House to task for inventing its own pandemic-gathering rules. They all reported it as if giving everybody tests an hour earlier, then requiring no masks, was all the protection needed. (We know the tests can fail, and with 150 people, the odds of at least one failing are pretty good.)
But again, no physician weighed in on this. Public health was simply bypassed by the sheer power giving the orders. What was public health to do, send DC police up against the Secret Service? They did it because they had the power.
Well, so do the Royal Family. If they'd really wanted, they could have thrown their considerable weight around, said everybody would be vaccinated, everybody would be tested, we're at least bumping 30 mourners up to 60 so that we can invite the whole family, and the top politicians. Or Dukes. Whatever. They could have done it, too, and they didn't.
They are not being given any credit for this. It's just what's expected of real leadership. What I can't get over is that there was no criticism of the previous failure of leadership, and no comparisons being raised now. Except at CCCC, of course.
I'll throw in a bonus. I missed this hilarious example of sheer entitlement at the time. The headline is "Funeral Guest Hit Restaurant Worker".
It seems a bunch of the elite mourners headed for the Fig and Olive, were seated to pandemic maxima - four tables of six - then more showed up, and the restrictions explained. Whereupon a mourner (not a celebrity name), broke the nose of one of the restaurant workers. "Then it just escalated for no reason", said a restaurant spokesman. I think anybody who's seen "mask derangement syndrome", from store owner's videos on TV news, knows what that looked like.
There were no arrests. A lack of police presence to which the guests were, I guess...entitled.
Those who have real Titles have just shown us the price of them.
http://brander.ca/c19#funeral2
April 10: Back to the Future with Laurie Penny
I discovered Laurie Penny's writing a couple of years back, and have been following her career ever since. She's a very talented and very passionate writer, has done some outstanding journalism by just getting in there and talking to people, and her insight is like an MRI machine. She's had very precarious employment, journalism being what it is, and went away from it for a while when Joss Whedon also spotted her writing talent, and got her to try her hand at fiction with an episode of The Nevers, now imminent on HBO (and Crave in Canada).
But she has some support - CA $3,824 per month, according to the Patreon web page - from people like me, who just, umm, well, patronize her, in the oldest sense of the word, via Patreon.com. In return we get access to all her writing, and e-mails to push them at us. I got one this morning, and it's from our future:
For me, the after times came all at once. I'm one of the few people who got to step from one reality right into the other. ... I'm now in Melbourne, where there's no COVID at all. None. For me, there was a specific hour, a specific second, when the after times began. ...Just hold that image, as we have to lock down again, here, and watch newscast about ICUs stuffing patients into operating theatres. It is coming. Just to rub it, Laurie is living in what Canada could have been, with the Canadian Shield strategy, last fall. Sigh.In Australia, COVID has been almost entirely eliminated. In Victoria, where I am, there are no cases at all. It's not that the country has been untouched - Melbourne had a hundred-day lockdown last year, which meant jobs lost, businesses closing, communities struggling, families fractured, the special hell of homeschooling for some and the grueling routine of isolation for others. ...
On my first day in Melbourne, I put on a real coat and boots for the first time in a year, and off I trotted out into the world, wanting to see everything, to go in everywhere. The department store! The supermarket! The library! I found somewhere to get a haircut after a year of auto-topiary that left me looking like an extra in a 1960s musical about orphans.
I let Laurie write my blog this morning, not just to get my money's worth out of the patreon.com expense ($3/month: you have no excuse), but because I'm grinding numbers.
I'm comparing the Canadian COVID stats for ICU, hospital, and so on from the last two weeks, to the previous pandemic sum totals. They're shifting, but not as much as the news would have you believe. For instance, the over-80 demographic are 70% of our pandemic dead, overall: but still 50% of our dead, the last two weeks. More tomorrow, and much more in coming weeks as the numbers are tracked while vaccinations rise rapidly.
http://brander.ca/c19#laurie
April 9: Worth a Thousand Words
Between these two images, everything you need to know about Alberta, and also, Ontario, really, our two most-conservative-leaning provinces.
At left, from CBCnews, all applause for the info-graphic that tells a story, as the best info-graphics do. At right, a comic from BC Data Modeller Jens von Bergmann, who clearly loves "XKCD", and has the same sense of humour.
That one is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's pretty close - and I'm talking the mentality of health ministers and premieres, not the people protesting restrictions. Their ability to look at growing numbers and see nothing there is already legendary. Why the public health ministers "average in" their views to get a feel for what they, as politicians, should be doing, is beyond me.
It's certainly the source of our current problems.
With luck, we are at least on the downside of the roller-coaster for a month - that's even assuming current restrictions get even P1 down below an R of 1.0.
With luck.
http://brander.ca/c19#1000words
April 8: Church Does Right Thing
...is that ever supposed to be not news. But, alas, it is.
The Reverend Dr. Greg Glatz, left, (links to nice story about him) is of the lovely and historic Knox United Church in downtown Calgary, right. And he just did something that I can't recall another local reverend getting in the news for, not this whole pandemic. I'm wracking my brains, but not google: if you have to use a giant search engine to find something, after a year as a news junkie, it was a fairly obscure event.
The Reverend Dr. Glatz said it was "good" that a fellow churchman had seen his church shut down, fences put around it. There have been major religious figures stand up for things. From the Pope on down, the top guys in most denominations have put out messages of stay safe, stay home, tried to provide for Zoom-type worship services.
But, when I read the story and was moving along, it suddenly struck me that this is the first local pastor, in the same community, to condemn fellow churchmen, for spreading disease. For deliberately mis-quoting from scripture that for 2000 years, has been seen to counsel acceptance of worldly authorities, to focus upon the saving of souls.
It's one thing to stick to positive messages, add to the voices calling for distance and stay-home and so forth. A negative message, basically an attack upon a fellow Christian, is a whole other level. Christian soldiers, could be saddling up; Dr. Glatz could well be the object of attacks on himself, his church, his whole denomination, in return. (Link to story from church graphic.)
Congratulations, Dr. Glatz: you've displayed the virtue of courage. Anybody could have stepped forward, but you are conspicuously alone, always a courageous thing to be.
As for the rest of you, show some spine. If you don't give Caesar a little support, there could be a lot more of God's souls rendered back unto him.
http://brander.ca/c19#goodchurch
April 7: Shocked, Shocked, That Ontario Needed Lockdown
What a surprise. Nobody who was determinedly looking away, and avoiding all the gathering data, and not-listening to multiple warnings, saw that one coming!I won't even bother with a link; it's the top story on the major papers, and TV channel news sites. Except The Herald, where Alberta's own problems have their increased restrictions as the top story, and the Vancouver Sun, which of course is obsessed with real estate. (People have been dying for a year; but these bidding wars are news!)
There's a great line, I won't bother to look up - I think the original is about "America" - which can be recycled here as: "Doug Ford will do the right thing, only after exhausting all other possibilities". Hey, remember Doug and Jason briefly distinguishing themselves by doing the right thing? Those were the Good Old Days.
Now, it's not just Doug and Jason holding back, and holllllding back, until the virus throws them into a come-along armlock, and forces them to do what they should have done a month earlier - other provinces have fallen into their bad habits. Remember when Saskatchewan was a safe place? Sigh.
Once again, I have to tout Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee, and his article on a major French study about pandemic response strategies.
Seems that they reviewed all these many countries, and the different health regions, states, provinces within federated countries like ours, and determined that Get To Zero is the best strategy. The one that Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, all those pandemic champs followed - it saves not just the most lives, but the most economy, the most money, the most schooling, the most jobs. That was yesterday's article. Today, he has another on how BC slipped up from doing well until Fall 2020, to the mess we are in today.
Andrew and Andre' (Picard): Canada's best reporting right now.
http://brander.ca/c19#shockedshocked
April 6: I Am Hiding Under the Bed This Week
Yesterday's "Short-Timer Syndrome" post was a little tongue-in-cheek, of course. I went out soon after, and took many pictures of the West End cherry trees in full-bloom, as they attracted their yearly fan club of admirers. As you can see in those photos, it wasn't "crowded" like a civil rights demonstration, and those were pretty low-risk.
Then, my first news story this morning was posted up on Facebook by a tiny newspaper for just the West End, at right. Well, great. Those crowds loving the cherry trees were in BCs worst hot-spot, apparently.
brea And, oddly enough for the "blood clots" issue, The National, last night, had an entry in their new series of stories about COVID-19 cases. The doctor stressed how this guy was in his early 30s and completely healthy before contracting it. He wound up intubated for a period, and also the victim of, wait for it, blood clots in his brain. This guy is not one of millions of vaccine recipients, because Canada's only had the one million cases. It's much, much more likely for COVID-19 to give you blood clots, than any vaccine. The disease is getting more frightening, every variant that comes up.
I've got a new thing for CCCC. Because I record television Over-The-Air, with an antenna, I have a power that cable/sat subscribers don't: I can record my TV, save it, edit it, shrink it down to half-size, as below. It's just a 30-second clip...but look at that man's eyes.
I have to credit The National, and the fashion-courage of their correspondent, Dr. Michael Warner, for just appearing on-camera in his scrubs - and his clear fatigue and depression. He's far more effective than any chipper public health spokesman spieling about washing your hands.
Effective enough that I'm going to be in hiding from the thing for a couple of weeks to come, and wary even after the protection kicks in. I'd sooner kiss a cobra.
http://brander.ca/c19#westend
April 5: Short-Timer Syndrome
The novel about Vietnam war experiences was turned into the movie, "Full Metal Jacket". The movie doesn't much mention the title of the novel. A "tour" of Vietnam was precisely 365 days. On the day you arrived, you'd be told, "you have 365 days and a wakeup". You'd lay your head down in Vietnam 365 times (if you could sleep), and on the 365th wakeup, you'd get on a plane.
These 365 were counted down obsessively by those who didn't want to be there. When the count hit 30 days and a wakeup, miltary superstition would start to kick in. Soldiers, the novel explains, are the most superstitious people in the world; an athlete unwilling to change socks during a winning streak has no comparison. Since life and death in modern battle are terribly random, any angle to improve your luck is believed: lucky rabbit's feet are held tight.
One thing that can drive you crazy is the thought of getting hit on your last day, your last week. It was actually at the last month that everybody would conspire to help a "short timer" avoid further combat missions. Partly from superstition, partly because: as he lost focus on being a soldier, and began to imagine actually making it home to the world, he'd become a liability, not an asset, in the field. So your last month was often almost all on the base.
I'm now four days after vaccination, and very little protected. There aren't figures on the protection level at this point, but they're pretty near zero. There's some significant protection as early as 12 days, and high protection by 15 days.
Now would be a very, very slightly better time for me to be exposed to COVID-19 in medical terms; I bet I have a few percent lower odds of hospital; but it would be the WORST time for me to get it in irony terms: the vaccination wasted, my disease basically unchecked. I really, really, really don't want to take risks now, just like a Vietnam short-timer: not when escape is so close.
So, even though we could use some milk and other groceries, I think I'll stretch it to tomorrow before hitting the store: Easter Monday is still the weekend, it might be crowded. It'll be another week after tomorrow before I'm ready to take risks like entering a store for non-essentials. Now is just not the time.
http://brander.ca/c19#shorttimer
April 4: Open Letter of Apology to Paul Godfrey
Dear Sir:
I write you at random, having selected you second from the top of the contact on the nearest school to my house. The first guy might be senior enough to be over 55; you, probably not.
So, notionally at least, it's your vaccination's last bit of soreness that is leaving my arm today, as I start to build immunity from the Oxford-Astazeneca vaccination that was meant for you, and I'm sorry about that.
It's no fault of either of us, and it follows accepted medical practice. The vaccinators are running scared of the anti-vaxxers, like elephants terrified of a mouse. Our culture has no greater heroes than those who invent and make vaccines right now, they should be all-powerful elephants. But the mice are empowered by Fear and Stupidity, great powers of the universe, and the elephants must tread very lightly.
So, even though the worst of your math students could easily compute that any risk from the vaccine is enormously outweighed by the risks of you not getting the vaccine, you will be denied it. Oddly, we give people great freedom to refuse a risk that is so small it may be imaginary - but no freedom whatsoever to accept a risk, though the acceptance may be mathematically obvious. I bet 90% of teachers would have signed any release form at at all to get my shot, but that wasn't an option.
It's as if seatbelts were associated with skin cancer (from contact with the plastic belt if you don't wear a shirt in the car), so you're being denied a seatbelt, then told to get back in the car and drive cross-country.
If I read about a single BC teacher actually dying from coronavirus contracted in the weeks before this is all sorted out, I'm going to have an ugly case of survivor's guilt.
"Having survivor's guilt" isn't much of an apology if it's you that doesn't make it, Paul, but it's there for what little it's worth.
I write that last, because that's the point of picking out a name and printing it, the same as Maclean's now-regular feature of "They Were Loved", putting faces and bios to the pandemic dead. We need to remember that we're talking about people's lives, people serving the public trust. Stay safe, Mr. Godfrey. Your medical system has failed you, and you're on your own for at least a few more weeks.
http://brander.ca/c19#apology
April 3: Good Saturday
Just to confirm, all those annoying reactions were down to a tolerable level a few hours after I posted yesterday morning. I got some mid-day sleep and was functional, if not vigorous. By nightfall it was just a one-asprin headache, and all my energy came back right around the 24-hour mark after they started, about 11PM.So, that's that. Back to normal this morning. I enjoyed a Zoom chat with some friends last night, including a guy who'd gotten Oxford-Astazeneca several weeks back, along with his wife, in Britain. He'd had no reaction of note, but his wife was laid up for a day in bed with my set of reactions, only a bit worse. Chatting with people in the area, that was not uncommon.
I managed to find a comparative table for different vaccines, and Astazeneca does have higher odds of some reactions - but very slightly. They all have more than 50% of protectees having a few of them. (Fatigue and headache are the most common, after "pain at the injection site", which I did not get.) The other two vaccines are actually more likely to have such reactions on a second dose. Oh, yes, you can get the issues after the second dose: something to look forward to. But, hey, only about 20% get nausea, though it's 40% for Moderna on second dose.
The article also notes something about "efficacy", where doctors have hastened to reassure people that Astazeneca's "76%" is really just as good as the Moderna/Pfizer 90%+. The article points out that Astazeneca figures come mainly from where it had to deal with the B.1.1.7 variant, that's more transmissable, by about 40%. Oxford-Astazeneca may actually be just as protective as the other two. (The other way to look at it, is that they will all be "only" 75% protective soon, as B.1.1.7 and P1 take over the field. Try to remember that a 75% vaccine is awesome by all previous vaccine standards.)
I joked with the party, that it was weirdly good, in a way. It would be a total act of faith to trust the vaccine without such reactions. A guy pokes you with a needle, nothing happens, was it a vaccine, or tap water? But if you go through a 1%-as-bad version of the disease, you know something is happening in there: for your T-cells and white cells, that day of malaise for you was the Rocky Training Montage, and they now have the Eye of the Tiger fastened on COVID-19.
http://brander.ca/c19#goodsaturday
April 2: Bad Friday
My vaccination went off without a hitch. I had been thinking of an amusing(?) post where I randomly picked out a local teacher - perhaps there's a 'teacher of the month' page at some local school - and apologize to her for taking her vaccination. That took a minute to sink in, when I saw it on the news: we 55-65 lucky duckies are getting the dreaded Oxford-AstroZenaca meant for essential workers, particularly teachers.I can only hope the decision is reversed quickly. Britain is now up to 30 cases of the blood clots - but out of 18 million doses. If that body of people also got 30 blood clots in the couple of weeks before their vaccinations, then I think we're done here. Fingers crossed.
But, alas, poor poor me is having a Bad Friday. I got picked, also at random, to be one of the guys that got a bunch of side-effects, closely resembling a super-mild case of the disease itself. A few hours of feverish chills and body aches last night, which combined with a dull headache to ruin my sleep. This morning, only the headache remains, and fatigue, though that may be more lack-of-sleep than a reaction.
I am still feeling very lucky and glad. With any luck at all, by tomorrow it'll be Good Saturday. And April 23rd, of course, will, statistically, be "75% protected against any symptoms, 100% against the ICU" Saturday. Also 67% protection against spreading the disease.
That is so worth a headache.
http://brander.ca/c19#badfriday
April 1: Anniversary Post: Hallmark Ending(?) ... Blog Birthday Present
The first post, here at CCCC, was April Fool's Day, 2020. The single most-appropriate "2020 Day". Christmas 2020 was not much of a Christmas! But April Fool's Day, 2020, was very much an April Fool's Day.The April Fools this year are all the polities - Canada's provinces, save the Maritimes and North, basically - that just foolishly thought cases that were going up, would start to go down if they did nothing more than plead for caution from podia. ("Podiums" is allowed, but I always go for the "ia" ending: "Stadia", "Millenia". It's just nicer.)
So, the blog's Least Surprising Birthday Present Ever, we get "sudden" lockdowns that are a "surprise" to the affected restaurant owners and so forth. I actually saw a ski resort pub employee (at Whistler, not the Kelowna place that disgraced itself and lost its lease) say "nobody saw this coming". Seriously?
There's nothing to say about it, no stories worth linking to. ALL of the stories for weeks have been about rising case-counts, variants becoming dominant. It was like "predicting" that sunrise was imminent, as you watch the eastern horizon get too bright to look at.
I'm able to summon up anger, even as I get my Hallmark-movie moment. Who the heck could have predicted I'd be scheduled for vaccination on the very anniversary of starting a pandemic blog? I mean, to a Hollywood scriptwriter, at least, it's hard to maintain dramatic tension after that needle goes in, and the protagonist is out of nearly all danger. Time to jump-cut to the "six months later" scene around the Thanksgiving table, start rolling the credits.
There's been some almost-movie-grade drama. I got a call yesterday afternoon, that, sorry, appointment cancelled, the government didn't deliver. Then, she called back at 8:30 PM, from her personal phone, to say that was reversed, the truck came through, the appointment's back on.
The appointments were done just as you may have seen on the news: a sign-up sheet. My vaccination actually kind of depends on nobody losing an 8.5x11 bit of paper. But with people like the young lady from Shopper's, calling me at night on her own phone, I'm actually very confident of success.
Given how bad the people at the top are, who led us so timidly and vacantly into a new wave, I think that young, conscientious, ordinary workers - with sign-up sheets - can frankly do better.
http://brander.ca/c19#anniversary
March 31: Tomorrow, Tomorrow, The Sun Comes Out Tomorrow
Fingers crossed for it, at least.I thought, "what the heck", and walked to my nearby drugstore about 8:30 this morning. Deserted. "Yes, do you need a refill?". "No, I say", pointing at the "VACCINE APPOINTMENTS HERE" sign. "I'm 62, and watch the news."
She smiles, but shrugs. "The lineup went out the door yesterday, while that news was still on. The list filled up in minutes, also the waitlist. The Davie street location got a lot more, you could call."
The number in my pocket, I take a 20-minute walk, instead. No hurry, it'll have filled, yesterday, too. But maybe they'll tell me how many doses they got, how long they took to fill up - nice bit for the blog.
At the pharmacy window, a couple were finishing up, and a guy stepped forward from my right. "Hey, I'm right here." "I was over there, on the dots", he replied, pointing - I hadn't actually been in the line. "But go ahead".
I didn't step forward; just called over to the pharmacist, "Just wanted to ask when your vaccination appointments filled up yesterday?"
She blinked. "I have two left, 5:55 and 6PM tomorrow". I waved the other man forward. (I really like to think I would have done it if she had said she had only one left. Pretty sure, anyway.) He got 5:55, and I got the very last vaccine appointment for tomorrow. I'm sure, the last in the West End. Booked by 9AM, the day after the news.
I already posted "I Ain't Afraid of No Blood Clots", but that does come with the caveat: I'm very afraid of the blood clots you can get from COVID-19. Not as afraid as I am of the neurological damage, and not nearly as afraid as I am of the lung damage. But much, much, much more afraid than I am of Oxford-Astazeneca blood clots, which occupy a reality zone between in the triangle between "fear-based myth", "hypothetical", and "only visible with the best statistics".
I joked with the first pharmacist that I was overjoyed to hear I had no appointment there because of the huge, round-the-block response. She nodded rapidly; from the news, health professionals are scared that vaccine fearmongering was going to have a win from this. Very reassuring to know that most people have more sense.
http://brander.ca/c19#tomorrow
March 30: Dumb and Dumber and Dumberer
In order, Dumb is confusing "circuit breaker" with "rheostat". A "circuit breaker" briefly stops all electrical transmission while you make sure a fire won't happen. A rheostat just turns down electrical flow by a bit, turning a valve. In British Columbia, just closing bars and restaurants and gyms, not all businesses, not schools, is a rheostat, not a "circuit breaker". They're debasing the terminology, but more importantly, being timid and weak about an already-desperate, time-sensitive fight with the variants.Dumber is Ontario, where they've seen this coming for weeks, known it well from two previous waves, and have still bumbled into 67% variants, and the pandemic "completely out of control". The "dumber" title comes from this story, actually, the tidbit that hospitalizations are this time 20% higher than they were at the start of the last lockdown.
Think about it, that means that instead of getting smarter every wave, saying earlier and earlier that "this is the start of a wave, let's stop it early", they're getting dumber every wave, taking longer to accept the obvious. If a cancer patient allowed more and more cancer symptoms to appear and worsen, every time the cancer came back, you'd say they deserved to die after the tumours grew for a third time, ignored.
And Dumberer is this story about the most-Republican of American states, where the governor is now touting her bravery at never locking down, any business, never recommending masks, as a campaign feature, a triumph of governance. It's a Bush speechwriter and lifelong Republican columnist who is saying of that:
Now let me be clear. South Dakota has the second-highest case rate and the eighth-highest covid death rate in the country. In that sparsely populated state, the disease has taken the lives of nearly 2,000 people. And Noem's defiant inaction has made that number higher than it should have been. What level of hubris, extremism or insanity does it take to crow about one of the worst covid records in the nation? Noem might as well be campaigning for higher office in a hearse.It does help put BC and "dumb" in perspective, and one might even be glad to live in "dumber" Ontario, given the amount of "dumberer" out there. Ah, well, I will cheer myself up by promising to get back to Brazil, soon. Good news: Bolsonaro is doing badly.
http://brander.ca/c19#dumbdumb
March 29: P1 in Vancouver
I just don't know whether to be frightened or reassured that St. Paul's Hospital found more cases of the P1 variant than are known to be in the whole United States. St Paul's is almost exactly a mile from my house.Normally, that would mean that my post of the other day, about "The balloon goes up", had gone up about P1, that there would be twice as many cases per week of P1 from now on, that it would take over during the course of April. That has been happening with less-bad "UK variant", B.1.1.7, but P1 would be worse.
What's reassuring, is Dr. Bonnie Henry, staunchly claiming that this very large cluster, along with several clusters of B.1.1.7, have all been "contained". That's a very large claim to make about so many cases, a statement of remarkable trust in the sheer thoroughness of the contact-tracing. It would require that everybody with any contact with any of all those cases, has been not just checked for symptoms, but tested, since so many are asymptomatic.
I can only hope she's right; certainly, she won't escape criticism if she's wrong. What was solidly reassuring is her statement that virtually all tested cases are now also being checked for what variant they are. We'll be able to track the progress of the "new pandemic" (and it is), as it happens to us.
The real hard question is what the public health doctors will insist upon if the P1 variant (in particular, but also B.1.1.7) moves into a high "R" value and control is lost. Those of us calling for "Canadian Shield" and "Get to Zero" and all that, for two months, have been proven right so far. If P1 can cause severe symptoms to the already-vaccinated, then we're in for 2021 as a Groundhog Year re-run of 2020.
So, they'd better be right.
http://brander.ca/c19#yvrP1
March 28: Brazil Faces the Test: Will Bolsonaro Hang?
Eventually, the nicest people have had enough, enough to make them a raging mob. Our hearts all went out to the people of Myanmar, the other day, who didn't just oppose lead and steel with fragile flesh...they come back for more, when they regrouped. It's happened before, and will again. I read the same story in Red China Blues, by Canadian journalist Jan Wong, who had a ringside seat at the Tiananmen Square uprisings. She reported with awe that people would be driven from the square, with machine guns, leaving bodies all over the ground...and then, they'd regroup and come charging back. At machine guns. There were similar acts of courage in Tahrir Square in Cairo, now a decade back.
The photograph shows Mussolini, and some cronies, who were shot and strung up, not by the allied troops, but by Italians:
After being kicked and spat upon, the bodies were hung upside down from the roof of an Esso gas station. The bodies were then stoned from below by civilians.I was joking, right at the start of this blog, when I asked on April 30, "Where is BoJo's Noose?" about Johnson, though resignation was certainly appropriate (and still is).
Bolsonaro, on the other hand, really has gone an order-of-magnitude past Johnson at getting his people killed. His P1 variant (yes, he gets to own it; there wouldn't have been enough cases to produce new mutations if he'd done his job) is now going to kill millions around the world - but most, in Brazil.
Brazil pulled into the lead, the other day, at most deaths ever declared in one day by any country, well over 3,000. It exceeded any American numbers from their last wave, though Brazil has just two-thirds the population.
But the thing is, the dying of yesterday is based on the case-count of three weeks ago. When the hospitals were at the breaking point, but mostly still functional. This article from Friday describes 15 patients arriving, for two beds - 13 turned away to die. Those terrible choices that Italian doctors were just starting to have to make in Lombardy a year ago, where you take an 85-year-old off the ventilator to give it to a 75-year-old with half a chance - that's now every day and hour in Brazilian hospitals.
The case-count is not rising all that rapidly, recently: the dying would only go up to 4,000 per day...except the hospitals are now turning most away, and it will probably be worse. They're running out of oxygen.
Gwynne Dyer, wanting to "hit the panic button on Brazil", is not of the opinion that the people can remove Bolsonaro (Tiananmen Square failed completely), but I'm starting to wonder. Every population has its breaking point. Watts, Tahrir Square, the Orange Revolution - they were all surprises when they hit.
I look at those graphs and I see that record-breaking death rate doubling in a month. How much can they take?
Bolsonaro might want to avoid gas stations.
http://brander.ca/c19#lynching
March 27: The Balloon Goes Up
One of those phrases you use, know what it means, but not where it comes from. Turns out that the best way to get all the WW1 artillery guns to start shooting simultaneously was to just release a balloon that they all could see, up and down the line. More reliable than wires (fail) or making a noise (might be drowned out). So the heart-lifting sight of a balloon rising lazily into the sky, beloved by every child, was used to signal "time for death".
The covid balloon went up over the last two days across the nation. It was just 14 days after I asked whether Ontario was just a month away from 2,000 cases per day, that Ontario posted a number quite a bit higher. I wondered for a day if that was some kind of weird spike in reporting, it was so fast. Five-fold growth in 14 days? But then yesterday was also over 2,000. It's on, the variants are growing faster than even the pessimistic models predicted, and Ontario is in trouble.
Alberta and especially BC may be in more trouble. I haven't seen a jump like the last two days in BC, in the whole pandemic. How could it grow from 716 to 800, then 908 in seventy-two hours?
If it keeps growing like that, we'll be in a fear-based lockdown in days, whether the government calls one or not. I feel like stocking up at the store today, preparing to hide inside for a spell.
I wonder if the store will be busy. Maybe I should stock up on toilet paper. If increases of 14% per day - an R of TWO - continue over the 3-days of tests that will be reported Monday - then BC will hit 1200/day early next week. The Ontario growth suggests an R of 1.7. These numbers are hard to believe, R values higher than any reported from UK - but if some local stupidity and superspreading are at work, they'll go on until people stop, or are stopped.
It may grow out of control, until we are in real trouble. Fair warning, you should prepare.
http://brander.ca/c19#balloon
March 26: An Extremely Short Summary of Yesterday's Press Conferences
Well, fine, I'm exaggerating a bit, and it wasn't that bad in every province. In Alberta, the re-opening discussion was about putting off the next stage...but noted that most transmission is at home, please be careful of others at home if you feel symptomatic. Yeah, it's all our fault.
- Cases are skyrocketing!
- The variants are taking over!
- Now, let's talk about our continued re-opening plan!
Here in BC, the whole conference went on and on about new closeness allowed in care-homes, because they, at least, are vaccinated and somewhat safe from severe disease. There was just no discussion of the shocking jump to 800 cases per day, and whether that suggests a response.
I'm going to save Ontario for tomorrow. That article makes me too angry.
http://brander.ca/c19#biteme
March 25: The Tyee's Nikiforuk Rubs It In
I try to provide more value than the usual blogger's "You've got to read this" link; but, today, anything I could add would be weak, both for information and entertainment, than Andrew Nikiforuk's you-idiots review of the last eight weeks. It's eight weeks today since a strategy was put forward, called "The Canadian Shield", praised by CCCC. (That was six weeks after CCCC hugely enjoyed Nikiforuk's scorching of Jason Kenney's pandemic performance.
The Canadian Shield strategy actually could run in six weeks, if all went well, exactly as it did in Portugal, covered yesterday. Following the Canadian Shield, our graph could have looked like Portugal's, below. In fact, oddly enough, Portugal's cases-per-day started plummeting exactly on January 30th, exactly as if they were the ones who'd read the article two days earlier.
Nikiforuk does a Sherman's March across the country, "congratulating" the offending premieres one-by-one; every province had its own screw-ups, but they all boiled down to weakness in the face of protests, lack of courage to move quickly, to trust in science. Politicians all, sitting tight and keepin their heads down, not real leaders.
I linked directly to Canadian Shield on Januarly 28th, only noticed Nikiforuk's "Get to Zero" article a week later, but it's the one he links back to, pointing to all the nations that did basically get to zero in six to eight weeks: New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Iceland and Taiwan. Oh, and all of Atlantic Canada and our North. It could have been done. He is especially excoriating about how we've not learned from our mistakes in previous waves. It's aggressive dumbness.
We can still do this, to squash down the variants. If we don't control the variants, they may well get around the vaccines; that's what evolution will naturally tend to do to them. It's quite urgent.
http://brander.ca/c19#nikiforuk2
March 24: Praise Proud Portugal
It was just two months ago tomorrow, when I posted "Pity Poor Portugal", which had been exemplary, at low cases the whole pandemic, until last fall, when their second wave was one of the worst it Europe. Here's the peak death rates, when countries started to turn it around, in terms of deaths per million population:
Portugal hit a bad place before they got serious, but holy cow, did they ever get serious. I haven't seen a decline like that, in any country, the whole pandemic.
- UK: 1200/68 = 17 deaths per million per day
- USA: 3300/332 = 10 deaths/million/day
- France: 600/65 = 9.3
- Portugal 300/10 = 30
Portugal is perhaps the single poorest country in western Europe; with a tourism-dependent economy that was hit hard. Nonetheless, when they locked down, they really locked down. Articles about it quoted government and medical people, talking about the details. There were simply no stories of protests, defiant restraunteurs, backlash, nothing. They just locked down hard for two whole months, everybody took it seriously, and that knocked the case-rate down from 12,000/day to 3,000/day in two weeks flat. That's an "R" of around 0.65; I can't recall a steeper decline in my whole time doing this. In the last five weeks, it's from 2500 to 500, about 0.8 - that's the shallow portion of their curve, but it is like the best-performance for any other nation.
Portugal is about a week behind Canada at vaccination, just under 9%, to our 9.5%. Their remarkable discipline, and cautious re-opening. Population-adjusted, their case-rate is now half of Canada's.
Praise Proud Portugal. I am so very happy to say a 180-degree turnaround of my own words of two months back.
http://brander.ca/c19#praiseportugal
March 23: America's Mass Shooters Herald "Return to Normalcy"
After many months of near-dormancy because of the pandemic, America's purveyors of mass gun violence today held a press conference to proclaim a "return to normalcy", and a resumption of regular mass-shootings in the news.
"We felt America was simply tired of crouching inside, afraid of being killed by a virus", said mass-murderer spokesmen, "when, as a good, strong, red-blooded people, they needed to get back to crouching behind counters and desks, afraid of being killed by us."
Continuing the news conference, by taking reporters hostage, and crouching behind their podium, the killers re-iterated that this was "part of America's great re-opening plan".
"There were mass shootings constantly in the news, until this stupid disease came along, killing people the old-fashioned way", noted spokesmen.
"It's just so out-of-touch in the 21st century to continue with these obsolete ways of dying. Republican rhetoric about 'culling the herd', with the virus, is just stuck in the Middle Ages. We mass-murderers can cull the herd with much greater speed and efficiency, without wasting medical resources."
Reporters commented, after taking a few casualties, and regrouping when the spokesmen fled in a car (swerving to hit pedestrians), that the shooters have certainly being getting back to it with undiminished vigor. "At least, it's not a racial thing", noted some police, with relief. "They said so".
The database at right, from "gunviolencearchive.org", only goes back one week. (There were 25 injured and 3 dead in the two days before. You're welcome.) The graphic links to their database. The rest of the chart, not highlighted by the comments, adds up to another four dead and 35 injured.
We are not, alas, all in this together.
CCCC is not going to turn into The Beaverton. This was just how I coped.
http://brander.ca/c19#normalcy
March 22: Vaccine Supply and Demand, British Columbia.
I was much taken by the vaccine appointment schedule on the news, last night. It was down to specific ages, for the next week. Age 79, age 78 two days later, age 77 two days later...age 75 by March 27.
If you compare to the BC population-by-age chart at left, which is cumulative, you see it grows by about 35,000 people for every year younger you go, so two days apart means they currently can get through appointments for over 15,000 population, per day. Of course, not everybody is coming in. Vaccines have only been arriving at about 10,000 per day, recently, so uptake of appointments on first offer is presumably around 65% right now.
By the end of March, we should have taken care of everybody down to age 75 who's going to show up early, so April starts us off with age 75, "done", for now.
The trouble is, that the number of people per year takes a jump at age 75 and downward: they're into the baby boom. There are about 44,000 people age 75, but over 55,000 age 74, and then it goes upward by 1000-2000 per year.
The chart at right is a model and here are the assumptions:
As you can see, it doesn't make a ton of difference. My favourite number, the day that I can make an appointment (age 62) varies from April 18 at best, April 21 medium, April 26 pessimistic.
- The blue line assumes 75% uptake, and 30,000 delivered per day.
- The yellow line is optimistic, assuming only 70% uptake, and 33,000 per day.
- The orange line is pessimistic assuming 80% uptake and only 25,000 delivered per day.
BC and Alberta are similar enough in population profiles, and are in any event getting vaccines supplied based on population, so Albertan readers can assume about the same thing.
Age 60 is a milestone, which looks like about May 1. 96% of Canada's deaths have been to those over age 60, so we can assume that, even if the case-rate in Canada is high, the death rate will be negligible.
Unless the P1 variant does just slip past vaccines, of course. I continue to beg every government to quarantine Brazil.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxupply
March 21: Think Spring
Fear of Brazil, and variants in general, has had me getting a bit dark, the last few days. And the first day of Spring in Vancouver is typically being celebrated by pouring rain.I've decided to think of some silver linings in the dark clouds, by an effort of will. Here's my best shots:
I was going to add in "we at least are now aware of our care-home failures"...but I cannot, in good conscience, assume that now we'll address them. Which is a sad thought, I'm going to put it away now, and focus on the good ones.
- The new vaccine technology. We've had many articles about it, but it's just our nature to take good things for granted, all too quickly. Anybody complaining about vaccination taking a long time needs to remind themselves that the whole program is a year early, by any previous standard.
- The new vaccine technology. This isn't just useful for this particular disease, the human relationship with disease itself could be about to undergo nearly as big a revolution as when vaccines were first invented. One of the developers said that her team is going to tackle cancer, next. Cancer.
- The pandemic is showing up authoritarians. China, in particular, has spent years touting that their controlled society is actually good for people, riding moral high-horse on the strength of so many hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty in recent decades. (Mostly by selling to us.)
But China's information control, the authoritarian impulse to deny that anything is wrong on their watch, prevented the pandemic from being stopped inside their borders, let it loose upon the world. Another big embarrassment is their vaccine safety scares and ineffectiveness. Brazil, I don't need to repeat myself; and half the postings here have been about the awful American response..which is obviously improving with a change in administration.
All around, if you hate authoritarians, you have to love how the pandemic showed them up as no-good, terrible, awful, pathetic excuses for governments.
- The pandemic is giving aid and comfort, if not to people, to the ideas that left-wingers (like me) have been trying to sell for decades. The United States may finally get, perhaps by 2026, the universal health insurance that Canada passed in 1966. Canada may advance on to a universal income support of some kind, like Spain, which announced a Universal Basic Income plan 11 months ago.
- You appear to be able to significantly reduce your risk of infection with nothing more than good vitamin D levels. I've been a vitamin D fan since remarkable studies a decade back showed it was a clear cancer preventive. Everybody take their vitamin D. The first day of Spring is a great day to advise a (careful) increase in sun exposure, too!
http://brander.ca/c19#nice
March 20: Follow-Up: The Variants Are Still Coming
First a follow-up to yesterday's post. BC was unfairly given a great rating of merely 3% variants in its cases. Yesterday's public health announcement, that we had 737 new cases in 24 hours, of which 68 were variants, is much better data, comparable to what was used for other provinces.And that comes to 9% variants, not 3%.
In short, Ontario is a few weeks away from huge case numbers as the variants become dominant this week; Quebec is a few weeks behind them; and Alberta and BC are just a few weeks behind that.
By the time BC is in a variant wave, even my age group could be getting vaccinated, but that will only reduce the death toll, not the misery. COVID is still a hellacious thing to get in your fifties.
Brazil was on the CTV news, last night, but still not as a menace to the world that needs to be nationally-quarantined; just as a local tragedy, which reminds me of coverage of Wuhan 14 months back. You'd think we'd have learned something.
http://brander.ca/c19#bcvar
March 19: What's Different About Ontario
I think I've resolved a bit of a head-scratcher about the total counts of variants in different provinces. When you look at the grand totals that each province has encountered (at left, with thanks to Alan Beairsto; it links to similar numbers at CTV) it looks like BC and Alberta are up in the same Danger Zone that has everybody concerned about Ontario: over a thousand in both Ontario and Alberta.
The thing is, variants have been trying to get going in Alberta and BC for some time; the numbers haven't grown rapidly - one doubts that's some divine miracle limiting their enhanced reproduction, it's laudable work from all those contact-tracers, running down all the connections, to draw a limit around the spread from each case. So far, the numbers, at any one time, are not nearly as high as Ontario's.
Counting the variants is not like counting the cases. We have tests now that let us tell you every day, how many positive tests there were that day. How many were variants, is not always checked for every positive tests; the DNA sequencing is mostly not as available. So we have statistical measures, often, how many out of a hundred random COVID tests were also variants.
We have snapshots of the how many variants are identified out of the currently-active cases, or how many were found in a day, versus the daily COVID case count, giving us a rough idea of the percentage of cases out there in the community that are the variants. Here's the numbers I could find in the last few days of news reports:
Province News ~Variant% BC British Columbia currently has "some 143 of 4,941 active cases are variants": 143/4941= 3% Alberta "Variant Cases make up 12% of Alberta's active infections" 12% Quebec Variants jumped up by 179, as total cases jumped by 764. Very roughly : 179/764= 23% Ontario "42% of new cases are variants" 42% In short, Alberta and BC have higher total numbers because they've trickled in slowly; are growing, but slowly.
Quebec is Ontario, a week or so behind; they recognize that the variants will have taken over in about four weeks, at the rate they're growing.
Ontario has enough data for statistics: the regular form of COVID is still being defeated, has an "R" of 0.9, the cases shrinking by about 10% every five days. But the B117 variant has an R of 1.3 or 1.35 growing rapidly as the other shrinks, so that Ontario is just days away from "over 50% variants", two weeks from them being the huge majority. The differing growth curves make them the "pandemic within the pandemic" of the article title.
B117, not much worse than regular COVID, is giving us a heads-up about P1, the even faster-spreading Brazil variant. While we need to hit that Brazil panic button, that will only give us time. We should start preparing now. For all we know, that one will need both the vaccines we've already got, and some activity restrictions, until we can formulate a booster. Sure hope not.
We are very lucky that B117 can be controlled by the vaccines; it's apparently 67% deadlier - five dead in Britain of B117 for every 3 that catch the regular. P1 is infecting people in Brazil who've been infected with the first one, so the vaccines probably won't stop it, alone. If it's also deadlier, then Bolsonaro will have effectively murdered millions.
http://brander.ca/c19#onvar
March 18: Hitting the Panic Button on Brazil
Dr. Gwynne Dyer is one of my very few North Stars, writers I automatically trust. I'm sure he's made mistakes in 40+ years of it, but damn few, and almost none that could have been avoided with more due-diligence at the time.So I assume he's done his homework with this frankly scary article about Brazil and its new variant.
Excerpts:
They'd have to lock Bolsonaro up first because he flatly refuses to do any kind of lockdown. He also regards vaccines as sissy and will not support a national program to vaccinate the population....
Because Brazil's infection rate is so high, it is an ideal pressure-cooker for new and sometimes more dangerous versions of the coronavirus. ... What makes it so frightening is that it spreads twice as fast as earlier COVID versions - and it seems able to reinfect people who have already had COVID once.
If it can do that, it can probably also get around the immunity conferred by existing vaccines.
Dyer ends by calling for complete quarantine of the country. What's bothering me, is that I found the article last night, already over a week old. There are indeed other articles in the news that seem to concede the same basic facts, if not all as urgently. (There's apparently hope that vaccines will still work, at least partially, against P1; and Bolsonaro announced a change of mind on vaccines, the day after Dyer's article - which still strikes me as a remarkable case of "too little, too late", given how Canada itself shows how slow a vaccine rollout can be. Brazil, a much-poorer country with a far weaker health system, can't possibly do anything useful against P1 in time, not with vaccines. Bolsonaro still won't lock down, or restrict travel.
So, Dyer's right, and we're just not facing up to the obvious risk coming in from another country, exactly like this time last year.
We're looking forward to the end of the pandemic over the summer, but if we don't hit the Brazil panic button, even out of an abundance of caution, we're taking a stupid risk of a second pandemic.
The term "crimes against Humanity", normally refers to a crime against any humans that denies their rights, and therefore all of ours. In this rare case, he's committing an actual, physical crime against all humanity, far worse than the usual meaning of the term. As his behaviour is willful, and follows multiple warnings, he's arguably the greatest criminal on Earth right now, trying to kill not just a million more Brazilians, but tens of millions of other humans.
Hit the panic button.
http://brander.ca/c19#brazil
But what caught me today was the big difference with Ontario, where that has already happened; but only in Ontario. Why Ontario? What are they doing wrong, or other provinces, right? Here's the variance of variants:
| BC: | 116 of 544 | = 21% |
| Alberta: | 62 of 355 | = 17% |
| Saskatchewan: | 66 of 156 | = 42% |
| Manitoba: | 14 of 111 | = 13% |
| Ontario: | 1034 , estimated: | over 50% |
| Quebec: | 179 of 703 | = 25% |
Why Ontario? Mind you, Saskatchewan has more cases per capita, and almost their variant percentage. It's easy to point out differences from huge, urban Ontario and the rest of Canada, but why does Saskatchewan have over three times the percentage of variants found in Manitoba?
I doubt the public health officials have time to chase down these questions, before the question has changed. One can only hope that we figure it out eventually, figure out what went wrong and right.
BC has been an conundrum for me. I've been railing that we have to change our behaviour, have to restrict more, it's about to take off - but I've been wrong. BC has been wandering up and down, spikes and dips, between 400 and 600 cases per day, for over two months. It's weird for pandemic count-numbers to do that -most stories are like Gibraltar yesterday, either soaring or plummeting, (or at least, sinking steadily).
I'm not complaining. The number is low enough, that with the old vaccinated, we aren't taking many casualties. If only Ontario could do as well.
http://brander.ca/c19#varvar
I normally ignore places like Gibraltar; they show up as separate entries in the "worldometers", but with just 33,000 residents, aren't a fair compare to what I called "The Major League" in my initial essay. Gibraltar, at left, is actually the single worst "standing" in the COVID Cup, with "2700 dead per million", despite under 100 deaths, some half again as bad as the catastrophes of the UK and Belgium.
But it's also the place that has pulled off the tremendous response to the recent wave that began in December and did all the killing. They instituted a tight lockdown at the start of the year, and it worked immediately, cases falling rapidly just a week later.
A few days after that, a major vaccination drive began, reaching past 40% vaccinated in just two weeks; by the third week, they were announcing the coming end of the lockdown, and by week four, February 1st, they started a re-opening that was completed over the course of February.
But not too quickly, or too soon; they didn't fully re-open until the start of March, they waited until cases were down to almost nothing...and until they were past the 70% mark for at least first vaccinations, and only people in their 20s were still exposed.
And now, they've reached that wonderful spot I only thought Israel had reached some weeks back: 88% vaccinated, cases at a couple per day.
Gibraltar, as said, is too small to compare to large nations. But, as an aspiration, their story of the last three months is one to hope for.
We've fallen off in doing comparisons to other nations. It's been some time since I read a story about South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Australia, the COVID Cup Champion fighters. I did see one recently about how Taiwan was already marketing itself as a safer place for business and tourism - not based on the current case-count so much, as bragging about how well it has done in the overall pandemic fight.
I think that business and travel alike are going to be taking a hard look at pandemic performance, once all the dust has settled, late this Fall, and investments may move around, the same as they do when a nation displays political instability, or economic fragility. COVID's judgement will be noted, for us all.
I loved my visit to Gibraltar, some years back. Climbing that whole mountain, and down again, to shop in town, was a magnificent view and a fun day. I'll have to go back; maybe stop in at city hall and offer congratulations. The COVID Cup's worst sufferer also played a near-perfect game.
http://brander.ca/c19#gibraltar
...at least, not compared to how afraid I am of COVID-19. It causes blood clots, for sure, instead of a barely-possible, hugely-unlikely maybe.
The doctors have to act this way; they basically aren't allowed to use "common sense", since, in the long run, science has often triumphed over common sense. Things that "really just couldn't be", turn out to be the unlikely truth.
But the price of science is patience, and I have none, just now. It's correct, over the long run, to be wrong ten times to be right once, follow the science. Four cases of blood clots just happened to follow vaccinations of the old, just as kids tend to show signs of autism around age 3-5, the same as when they are vaccinated, and you get a time-correlation, that is very probably not causation.
With autism, multiple careful studies established that there's no causation. NO, I'm not linking to them. If you still need that proven, then go away, I don't even want you reading my blog.
With blood-clots, we can no doubt gather data together fairly quickly, since so many are being vaccinated, that the rate of people developing blood clots, around their vaccination, is the same before and after the vaccination itself. Old people get blood clots. If you vaccinate hundreds of thousands, then the causation-proof would be that (say) 1 person per 10,000 per day gets a blood clot in the 7 days before the vaccination, and 2 or 3 persons per day, in the seven days after.
That's almost certainly not going to be the case, because of that "common sense" thing: nothing about the vaccine, or immune responses to such vaccines, has ever been associated before, with clotting.
Scientists have to check, that's science. But politicians have been overruling them, for economic, lobbyist-borne reasons, for the whole year. Let's overrule their caution, and volunteer Canada to receieve all the Oxford Astazeneca products that other countries are currently not taking.
I'll take the first shot.
http://brander.ca/c19#bloodclots
It's six weeks since I predicted that Biden's "Path to Victory" was to shoot for their Independence Day for the victory party. As linked to at left, he just announced it.
To be exact, my words were:
Then he can stand up on the steps of the Capitol again, on Independence Day, and declare American Independence from the tyranny of the virus.
And his words, the other day, were:
"That will make this Independence Day something truly special, where we not only mark our independence as a nation but we begin to mark our independence from this virus,"
Not that it was hard. Anybody who loved Bill Pullman's speech at the end of the movie, "Independence Day" could see it at once. The trick is to turn it around, and consider what a failure it would look like if July 4, nearly seven months after the first vaccines got out of labs, had still left Americans unable to have their summer kick-off party? Unacceptable.
Moving at least some kind of major social-events re-opening to the beginning of summer is an obvious morale need for us, too. Because Canada got off to a later start, I'm not sure we can do the same for Canada Day; that's why I went for the Fireworks, (and the August long-weekend) as BCs target holiday.
Calgary, of course, is going to want the Stampede, and that may be tricky, at least without "vaccine passports" at the door. Hardly surprising that Jason Kenney just raised it as a goal, though without commitment. I wouldn't commit, either, not with half of Europe re-introducing restrictions. These new variants are proving to be as scary as predicted. Fingers crossed we can get the case-count way-low by late June.
http://brander.ca/c19#bidencalled
I now have multiple friends linking me to the Centre for Health Informatics at the U of C. They are publishing COVID-19 test levels from three sewer sampling sites, each of which agglomerates much of the city - there are just three zones being accumulated into one big reading. (Map at left).
Well, finally.
CCCC, having a history with sewer management, has long since published links to similar projects at Ottawa, and Guelph, both last October. Those projects followed a successful project in New Jersey colleges.
Everywhere it's been tried, it's worked, been a fine idea. It just doesn't catch on, doesn't get real funding. Everybody doing it is doing research, not active public health work. Hugely frustrating! But, typical. I realized, last spring, when innovative ways of testing were unable to get traction, that public health bureaucrats are too conservative to innovate on-the-fly. We can only hope they pick up reports from the researchers that will cause them to add these tools to the next fight, probably decades from now.
But, just FYI, this is a map of Calgary's sewer catchments. There are over 50 of them, though only 25 have more than 1000 pipes:
The fun thing about a blog, is you can't run out of room. Want to fantasize about really bringing accuracy to this fight? You can also name the 500-some manholes that just collect a subset of each of those, the sub-catchment, and Calgary has over 500 of those, though just 450 with over about 20 pipes.
Most likely, you'd want a mix: go to sub-catchment level with the biggest catchments, basically break the city up into about 200 zones of comparable size. Then you'd be down under 10,000 people in every test zone. You could put test-collection at all the "campuses", every institutional site that has its own collection system: Skyscrapers. Schools. Industrial areas. Food production.
I can almost hear some Calgary researcher breaking out into laughter: 200 test sites? Does this CCCC idiot have any idea how much it costs to run one test site? The staff-hours, not just the equipment?
If so, he's a researcher that don't know business. The pandemic is probably costing Canada hundreds of millions of dollars a day. Strategies that would let us get more work done, save lives, would have been worth going into mass-production on that equipment, and mass-production (training) of staff, eleven months ago. We certainly could have been ramping up a heck of a lot more than this, since October, when the other projects showed success.
I tend to think, that higher-ups don't like to even think, about wastewater projects. The whole subject is distasteful. Like really old people with dementia in care-homes: the subject gets forgotten, over and over. Remember how in "It", all the awful things that happened in the town of Derry just...slipped away from people's minds. In the Stephen King novel, that was magic, but he was riffing on a real phenomenon: people want to forget some things. Until it's your grandma, then you can't.
And we all want to forget the sewers. It's caused us to miss an opportunity...so far.
http://brander.ca/c19#yycsan
I know, that in my heart of hearts, I was kind of smug about it, though I've had many dental issues over the years, and am hugely indebted to the miracles of modern dentistry (three implants..or is it four?) I had one implant replaced during the pandemic, under all kinds of extra PPE that made me feel my least-safe moment was in the entry room, when another guy walked in.
Six weeks ago, Dentists in BC asked for early vaccination, so they could get back to work. For many, that's just about them, but for medical practitioners, it means getting us pro-active care we need (if not want enough to protest about it), rather than only emergency care. It's an entirely reasonable request, from the public's point of view, much less theirs.
But CCCC would like to go a step further, and do a little social engineering. Dentists are obviously able to administer vaccine. Hell, they're the only people who have to give you shots into your gums; your arm, they could do blindfolded on a trapeze.
CCCC hereby proposes making all dentists offices vaccination centres - but only for patients! If you come in and get your dang checkup and cleaning, you can have an early vaccine shot.
They would, of course, be fully booked as fast as their receptionists can type.
Perfect.
Of course, I'd also tell all the meat-plant, and other neglected "essential workers", about the idea, a day early.
There are about 3,000 dentists in BC, and I'm sure they can all see a dozen people a day for basic services. And they'd be happy to put in six-day weeks for a few months, they've lost a lot of work. That's 800,000 people in a month.
Just brainstormin'.
http://brander.ca/c19#dentists
He writes that I would really love this CBC story with five excellent infographics (some moving ones, always cool), not just about disease, but shopping and work patterns, home prices, and travel.
That linked, top item, to breaking news about the growth of "variants of concern", in Ontario. They've nailed down the R value for the biggest variant, at 1.24. That means, as you can see from a graph of the last four weeks, that it will about quintuple in a month. By the 11th of April, todays average of 450 cases/day will be over 2,000.
If all goes well, they should have everybody (sane and) over 70 vaccinated by then, and the death rate from those 2000, per day, will be a fraction of a percent. The hospitals will be "only" as crowded as when they were getting 3500 cases/day in December.
But, still, it sounds nuts to open up in Ontario, unless the variants are very resricted to some regions, and the others have a little more time.
Here in BC, many have been baffled that Bonnie Henry is talking both with concern about variants, and about doing some re-opening, presumably because she's confident about keeping a lid on it with contact-tracing. I don't think Ontario has that luxury.
http://brander.ca/c19#ontariovoc
I've been running numbers on how, damn, if they want to vaccinate over 4 million British Columbians by August, they need to do 32,000 a day from now on - and at present, they have a spike of 12,000 per day, every week when the shipment arrives, then less for the rest of the week.
This article at the CBC does the correct math, where we will take time to ramp up to that, so we'll have to go past it to make up, with a peak at 50,000 vaccinations per day, just in BC. The overall nation will be needing almost exactly ten times that, over 3 million per week all summer.
It's reassuring to hear the confidence with which the political announcements are claiming that level of supply will be coming in. They just have to not screw up the deployment, and all those early supply problems will be forgotten, all forgiven. They know that if they do this really well, they'll probably get away with a lot of their worst failures, in care-homes and rapid testing and schools.
It's also nice that Israel tried out Pfizer on 600 young children, with no ill-effects, even some with cystic fibrosis. Somebody has to try things first, and we are all in their debt.
http://brander.ca/c19#bcvaxsked
Nobody is committing to anything. The trouble is, events don't happen unless you commit work to them months in advance. But if there was one bet you'd think was decent, it would be the Vancouver Fireworks ("Honda Celebration of Light", fine) that come at the end of July.
We're currently figuring that everybody who wants a vaccine will be able to get one by then. It's a really good bet that high vaccination rates for the previous two months, combined with summer, will have the case-load on the run by then, as well.
Yes, it sounds insane: you can get up to 250,000 people watching, they say, probably over 200,000 just on English Bay beach. But everywhere except the most-popular spots right at the centre (where the rock bands also play for hours beforehand) is fairly spread out; I've mostly had over a metre between our blanket and the surrounding ones. It's not much closer quarters, out of doors, at a beach where there's always some breeze, than the Black Lives Matter gathering near Sunset Beach last summer.
Further, the fear of "superspreader" events is two-fold: the actual infections, and the secondary infections from those. As the event would be near the end of the vaccination schedule, the number of people who can even get the secondary infections would close right down in the few weeks after the end of July.
And why restrict ourselves to the normal date? The date could be pushed back about three weeks, to just before the end of August, and still be summer. By then, we'll probably be slowing down on vaccination, from lack of customers.
It would be a great moment to pick as the point where it was basically all over. Fireworks would be the perfect end-of-pandemic celebration.
http://brander.ca/c19#fireworks
First up, a retraction of two posts is needed, as they were based on incorrect data. The Israeli "cliff" post and the "Israel, WTF?" post were both based on data from the source at left, which was showing Israel as having vaccinated 70, then 90+ percent of its population - until recently, when the number jumped down to just over 50%.
I was at first wondering if Israel had taken to heart the SNL joke about "Israel is half vaccinated - the Jewish half, I'm thinking", by Michael Che. (In point of fact, Israel is not vaccinating the Palestinian Territories yet, save giving some leftovers to their medical staff.) But, no: while Israel is vaccinating Muslim Israelis, (not "Palestinians", citizens), I think that the tracker service simply confused "doses per 100 citizens" with "percent citizens vaccinated", or some such. In any event, the reason they've hit a plateau on cases is now clear. We'll all need some patience to see the miracle of herd immunity make that cliff happen.
But the limits to vaccination that caught me this morning was the news of not just one, but two outbreaks at a hospital in Kelowna..
These are recent. They happened after we'd vaccinated (nearly?) all our medical staff, who were in line starting December, and are not anti-vaxxers. These hospital outbreaks are happening despite the staff, who should be about the only humans in contact with patients, having at least one shot.
It's much too early to tell just how effective vaccines are at stopping the spread, as opposed to stopping the symptoms, but news stories like these urge us all to caution. As the vaccine rollout hits high gear in a couple of weeks, by a month from now, people will be wanting to "act normal".
Don't let vaccination drive your behaviour. Let the case-count drive your behaviour. If the vaccines are working, the case-count will show it.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxlimits
Permit me to go off-topic for a bit; there's just a fine contrast, in my media mix this morning, between two ways of "taking over the world".
Salon.com has an excellent (non-pandemic) article, linked at left, about how the media sells war to liberals by portraying each intervention as a necessary humanitarian effort, or a "tragic failure" if we don't drop bombs.
It contrasts all the many, many articles over the years that have headlines like these, with how well that worked out in Libya - the country fell to warlords, is still a charnel house - with slave markets. Curiously, new articles about Libya all wonder how it could have happened, often not even mentioning the massive NATO bombings.
The same morning, I read at the National Post, about Russia, China, and India moving aggressively to provide vaccines around the world, China to more than 50 countries.
"No strings attached" has legal merit, but emotionally, this is going to have positive impact the way that "vaccine nationalism" had negative impact - people remember who their friends were, when they were in need.
I suspect that vaccines themselves are going to be awfully plentiful in a few years; as CCCC has documented with sanitizer, the free market aways overreacts to any strong stimulus. Drug production, on the whole, however, is still an industry Canada could look into, again, for the whole world.
This 2018 Gwynne Dyer article, "Only the Poor Die Screaming" will tear at your heart: how the very cheap new opiates that are killing so many in the first world, are not cheap enough, in the third, to prevent terribly painful deaths to many.
Canada could push back against Big Pharma, by becoming a Very Big Pharma player -and not for excessive profit, just for good jobs doing good deeds. Vaccines are just a part of it.
http://brander.ca/c19#takeover
We all went through the up-tick in cases a month later, but Alberta, the last week, leveled off and even posted a slight reduction, like most provinces. BC, on the other hand, just keeps heading upward, starting to look like that frightening variant model from February.
Worse, the two provinces have now fully switched places: after a whole year where BC had half the cases of Alberta, it's now Alberta that's down in the mid-300's of new cases per day, BC over 600.
I do not credit Jason Kenney.
One could certainly heap blame on BC politicians and public health officials, for not being harsher, and CCCC certainly has, repeatedly. There's a lot of blame due for not using enough of those rapid tests, too. What probably hasn't been done, is enough credit to all the contact-tracers that have held down the growth as much as they have. The curve still doesn't look exponential, and the fact that we have days where the new-case count goes down, tells you the battle is still joined.
But the bad guys are winning, in BC, at least, and from that recent desperation move, it seems likely they've pinned every hope on vaccines holding down the death count until they can hold down the case-count, months from now.
http://brander.ca/c19#aboverbc
As a lover of information graphics, may I ask everybody to click on the graphic at left to jump to the fine CBC article using that art and science to show the pandemic, particularly the "risk your life to work in a meat plant" part of the pandemic.
This article needs an extra headline: At Least Vaccinate the Meat-Processing Staff.
We're vaccinating the care-homes, as the highest of high priorities, but the only transmission difference between those homes, and The Line, is the relative youth of the victims, holding them down to a few deaths per hundred. The workers are telling their union they're scared. But, if they had any power or money in this world, they wouldn't be working there to start with, so they've been abused by their management and multiple levels of government. A few bucks' worth of vaccine is the least we can do.
The CBC article is about the Cargill plant in Alberta, but the news is also fresh because of the re-opening by Olymel of another one in Red Deer - just in time for that March surge every epidemiologist is expecting.
The article contains a very telling sentence:
The Quebec-based company said reopening has become possible because "management and the regulators are satisfied that employees can return to the plant safely."Conspicuously absent, is any indication of whether the employees think that they can return safely. Normally, in any other line of work, that would be the criterion; in the circus, nobody asks the clowns whether the trapeze is safe for the acrobats. You ask the acrobats who depend upon the ropes.
The employees may have been distracted. They still have 78 active cases out of the 515 who became infected, over a quarter of the 1818 staff. A fourth case died just yesterday, as the Olymel annoucement was coming out, which puts Olymel ahead of the Cargill outbreak for total deaths.
Remember to multiply by, umm, "several", to get a count of infectees who won't ever be quite the same, sustained permanent organ or nerve damage.
We have no excuse. We're eating meat, and sneering at the butcher's pathetic, avoidable death. Vaccinate them all.
http://brander.ca/c19#grimgraphics
But not always. My career included the very origins of the first GIS, "Geographic Information Systems", i.e. smart electronic maps like Google Maps. On that first project, I got to study the database that early GIS used, the code that worked it.
It wasn't that hard. This world has some really complex computer programs, labyrinths of logic, but the problems of "mapping things in XY" and "tracing networks of nodes and links" (like that shortest-path for your car, on Google Maps) are not among them. They're 3rd-year undergrad computer science problems, at best. (Maybe 4th year if you get into spherical trig of the actual 3-D globe, which we didn't.)
As my employer struggled to get a large corporate GIS working, for years...and then, years more, when we concluded that original product I'd studied had to be dumped and replaced with ESRI, the big industry standard package. During those several years, I simply created the GIS functionality Waterworks needed, on top of our simpler CAD (Computer-Aided Drafting) package.
I repeat, it wasn't hard. The database design was a few weeks of work, not months. The CAD coding contractor ultimately charged me $400,000 to rewrite the code for both water and sewer, after charging maybe that much again, for the first water-only version over the previous few years. It was all less than a million.
It did all the GIS stuff I needed for my job - and for other people, many dozens of jobs - for twenty years, so far, and counting. They're still using it. About 10 years back, the corporation launched a massive project, about 30 staff, to replace it with a new Water/Sewer GIS based on that standard ESRI. The project was cancelled at the $8 million dollar mark, when a review showed they were $3 million away from producing a not-superior product, so mine's still there. (Why could $10M not replace my $1M? Overambitious project, badly managed...but the key, I thought was that the programmers were NOT GIS professionals, and not engineers, didn't understand the industry. They spent millions just deciding what to do, whereas I knew what I needed, going in.)
So there's "DIY" working, where the "real professionals" didn't. Sometimes, customers go with the big commercial offering because it was there, and "bigger is better" remains a default assumption, but it can be wrong.
And so we come to Cuba. This is different than my September 13 article about DIY vaccines and how we should just try them.
Cuba, pariah to America and abandoned to dire poverty by its original Communist sponsors for decades, simply ("simply"??) went DIY on vaccine. . The first two candidates are both called "Sovereignty" (Soberana 1 and 2), rather than "ScrewYouToo", because Cubans are nice people.
That's different from some meatball-vaccine experimenters at home, because Cuba already does this: produces 8 of the 12 standard vaccines for its own vaccine program. My "DIY" term is actually an insult to the Cuban professionals that have been doing this for a long time.
The connection between my story and theirs is that: I, too, was a GIS professional, in command of all the relevant knowledge actually needed for the job. (The better-funded guys that tried to replace mine, not so much.) I just wasn't as big a deal as a big GIS company, so seemed to suffer in comparison. But you don't need to buy your fish from a giant fishing boat: the fish from a little fishing boat are just as good, because even that boat is big enough for that job. Bigger is not always better. Pfizer and Moderna are bigger vaccine makers than Cuba, but Cuba can, in fact, do it.
Even though, they're just this little island of 11 million people and about nine spare dollars. These news articles kind of surfaced, only when they got into trials, recently.
There's a whole proud Cuban history in medical care, at this point. Medical brains are pretty much their best export. Fidel himself oversaw the development of their biotech sector 40 years ago. The Soberanas are just the first two of five vaccine candidates they have in development. They believe they can crank up production to 100 million doses per year.
Quite the contrast to Canada, four times larger, seventeen times richer (GDP of $1.7T rather than $100B), which can't produce the needed vaccines now because we abandoned the capability.
I'm confident, lately, that we'll soon have a pretty fast vaccination program with our imports. But I almost wish we could instead just plan a vacation to Cuba for some vaccine tourism.
And those limes. And the Afro-Cubana bands alternating with Salsa bands in the bar. How the hell did just eleven million people invent two whole musical genres?
Hats off to Cuba.
http://brander.ca/c19#cuba
Hey, it's just a blog, some days I only journal. My January 18 post about finally having too much sanitizer clearly needs an update. Stock up for the next pandemic, now's the time to buy! Remember when it was $7.99 for 150ml?
That's available at Canadian Tire right now, so hop in the car. Remember that you can burn it for heat, in other kinds of emergencies. Not a huge drop, really, just down to $14/L from January's $21/L, but it stores better in your shotgun shack.
En route there, on a Monday, I crossed paths with a demonstration, oddly at the Law Courts rather than the usual public square behind the art museum, making it kind of cramped and harder for the public to be in awe of. Maybe they liked the cramping so that they could better deny that there is even a pandemic - or "casedemic", as the sign says. (If it's a world-wide "casedemic", of cases of a disease, isn't that a pandemic? Never ask.)
There's a certain peace descended upon me since the American election went off-the-rails. (It mercifully went off the rails only a month or so after it was over.) As one listens to the bizarre, fragmentary, and so, so vague clouds of conspiracy theories about the "steal", you have to realize how hopeless it always was to convince some people of anything they don't want to believe.
So I smiled and even waved, as I cycled past them. After all, they were on the other side of the road, so I wasn't going to catch wrongness from them. NB: I did clip out the sign that read "Lock Up Comrade Bonnie", alas, but I liked the one turning "Global News" into "Globalist News"; I'd send Keith Baldry a fedora so he could look more spy-like, but I doubt he'd wear it on air.
http://brander.ca/c19#scenes
It's kind of bold and daring, the stuff that we pioneering Westerners imagine as a cultural feature out here. Nobody else on Earth, so far, is stretching out the gap between doses to sixteen weeks, 116 days. And it was fun, seeing the previous, plodding schedule get a major goosing forward. We should be done all the receptive vulnerable people by the end of March: not just the over-80s, but now all the 70s, and at-risk people down to 60.
The very first CCCC post was about the age-related odds: the 70s are the 4.3% mortality group, we 60s just 1.9%. Then, for the 50s, it leaps down, 3-fold, to 0.6%.
There's undoubtedly desperation, because we've clearly given up on that next wave that I've been predicting for ten weeks. By April, they're probably figuring on over 1000 cases per day, and exempting nearly everybody over 70 means 1000 cases becomes only 10 deaths.
People are kind-of shrugging at 10 deaths per day right now, so that won't cause a panic, though I hope it bothers somewhat that they'll mostly be in my age group, with a few decades left.
Having tossed out the strategy of minimizing transmission,in favour of "protect the old", it's my own age group, and a smaller number of 50-somethings, that will be taking it in the shorts. More total cases, almost none over age 70, so those extra lives lost will mostly be in their sixties.
Of course, that Simon Fraser paper with the "600 lives" calculation may have assumed the R-value of the original COVID; Dr. Bonnie may be afraid that even frantically vaccinating essential workers instead won't hold down transmission enough, any more, as the variants spread.
Either way, it boils down to:
http://brander.ca/c19#desperation
I'm putting no more effort into straightening out those graphics from worldometers and CTV; the point is that they're all the same shape, all over North America. Mexico still has some decline, but nearly level.
They say that the goose at the point of the "V" in a formation, is not the leader; they all have a consensus about where they're going, even the "leader" is constantly adjusting his flight as he notes where the geese on either side are turning. You'd swear that coronavirus response had turned that way across a whole continent. States and provinces that had different curves a month ago, are all now just...hitting bottom, and starting slight inclines in cases.
This isn't true in Europe. Spanish cases are still in steep decline; the UK has moderated the rate of drop, but still dropping. (A bigger exception is Portugal, which has done the most amazing decline of the pandemic; they deserve their own post.)
The bad news is that Germany is looking just like North America (slowly rising at about 8,000 cases/day, worse relatively than Canada now), France has been rising from bottom for a month, and Italy has just started to curve sharply upward.
So, it's a mixed bag, but even worldometers grand-world-summary "New Cases" graph has leveled-off in the last week. The predicted Revenge of the Variants would seem to be just about upon us. The case-load is as low as it's going before the next wave hits in a week or so.
That's it, today, just data observed and reported. I'm done railing at it; now it just has to be dealt with.
This story ain't got no moral,
This story ain't got no end;
This story only goes to show
There ain't no good in Men!
http://brander.ca/c19#declineover
Because this is the 21st century, I thought, but clicked, and it has a link to a paper out from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which has this in the summary:
The CUHK team recently developed an oral microbiome immunity formula for COVID-19 patients and postulated that this formula would improve clinical symptoms and decrease proinflammatory markers in SARS-CoV-2 infection. In a pilot study in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 7, significantly more patients who received the formula achieved symptom resolution and a reduction in pro-inflammatory immune markers than those who had standard care. Relative abundance of favourable bacteria species also significantly increased after synbiotic therapy compared with baseline3. These preliminary data suggest that modulation of gut microbiota offers hope of boosting immunity against COVID-19 and other emerging viral infections.
I am duly corrected. If the new Canadian study, PROVID-19, at U. Sherbrooke, pans out, at least.
And I am duly reminded of the great statement about this formulated by musician/comedian Tim Minchin, and his song/poem, "STORM", which you should click on immediately if you haven't heard it. Storm has the greatest statement about this topic, ever:
No, there's no such thing as "Alternative medicine that has been proven to work". "Alternative medicine", by definition, has either not been proven to work, or has been proven to not work. Any alternative medicine that is proven to work, is simply called...medicine.Best of luck to U. Sherbrooke. We could absolutely use a new medicine in our toolkit. I am also reminded of the greatest quote from the movie Wargames: "God Damn it, I'd piss on a spark plug, if I thought it'd do any good".
Let's try the hippie stuff instead.
http://brander.ca/c19#storm
So much for Israel falling off a cliff (in COVID case-counts, when vaccines took hold).
For the last week, it would be fair to say that Israel has met the conditions for "herd immunity". As of seven days ago, February 20, Israel had:
I had already been expecting the slope at the right-hand of the graph above to get steeper (if not quite a "cliff") for two weeks, already. Note again, that the figures above are seven days old. Israel is now at 92% of the population vaccinated (which may make them the most-compliant vaccinators, too: Here's the sad and stupid story of a third of the US military refusing vaccine.)
Instead, the whole last week since those statistics happened, has given us the opposite of a steepening. The case-rate leveled off, and has actually risen nearly 3%, in the last few days. Their seven-day average is 3,784 cases-per-day. That's more than 20% higher than Canada's - and we have over four times their population. Israel's current per-capita case-rate is 75% higher than Canada's brief peak on January 9th.
Which, perhaps, explains the (I'm sure, brief) halt in reductions, and even the little increase. Because the virus is still very prevalent in Israeli common spaces - and the Israelis are abandoning all those "safe behaviours" that CCCC champions. What a validation for my blog! But researchers are blaming behaviour in Israel for the infection increase.
Their language in that story is mild, reminding us what cautious, tentative people researchers are. Anybody else, looking at the cover of today's Times of Israel, at left, would just day "DUH".
Israel is doing so well with vaccination, and using the very good Pfizer product for all of it (they have so much vaccine, that they aren't bothering to use their Moderna stock, fobbing off that extra to Palestinian medics), that the virus can't hold out much longer, no matter how badly they behave. But their current death rate of about 25/day, when it could already be down to half that, means those Purim Parties are going to cost dozens or even hundreds of lives.
The last to die, for a mistake.
http://brander.ca/c19#israelWTF
A fun thing (probably the only fun thing) about a pandemic blog, is that you can often just journal your own life, since it's happening to us all. Last night, I went for takeout to a shawarma place that shall remain nameless, save that it's on Denman Street next to the Babylon Cafe, which did deserve my business.
The shawarma place is about five metres square, somehow squeezes in four little booths. And they were nearly full. They had barriers between them, so that twenty centimetres and some plexiglass separated you from the next table. The plexiglass goes up about a foot about your head, and stops.
I had entered it, in that state, with two masks on, to give a quick order at the counter and wait outside. Last night, the space for ordering had three people crowded into it, elbow to elbow. I stared for a minute, and went next door, which was being run safely. Go, Babylon Cafe. I have no idea how the other place is escaping Public Health inspections. It felt rude at the time, to take a picture. I should go back tonight, snap one, and complain. (Also, I was very hungry to get home.)
Then, today, I get an email from CCCC friend Hugh Costello, who's been in England for months, with his daughter and new granddaughter, Maria. Hugh's wife Christine is still there - perhaps long enough to get vaccinated! Hugh wanted to get home before the new hotel rules came in, and made it. He writes:
Lockdown in UK is quite extensive. Christine and I took Maria for a walk and picked up a few things at the grocery store. I stayed outside with Maria and a headline on the Daily Telegraph caught my eye; grandparents not living in the same house were going to be able to visit with their grandchildren outside (they still won't be able to come indoors) at the end of March. As of now FaceTime and the like are the only options to interact between social bubbles.So, if you're envying the rapid decline in cases that the UK has achieved in the last five weeks flat, at left, that is how you do that. You don't let restaurants open, pretty much how they want, on their own recognizance. People will just do what the shawarma fans last night were doing: deliberately ignore risks.
I'm still putting off showing our own case-count graphs, which clearly show our struggle to go down at all, rather than up. BC in particular, has gotten cavalier about the virus, and we're asking for trouble.
http://brander.ca/c19#reallockdown
Today is a "CTV News"-themed post, in honour of their fine work in spite of over 200 staff being laid-off by their owner, Bell Media, a profit-making enterprise that has correctly seen news as a financial liability for their corporation.
Before they finish killing off CTV News, with cut after cut, though, the newsies are getting out the stories, serving the public trust, if not the bottom line. Today we have two.
Both stories criticize the provincial health plans, with Dr. Bonnie at the buck-stops-here desk, so she gets piled-on today. (The photo is from the non-covid story about her conflict with the RCMP about Naxalone; they're hating on her, too.). But our first story is about the BC decision to go ahead prioritizing my age group in April over high-contact workers. Simon Fraser U has published a model showing it would actually lower cases and save up to 600 lives to delay us 60-79 age group to focus on "teaching, retail, food production and law enforcement".
It's just as wrong to ignore the best-available science to save those 600 lives as it is to ignore masks, or vaccines, or ventilators. You use every tool you have.
It's politics, of course. We old people really get out and vote, and people vote when they're scared. Bonnie's boss, politician Adrian Dix, is right to fear the wrath of old people having their vaccines "snatched away" for a couple of months.
Scientfic strategies minimize loss of life. Political strategies minimize loss of votes.
The second CTV story is nation-wide, though BC is part of it, so we'll link to my own MP, physician Dr. Hedy Fry, calling on BC to use up its million rapid covid tests before they go bad.
Un. Be. Lievable.
As much pandemic news as I follow, I'd just given up on rapid tests. I did post after post about the need to use them, and finally gave up hope. Well, it turns out that they finally got approved, mass-produced, and distributed by the Feds.
And ignored. Left on the shelves. Insane.
The problem is the same as the early failure to recommend masks: they're thinking like personal physicians, not as epidemiologists, fighting fog with things that, statisically, reduce fog.
The logic with masks was that you'd put on your N95 a nurse needed, think you were invulnerable, and behave as if there were no pandemic. They had to flip when it was admitted that while masks provide very partial protection no doctor would rely upon while working, they did statistically reduce transmission so much they were a huge effect.
Their hatred of testing is based on the same objection: rapid tests aren't accurate enough. You can take one, see negative, and think that's certain, behave badly and cause transmission. All true. But uses of rapid tests that are aware of that can statistically reduce transmission. If you rapid-test a whole class after one kid goes positive, and keep the school open instead of closing it, you're very likely going to be correct. Ditto with all those workplaces that need the vaccines! So the other theme of today's post it "what about the essential workers?" CTV's Don Martin interviewed appalled doctors.
Too late for the care-homes: Simon Fraser appears again as Dr. Bonnie's nemisis (and all the other health authorities), calculating that use of rapid-tests in care-homes a year back would have saved about half the deaths in nursing homes. About a third of the deaths in Canada!
The story says that Trudeau is about to start handing the tests to pharmacies, in frustration. BC should just hand them out to school nurses, at least.
These are foolish mistakes.
http://brander.ca/c19#badbonnie
There's two stories I'm delaying as best I can: the high probability that we saw our lowest case-counts for months to come, last week; and that Israeli "cliff" I was hoping for isn't that sharp. So every morning I look for anything else that needs attention, to give another day for data to break my way.
Today's is pretty self-explanatory, at left. (I also look for stories that tell themselves.) I'd love to claim that this was just about our fascist-adjacent neighours to the south; but we all know that there's a fair-sized chunk of Canada, too, that also love the whole cluster of beliefs that the "White: Republicans" group clings to (bitterly).
Obama's "cling bitterly" line, is the about the best description for still holding beliefs that the virus is a hoax, that it's no worse than the flu, that you're safe if you ask for hydroxychloroquine...and now, that vaccines are, if not poison, dubious. Suspicious. Somebody else go first, I'll try it in a year.
For Canada, this group seems to be small enough to not be a serious factor in vaccine acceptance: we should still be more-worried that long-disadvantaged groups are suspicious of White medicine. Even for America, a back-of-the-envelope is easy.
Simply rounding to 40% White Republicans, 40% White Democrats, 20% non-White, gives us:
For the GOP, arguably another huge fail. If they'd been numerous enough to deny that "herd immunity", then they could still be killing other people, and making government look generally bad, just like distance-and-mask-defiance that killed off so many in their Red states in the fall.
But if herd immunity is reached, then all the last deaths, as the epidemic fades at last, will be happening with the anti-vaxxers. Sympathy for them, from almost anybody else, is going to come hard.
http://brander.ca/c19#GOPvaxHate
DATELINE, STRASBOURG, June 28, 1943:German officers were baffled today, when French civilians presented themselves at the train station, demanding to start their annual vacation to Bremen.
Stating that "We've had enough of this war crap; we're tired of it. We've skipped our Bremen vacation for three years in a row, and we've just got War Fatigue." The German officers attempted to politely explain that the war was still going on, and that some inconvenience was unfortunately necessary, when the French would-be tourists became belligerent.
Exasperated, the Germans arrested them. The French have demanded to be jailed in Bremen, with a good view of town.
...said no newspaper story about war, ever.
You'd swear that the central conceit of "Pandemic Fatigue" is that the pandemic is the fault of the government, and The People, bless 'em, have a right to redress for the outrage. Well, you have no right to rail at Mother Nature, you're being silly. It's like being tired of life itself, which is very fatiguing, with all its diseases, and other challenges. It ain't called "This Vale of Tears" for nothing.
I'm grumping because I was inspired by a counter-example on last night's CBC news. They covered a 90th birthday of a man who has only been able to wave at family through a window, for a year, as the last days before his vaccination tick down. But our jaws dropped when they mentioned that his live-in caregiver simply had to bubble up with him, and not her family - she's been living with him for a year, and hasn't hugged family in that long. It was a professional dedication to a job, and a personal dedication to a vulnerable man so dependent on her, that left us in awe.
These marchers seem like such whiny babies compared to her, an adult who accepts that life comes with war, disaster, and disease - that must be met and dealt with, whatever the cost.
http://brander.ca/c19#fatigue
I believe that CCCC may have found its stride, in the underserved journalistic area of "rough speculation". Not wild speculation, but not professional, responsible speculation, either. Regular journalists are professional, and responsible, and only interview doctors and bureaucrats who are professional, responsible, and cautious - which means you don't even get a rough idea.
All we're getting on the vaccination schedule is "we'll all be done by Fall", which is like saying "everybody will finish this marathon by midnight", when Colour Commentary requires at least an honest guess at who will beat what time.
For irresponsible, rough speculation, I'm using the following easy, fun model:
This is enormously reassuring to those of us expecting a terrible variant-driven wave to rise in March, and for April to be very bad. As the cases go into the high thousands per month, nearly everybody with a hospitalization-probability in the tens of percent, a death-rate over over 2%, will be safe.
We'll be able to sustain over twice the case-rate, probably triple, before the hospitals fill up again. It'll give us time to admit what the smart already know, that we need one last lockdown. My earlier hopes of an Easter supper with family. have probably been ruined by the current timidity, the abandonment of "get to zero".
Even better news, they should get down to me before: Canada Day, The Stampede, my birthday, that whole early-July season that always takes me to Calgary for parties and friends. That may still be all cancelled this year, but there's some hope. By the usual Vancouver Fireworks time at the end of July, they'll be down to the early 50-somethings. Again, maybe cancelled, but maybe not.
The schedule is already very rocky by the last date on that table; they really have to go past 1 million doses per week at some point, or 40 million people will take 80 weeks, over a year. Even "herd immunity" would take until December. So they have to pick it up - hopefully, by June, so that all those summer festivals can go on.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxschedule
And America's deaths are one-quarter of the world's, so I extrapolate to get our headline. COVID has killed a thousand kids.
COVID-19 is merciful, compared to the 1918 Flu, of course. The graph at right, from a paper published just a few years ago, shows how cruel it was. The same high mortality for the old, starting around 65; but also an age range of high mortality from age 20-35, the peak productive years! Many widows and orphans.
But the terrible story is at the far left, where the highest mortality was for babies, shooting upwards higher than the 70-somethings, for ages under three.
I got on the topic because the news sites more cautious than CCCC, which follow offical stats, rather than worldometers, are just today filling the top half of the page with the 96-point headline "500,000 dead". The Washington Post has a heart-rending article on the small fraction of those dead that were those hundreds of little children.
If you need strength to get angry at yesterday's rally against public health, just dip into it, as much as you could bear. I had to stop reading:
They had futures in mind. In Gainesville, Fla., Kimmie Lynum was busy planning her 10th birthday party. J.J. Boatman, a 9-year-old in Texas, was thinking about his future; he wanted to be a policeman or maybe work at Taco Casa so he could bring tacos home every day. Tagan Drone, a 5-year-old in Amarillo, Tex., planned to be a mermaid for Halloween.The article mainly focuses on the remaining family, though. There's nothing more devastating for any parent, but also, the brothers and sisters are never the same.
Covid-19 killed Gigi Morse in August in Jackson, Tenn. She was a dynamo of a kid who loved Froot Loops and was obsessed with all things 'Frozen' - the songs, the characters.I get more sanguine about how much faster the American vaccine delivery has been, reading this stuff. America has suffered so much more than we have. Yes, yes, they "brought it on themselves"...except that Gigi Morse did not. The sooner America gets vaccinated, the fewer Gigis and Tagans there will be.The virus didn't kill anyone else in the Morse family, but Gigi's mother says it might as well have. The pain does not ebb. The guilt gnaws at them constantly.
"You see on the news, 'X amount of people died,' but it's so much more than that," Priscilla said. "Do people see just how destroyed your family and your life is, six months later?"
Canada prevented six out of seven child-deaths that we would have had, if we'd been like them. Our kids are in one-seventh the danger. Their vaccines are the next Gigi's salvation. Go, USA.
http://brander.ca/c19#1000kids
We're in the weekly 3-day data-drought in BC. Yesterday, a case-count of over 500 clarified that BC is indeed in trouble, with COVID cases suddenly shooting up in multiple locations, as analysed yesterday, just below. Public health simply said nothing about the frightening numbers, but if all three numbers reported on Monday are up, they really need to talk about a response.
While CCCC awaits those developments, more thanks are due to Globe-and-Mail health reporter, Andre' Picard, last back-patted on November 15.
Andre' sat in for Canadaland Short-Cuts the other day, and tried to counteract the tension-cranking, and attempts to stoke conflict, that the rest of the media are peddling.
Over at Canada's new effort at journalism, The LINE, they're selling the notion that the vaccine rollout is so bad as to cost Trudeau the next election. (I'm actually very excited by The Line, they're writing good stuff - only the problem that I'm now subscribing to about six things, has me hesitating to subscribe for $50/year.)
Host Jesse Brown set up all of that, summing up the national vaccine-panic stories in a voice that kept rising in pitch. Then Picard's voice, low, slow, and calm, shut it all down. Canada's progress is well behind some countries, but really about middle-of-the-pack for developed countries. Nobody is really protected until we all are, so the date you get your shot, is not as important as the date then 70% vaccination is reached. There is just nothing to get that upset about. The media love to build up these things, and oh, they love, love, love to say that political power hangs in the balance on this issue, but the vaccine story is not that dramatic.
Bravo. I've let myself get more excited by it, than it deserves. Picard also noted that some of the best-performing vaccinators: the UK (26%) and US (18%) are the ones in most-desperate need of the help. Both still have far higher per-capita case-rates than we do, you're still safer here!
Picard is still at the Globe, of course, and the graphic at top links to his blog, Picard on Health.
http://brander.ca/c19#picard2
It was especially galling, because former problem-places like Ontario, Quebec, and nearly all of the United States, have had rapidly-falling cases for weeks, so much so that there are articles puzzling over why cases are dropping so much, so fast.
BC had been bumbling along, with cases barely dropping at all, sometimes ticking-up a bit, for all of February. One hoped, every day, for the numbers to tick-down, finally. That BC would join the continent-wide curve-crushing, before the variants came.
Then, yesterday, the reported case-count was 617, nearly two hundred higher than the average of recent days. What the hell?!? Surely, this was some catch-up of cases from previous days, gone unreported? Nope, nothing about that in the news announcement. Dix and Henry blandly reported that cases had "ticked up". Ya think? 50% in a day? Some tick.
I wearily downloaded the whole case database again, to see if this was a single outbreak, somewhere - a work-camp suddenly reporting they'd all got sick over the last week? Nope.
The chart at left shows the raw case-counts, and so the lines are very raggedy, up-and-down every weekend. But if I'd used the "7-day moving average" mostly needed these days to smooth that out, you couldn't see the tremendous spike at the end.
Unsurprisingly, it's the Fraser region, our largest, at 1.8 million, nearly half the province, that is responsible for most of the spike, as it's been responsible for most cases. That's not entirely the larger population: they've had a higher per-capita rate, too. But you can also see upticks in the Vancouver Coastal Region (that is, most of Greater Vancouver), and in the Northern Region (the vast forests from Prince George to Prince Rupert, and far north of them).
The table at right drills down to the contributors to the "spike": Fraser Region is over 140 added cases, compared to the previous two days, Northern added over 60 more cases than previous, we in Coastal were "just" an extra 20-30 cases, all of a sudden.
So it was all over. Cases just spontaneously picked up in much of BC, places far apart.
I was still hoping that the big jump in Fraser was concentrated into one event, something that happened and was over, wouldn't spread. So I broke up the Fraser Region into its sub-regions - there's a map of them all here, at StatsCan, but basically:
I'm chasing this down, carefully, because it looks real bad. If there's no special place this is happening, then it's not isolated; the infection just spread, the last few days, much faster than it did for whole weeks before.
It's hard to panic, as in "The Variants Have Come! Run!" ... even the dreaded variants can't cause a 50% jump in one day. I really don't expect another report of 600 or higher this afternoon. Spikes happen in statistics.
But this is as concerning as it can be. If today's numbers are up even somewhat from two days ago, if the increase holds through the coming weekend (BC will have one more report today, then none until Monday), I don't see what public health can do but move swiftly to a lockdown.
Fingers crossed.
http://brander.ca/c19#spike
Lombardy is the northern province of Italy, population almost exactly 10 million. It was where COVID-19 really hit; it has a lot of old people, care homes. It was the source of those harrowing news videos last spring, every room and corridor crowded with people on oxygen, choices made about whom to unplug.
This Lancet Paper from last April 15 indicates that Lombardy has 10 million people, or one-sixth of Italy's population, but took 53% of Italy's deaths up to that date, or three times the average. Italy is now at 1571 deaths per million. So, Lombardy, if it kept up the ratio, is at 4500.
Even if Lombardy improved its performance later in the pandemic, it's worse: that April 15 number was 2200 deaths-per-million already.
Which brings us to New York, second-worst in the United States at 2,388 deaths-per-million, just behind New Jersey at 2,548. The problem for Governor Cuomo, left, is that the number is false.
New York claims a death count of 45,457. this Associated Press report from last summer suggested that the 6,600 of those deaths claimed to be in care-homes were under-reported by half...and perhaps as much as 65%.
But before we run those numbers, let's take a moment to appreciate what a loathsome swine that Mr. Cuomo has been in other ways. As The Daily Poster reports to its e-mail subscribers today:
"The immunity laws could be wrongly used to provide any individual or entity from liability, even if those decisions were not made in good faith or motivated by financial incentives," 
Amid New York's exploding COVID death toll in April 2020, Cuomo's budget included a provision shielding hospital and nursing home executives from legal consequences if their corporate decisions killed people during the pandemic.
Those are his pandemic sins; I'll leave it to other news to report on the squalid political squirming that followed recently: intimidating whistleblowers, and even just critics, with threats.
...
Cuomo's corporate immunity provision was quickly copied and pasted into other states' laws and into Senate Republican legislation, in near word-for-word fashion. The liability shield spread from New York to other states...
- Report by New York AG
But, those stories do inspire me to use the CCCC superpower of not caring if this is responsible journalism: let's just assume that "as much as 65%" is true. Indeed, CCCC would bet money on it, when all is fully invesigated. If 6,600 is barely a third of the total, then CCCC gets to add no less than 12,000 deaths to that 45,457: we'll kindly round down to 57,000.
57,000 dead, divided by New York's 19.5 million people brings them up to 2923 deaths per million. I'm sure that Lombardy is surely over 3,000 by now, at least.
So, New York is not the absolute worst. Cuomo, on the other hand...really does need to be recalled, impeached from ever again holding office, and, one hopes, charged. It's got to be some kind of crime to lie about how bad a public health crisis is going. One trusts that American Democrats are not the same kind of personality-worshipping tribalists as their Republicans; that his former supporters will now turn upon him in outrage, and end his power to keep hurting people.
http://brander.ca/c19#cuomo
I was going to write about Dr. Henry's complaint that Fraser Region is ticking up. This was a surprise read, because of my own analysis over two weeks back that Fraser was the only one reliably going down. Things have clearly changed.
When I went to check the numbers, and made the graph at left that compares six provinces by how much they've reduced their 7-day average over the last 7 days. BC actually had a decent downward-tick yesterday; (dark blue line). Henry was obviously advising caution about it.
I was going to add comments about how Alberta (orange line) is now far better than BC, after all those months of being twice the rate; but then I realized that the whole West had an uptick the last few days. Family Day? It's not our biggest holiday, doesn't come with a family feast-meal like December. And here's the thing: Ontario also gets Family Day, and their descent (dark red line) is the best of us all!
One really has to wonder about Manitoba: heading straight up, all week.
We've just a few weeks now, before the variants change the R. We could really stand three weeks in a row like Ontario's: 20% reduction every week. That would halve the current numbers, get Canada down to the peak of the first wave. That's not a great position to go into a new wave with, frankly, but it's a lot better than our current situation.
We're acting like the vaccine cavalry is just over the hill, going to arrive next week. For the very old and institutionalized, the health-care workers, yes, it is. The rest of us, however, need to get serious.
http://brander.ca/c19#uptick
There was nothing special about Iowa in the numbers with which CCCC is sadly obsessed. In the great worldometers scoreboard of CCCC, where every US state has its own database entry (but not Canadian provinces, the jerks), Iowa currently clocks in at 1668 deaths-per-million, which is awful, worse than our by-far-worst province, Quebec. It's worse than the US average, which crossed 1500 yesterday, and worse than most other nations, worse than poor Italy, poorer Portugal. But it wasn't that bad as US States go! The US has done so badly, you have to grade on the curve, and Iowa is the 16th-worst state, a long way behind the horrible failures of New York/New Jersey care homes. (Wealthy Connecticut was also dismal, at over 2000 deaths-per-million.)
But Iowa is special because its bad performance comes in spite of its (covid survival) virtues. It's nearly all-white; financially comfortable; provisioned with infrastructure, and extremely rural. Iowa's pandemic problem is its politics.
An introduction to that bag of snakes would start with this Atlantic article on their representative Steve King, tossed from the Republican party for his openly anti-Semitic and racist remarks, but still loved back home.
By last December, The Atlantic was even more torqued at Iowa, with the article "Iowa Is What Happens When Government Does Nothing", excoriating the state's awful pandemic performance, losing thousands of lives that could have been saved. They have a total population of just 3.1 million, but over 5,000 dead. Manitoba and Saskatchewan, together, have nearly that population (2.5 M), a similar geography, and just over 1,200 dead. Compared to them, Iowa tossed over three thousand lives away.
That article makes it plain that the performative-freedom-politics, where you pose yourself as a hero to the Common Man, fighting against Oppressive Government by opposing public health steps, is responsible. Example after example, of the government doing nothing, while government figures actively praise bad behaviour.
What cranked up this Iowa ill-will, is the more-astonished-than-angry article in the Post, "Welcome to Iowa, A State That Doesn't Care If You Live Or Die", a few days ago. At this moment, where everybody sees the variants taking over the case-load, where the scientists that were all right other times, are predicting a bad March, and worse April, Iowa just lifted all restrictions. Without explanation or warning.
If you only click on one of these articles, that's the one. Iowa is also the source of that story about the meat-plant managers betting on how many would get sick, after the plant forced workers back to work (or be fired), without PPE to protect them.
Hey, the vaccines are coming, right? Well, Iowa ranks 47 out of 50 in vaccine distribution. I've actually found a place, not far from here, that I pity more than Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Imagine having to live in an endless, featureless prairie, and also having terrible, useless, uncaring government by proud, upfront racists.
http://brander.ca/c19#iowa
It took me an amazing amount of googling to answer one simple question: Where are the Israelis getting all those vaccines from, and how?
Every news article just noted "The vaccines arrived" without naming the source. Finally, I found the Financial Times link above. It's just those same European Pfizer factories that are supposedly denying Canada supply out of "Vaccine Nationalism".
Ummm...why does the vaccine nationalism not apply to Israel? How many soldiers did they sacrifice to defending Belgium, whom I think promised eternal gratitude and friendship at the time?
The FT says that Israel impressed Pfizer by promising the fastest, smoothest vaccine rollout ever (delivered, must admit), and full sharing of data, so that Pfizer would benefit from the quick win, and the natural experiment. I suppose that did benefit Pfizer, and our health-care bureaucracies, that had done so badly at testing, couldn't be expected to manage a fast vaccination. But still, letting the benefits to corporate image dictate national strategies seems blind.
We are members of NATO, so that our military can go do more dying for France and UK and Belgium, should they ever need it. I'm sure they'll promise Eternal Friendship on that occasion, too.
It's no surprise, of course, that "Vaccine Nationalism" applies to our relationship with the United States. Theoretically, they could have shared their manufacturing, agreed to vaccinate both nations in tandem, so that the infections on both side of the longest undefended border would decline in concert. We're so much smaller, they'd still be at 10% of the population done, instead of 11.6%, this morning. But hey, they only agreed Friday to lift the steel and aluminum tariffs for this morning's shipments; until today, we were still a "security risk"...and poor treatment of allies was about the least-mentioned sin of the last administration; Americans just barely care.
But, same deal: I'm sure we'll be hearing from them the next time they throw a war for us to go die in.
http://brander.ca/c19#500000
I can always crap on Iowa tomorrow. (Both their senators just voted to acquit. Screw 'em.)
It's this Atlantic story about the little kingdom of Bhutan, population 777,000; like Nepal next door, a mountain fastness on the northern edge of India.
Having success at the start of the pandemic was easy for these remote places. Bhutan has a small tourist industry by design; they always wanted low impact on their country, and ensure it's expensive. So it was easy to keep it out, at first.
But, that only works for a few months. If you don't have safe behaviours, a single case will become thousands, and in a few months; we've all watched it, over and over. Peru and Bolivia are remote from rich countries, and not big tourist draws, but both have been ravaged. Bhutan has kept it out, and kept it down. Down to nothing: they've had one case per thousand residents, (Canada has had 20). And one death, despite having only one ventilator. (Average income, about $3000.)
It won't surprise CCCC fans to know they've done it by a maximum of safe behaviours, and almost-astounding public-health competence.
Around midnight on March 6, Bhutan confirmed its first case of COVID-19: a 76-year-old American tourist. Six hours and 18 minutes later, some 300 possible contacts, and contacts of contacts, had been traced and quarantined. “It must have been a record,” Minister of Health Dechen Wangmo—a plain-spoken Yale-educated epidemiologist—told the national newspaper Kuensel, with evident pride.The other Good News story is New Zealand, with Aukland going into a three-day lockdown because they had three unexplained cases.
For New Zealand, this is "a significant setback", but I'm thrilled by it. First, that the public-health system was that confident, and swift, and decisive. So much better than our nervous, tentative warnings about what we might have to do, please just be good.
Secondly, that they have this thing so whipped that the tiny outbreaks can be nailed with a mere three day lockdown. Three days? BC couldn't fix its current mess in less than three weeks.
I've been posting downer material for days, about case-rates that sit on shelves instead of declining, vaccines that aren't coming, trains rushing at us. It's nice to know that at least in some places, sanity and science have prevailed.
http://brander.ca/c19#bhutan
Trudeau will get the blame, obviously, "the buck stops here". Certainly the provincial politicians will take none, though they actually have, always had, the power to make their own deals, as they did with PPE. Trudeau alone has no higher power to point to.
But Trudeau, and previous Prime Ministers, did let themselves be ruled over by the one overarching Ruler of the Earth: the Free Market. All the vaccine manufacturing is in other countries, not because Canadians forbade it, or chased it out; it was just a little cheaper, or a little closer to Home Office, to put everything in Europe and America.
It nice, I guess, that nobody is pointing fingers at "other countries", and making this a diplomatic fight. But there's no getting around it: our closest allies, for whom we did not have to send Canadians off to die in war, ever (we've never needed to defend ourselves since 1814; every Canadian soldier since has died for an ally) turned their backs on us, rather than take the kind of political heat that Mr. Trudeau now feels.
We've done a lot of dying for Europe, for Belgium and France. We did some recent dying in an apparently pointless, vain, war in Afghanistan, for America. Their 15% today, would still be 13.5%, if they'd committed to Canada and America vaccinating in tandem, each at the same rate. But nobody even discussed holding back the American program by one-tenth to keep our program at par. The very idea.
At least, now we know whom our friends are: not our military allies, and not those wonderful, innovative, enterprising entrepreneurs of the Free Market.
Well, CCCC attacks from the Left, if only to give readers a little variety from most news. Mr. Trudeau should make some noise about just nationalizing the Canadian Pharmaceutical Industry. The idea has had currency for some time. Normally, nationalization is crazy talk - humanity found out the hard way that government control of the economy is stinks on ice. But Big Pharma is such a tight, centralized oligopoly it's practically a government right now - just not a government that serves the public trust.
I'm not saying Mr. Trudeau should actually nationalize the whole industry; I'm saying he should make some noise about it - I just want to see the looks on their faces in the Parliamentary hearings.
If Trudeau can beg, threaten, or bargain for a flood of vaccines in the second quarter, he'll be saved. If not, he should deflect blame to the industry - make some noise about how they're an unelected government of Canadian Health Care, promise to fight against them for Canadians, point out a bunch of their sins (that should not be hard), and propose something populist, if not nationalization.
But just getting more deliveries instead would be far better. People remember the end of the story.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxblame
What multiple news sites and social media meme-forwarders are passing around is this model produced by people at Alberta Health, about what the B117 ("Kent", or "UK") variant means. Here's the very short version: the UK variant grows, under restrictions that do suppress the original, as fast as the original did with no restrictions. It will be a jump one year back to last April, only with all that explosive growth happening despite the current level of restrictions.
And I just changed that last sentence from "would be" to "will be", because I think that the public health people are simply resigned to letting it happen, so that people will agree to a "COVID Zero" grade of lockdown.
Norway has shown that a tight lockdown can control even the B117 variant. Their case-rate is stable again, their postive test rate down to 1%. But it took some tight restrictions, which the public health people are clearly not going to pro-actively order. This makes me very sad; we can see this train coming, know how much it will hurt when the train hits us, and we aren't getting off the track. When this graphic showed up, some were still hoping for a strong pro-active response, so that cases would be WAY down by March, the growth of the variant also suppressed, giving us more time to vaccinate. It's not happening. So, this graphic is now a prediction, not a just a warning.
The model shows the situation I discussed yesterday, where the case-rate is much higher than today, by the start of April - so high that the death-rate will soon be the same, despite everybody over 80 being protected.
The vaccinations will be picking up, and the over-70s will be kind of frantic to get them, as the ICUs fill up with people in their age-group, and some 60-somethings. Finally, there will be a lockdown, because people always do the right thing, when you hit them over the head repeatedly, and threaten their lives.
But it will, very predictably, be the cruelest month. I really feel like dropping this blog so I don't have to watch the train coming.
http://brander.ca/c19#april
Here's a very rough approximation, using the wrong statistical technique: just chopping off the deaths over age 75 on the chart at upper left. They're about 252,000, compared to 169,000 deaths under age 75, in the US, that is, the under-75s are 40% of the total dying. (Half of those are 65-74, so one can imagine their frantic search for a vaccination, by April.) So, will the death-rate per 1000 cases be about 40% of current numbers?
That's probably close enough for such inexact estimation, but it's not how you do it. You have to subtract the protected from the current case-distribution. (12% should be in the mostly protected, over-70 group). Then you treat the remaining 88% as 100%, and have to bump up their death-rate, because they are now all of the cases. Roughly.
It doesn't make a lot of difference; the death-rate will be about half what it was, with 1000 younger people being all of 1000 cases, than with 1000 people, of whom one-eighth are old.
Right now, BC and Alberta cannot seem to get much below 700 cases per day, and have nearly 20 deaths per day. Suppose we have it down to 400 by early March, when it starts going up again, because variants bypass our restrictions. By mid-April, they could be at thousands of cases per day. Once it hits double the current 700, once it hits 1400/day, the death count will be the same, then start going up...and few of the dead will be very old.
That will be the point where there will either be a massive, well-run vaccine program going full steam - or political heads will roll. The complaining right now is nothing.
http://brander.ca/c19#newdeathrate
The words above link to the most-viewed story on CBC News this morning: that the scare we all got a year ago, when 40 of 73 doctors and nurses at a prairie curling bonspiel got COVID-19 in a matter of a few days.
So, the doctors struck back with science, making data-lemonade out of the viral lemons, interviewed everybody about their contacts in detail, and how many secondary infections there were. The came up with one conclusion of special interest to the general public: it was the socializing. Seventeen of the 18 teams that participated had at least one case. The only exception was the team that skipped all social events.
Turn that around to a victory statement: they curled with people that were all turning positive and shedding virus, who were all getting it from each other, and were unscathed.
That means that curling itself can be a safe activity! So, perhaps, can be all those children's sports that many are hesitant to re-start. Hockey can hardly be more dangerous than curling, (except for head injuries, of course).
And, again, and again, we see the blame pointed at those darn "sociables". Not, maybe the world-famous "The Sociables", gang of Brier SuperFans that delight the crowds (and bored news cameramen) pictured at top, (picture links to their story). They've been out of business since that bonspiel scared the bejezus out of the whole sport.
But, the sociables, more generally, are the problem with everything. We can probably do more activities - sport, business, school - as long as we avoid the stuff that humans do when they socialize: face each other and open their mouths.
So: everybody stop doing that, and we'll be fine.
http://brander.ca/c19#curling
With Canada, you can see that in 2006, there was a lot of population in the 40-55 demographic, and you can still see all the "extra" females over 80, compared to the men, dead of WW2, and earlier health mortality. You can also note the dearth of Canadians in the 0-14 age group - the size of the "under 5" bar is how big the "40-45" bar would be in 40 years, were it not for all our immigration. (This is why we have high immigration: if the 45-year-olds want somebody to sell their houses to in 25 years, there wouldn't be enough 30-year-olds buying then to avoid a housing crash, save for immigration.)
Anyway, that's the kind of stuff his lecture was about: when will various economic needs change because they're age-specific. Like houses. And medicine.
Alberta has a lot more people in the 0-35 demographic, in 2006, and probably still does, because Alberta gets so much young immigration, from other countries and other provinces.
Similarly, above age 55, Alberta has relatively few senior citizens, compared to the rest of Canada.
By the time you get up to age 80+, the "COVID Death Zone", Alberta is really defincient. The province really has an easier time of it with COVID death counts.
For those incensed at "transfer payments", here they are. There are not actual transfers. All that journalists mean when they say "transfer payments" is that income tax revenues are higher per capita in some provinces than others. When you think of Alberta "transferring" to Quebec, it's often Quebecois that moved to Alberta to work and pay taxes, which are consumed by their mother in the care-home in Quebec. At least until recently, when several thousand died.
When you subtract out the part of "transfer payments" that is just "young people paying into Social Security and old people taking it out", there's often not much left to complain about.
The differences between Alberta and Quebec may cause some loud "transfer payment" complaints, but they don't explain more than a little of the huge number of dead in Quebec. Quebec does not have twice the old people as Alberta; it's more like Alberta is 10% below Canadian average, and Quebec, 10% above.
Aging countries like this will be struggling with any pandemic, since few of them are kind to the old.
I'm actually repeating myself, from 10 months ago in early April, comparing Italy and India, when the blog was barely started. Having found the original Foot graphics that compare them to Canada, I wanted to go over it again, as we consider how desperately the third world needs those vaccines. They do, absolutely. The urgency for those besides health-care workers, however, is not the same.
India is just inherently incapable of having the same death-rate from the pandemic, because so much less of her population is over 40.
http://brander.ca/c19#demo
Now both the minor and major hell terms are adjusted for "just a flu at home"; it was bad by that standard, where you're so tired you can't read, where sitting up for supper and two hours' of TV every 24 is a major athletic achievement. And of course, the endless misery in the throat, down through all the lungs, just holding on. But I don't mean that hospital needs were looming, not even for Dora during her first, worst week.
But that's all normal. People get flu every year or three, even get it that bad every decade or so; I'm sure I've been through several like that in my life, forgotten most of them - they're normal. Unpleasant, very, but not scary.
If a shot can reduce COVID-19 to no worse than that, I'm done. The pandemic is over for me, because the disease has been reduced to a normal, unfrightening, acceptable event in my life. I'd take that "only 50% effective" shot today, as my only further protection, because it's 100% effective at preventing "severe illness"...which, when a physician says it, means "severe enough to call me". I'm taking that to mean the minor hell I remember is the worst I could then expect from COVID-19. So I'd be done. I live with that already.
Dora has just turned 89, and while she has no underlying conditions - at 89, she's on one pill, the most minimial blood-pressure prescription, and shoveled the walk for an hour this week - a flu as bad as December 2018 might risk her life this year, or next. If the same symptoms hit again, she might need a few days under care - and for her demographic, any hospital would be worrisome indeed.
The vaccine experiments are not getting into that - when somebody is so weak that they can be killed by almost any flu-like symptoms, preventing even them is an almost impossible. We try with the flu itself every year, but every year, flu deaths are considered normal, and even merciful, endings for some.
If COVID-19 is reduced to only as deadly as the flu already is, in care homes, then again, the pandemic is over even for them. We, and they, have already been accepting the cost of "flu season", for decades. Maybe we shouldn't, but that's our culture. COVID-19 will become a normal part of it.
Needless to say, if we have 50% vaccines and 95% vaccines, the old people (75+) all get the best ones. For the rest of us, though, it's kind of a shrug. Or should be. I plan to shrug, and line up for whatever they've got.
http://brander.ca/c19#jjvax
Quebec has done badly, very badly. It must be noted that they have the oldest demographic age-pyramid in Canada, they just have a lot more old people to catch it. They have been twice as bad as the next-worst province (Ontario) since the start. Quebec looked as bad as the UK last July.
Well, one thing has changed from that chart, relatively: Quebec is no longer as bad as the UK. Quebec may have doubled her deaths-per-million to over 1200, in seven months, but the UK has nearly tripled their number, now up to 1,651 dead per million.
As this chart shows, Quebec, which looks awful compared to other Canadians, shows up pretty high on this overall North American listing.
All of Canada (save Quebec) would be among the very best, were we American states. Our own BC, and the two million in Atlantic and Northern Canada, are better than any. Saskatchewan, beaten by a hair, only by wealthy, lily-white Vermont.
BC is no longer twice as smart as Alberta, that I foolishly bragged about just weeks ago. Our continued high cases have us down to 25% better, and Alberta, for all Kenney's missteps, would rank in the top-five US states in the intramural COVID Cup standings.
Even Ontario would, actually: only four US states have it better. The disappointment of 2021 so far has been Manitoba, which kept to the lowest of COVID Cup scores for nearly a year, then slipped recently, now Canada's second-worst province after Quebec. Worse news for them, their decline-in-cases of recent weeks looks more like the slow, stuttering decline of BC, than the steady, and steep declines of Ontario and Quebec.
As with my Alberta/BC ranking of a few weeks back, the pandemic never gives you a breath to assume that current standings will remain. Germany had a huge wave. The USA is vaccinating much more quickly than we are: they are nearly at 12% with shots, while we languish at 2.4%, a fifth as much. They could start pulling ahead in a matter of weeks.
When you look at the numbers, its hard to avoid a clear recommendation: what vaccines we have, give to Quebec. They have a lot of seniors, and I would say they have a bad government. Rather than saying "well, they deserve this, then", we should have a care, show some national solidarity, and prioritize vaccine distribution by risk, just as we did with First Nations communities.
Being treated like Canada's problem province is punishment enough. That, and ten thousand dead.
http://brander.ca/c19#q
It's richly deserved. It's got people asking Dr. Bonnie Henry questions in news conferences, has her denying that its call for "Get To Zero" is even possible.
This isn't recent news, the original story has just been building for a whole week. It isn't going away. The link just above notes how many experts support Nikiforuk's call, and links in turn to the "Canadian Shield" strategy document that makes the same call for a rapid push-down on transmission.
CCCC is just joining in, after a week, because I'm not even sure that we are reducing cases at the pathetic rate of R=0.92 that I calculated the other day. Yesterday's case-count was back up again, barely below 500; we're leaving ourselves sitting ducks for the variants to spike that up to thousands in March.
Secondly, Nikiforuk, for all his popularity with people-who-read, might as well be a voice crying in the wilderness, next to all the talk of re-opening, now that curves have been crushed down to merely the size that frightened us last Spring. Everybody is talking about Whistler, but nobody is doing anything about it.
Thousands of jobs in Whistler hang in the balance, the news stressed. Can't they at least threaten them with closure, discuss the idea, just to encourage them to smarten up all that staff-socializing apparently at fault?
The contrast between the casual attitudes of the politicians and business community, and the five-alarm noises coming from the science community, is dramatic and frightening. Everybody read your Nikiforuk, today, and get ready to join the outcry. When the case-load starts rising, it'll be too late.
http://brander.ca/c19#get20
The important step, always, is to experiment. I tried putting two on. The thin, very comfortable one from the Aquarium, then Connie's home-made heavy-fabric one on top, with the brilliant wire across the top that lets you mold it around your nose.
It was comfortable; I could breathe fine, actually, and had a feature that made it way better. I wished I'd tried it months ago. I'm never going back to single-masking, at least, not except in mid-summer.
It practically halted the steaming-up of my glasses! I've been wrestling with that problems for months, through the late-Fall and Winter. The wire-over-nose masks really helped, but often needed adjustment. Double-masking wasn't perfect, either, but once I got the two settled together and the wire tamped down, it was the least-steamy vision I'd had since August.
So, that's that, then. Normally, asking for "more" of any sort - more distance, say, has to balance return against cost, even if the cost is "annoyance". In this case, though, I repeat that I wished I'd tried this in September. I hope I'm getting some extra protection and doing my bit; but double-masking, everybody with glasses will want to do, anyway.
http://brander.ca/c19#mask2
I waited long enough to apply my non-patented, (also, non-reliable) method of calculating "R" in seconds - taking the case-rate five days apart and dividing - to yesterday's case-rate divided by January 30. It's 0.92, just enough to cut our case-rate in half - if we keep this up for forty days and forty nights, to the middle of March. Then another forty days - end of April - to cut it in half again. Sometime in May, we'd get down to the case-rate at the peak of the first wave. In short, we are just barely in decline. It's not enough.
The variants would blow us away like lint, if they were prevalent; the lowest estimate is that one adds 0.4 to the "R", taking us up to 1.33, a 50% increase per week.
The decline of December would be more like it: at 0.85, we'd cut it in half in 20 days, be at the peak of first-wave by end of March. Unfortunately, "end of March" is about when the variants will have become dominant, and the calculation doesn't include that. Even 0.85 would probably not be enough to save us from the variants before the vaccine cavalry comes over the hill, about summer.
I'm calculating as I write, here, but my first approximation is: we're still screwed. We have to do more. This is encouraging, but still frightening.
As for any "relaxations", give me a break. Unthinkable.
The odd increases in both case-rate and death-rate for Israel over the last few days, I'm sure are the old problem of "dip in figures over the weekend, spike on Monday as they catch up paperwork".
Israel has generally been on a rather steep downside of the deadly curves for a month now, courtesy of a pretty serious lockdown. Their "R" (roughly approximated by the case-rates five days apart) is about 0.86, lately. Even the heartening American decline was only 0.83, recently moderated to 0.89.
So the whole world is watching Israel case-rates right now. If their daily-cases stop declining at the rate of by 14% every five days, and start declining at, say, 50%, or even 60%, every five days, we all get a glimpse into our own futures. It'll be like a sped-up movie, the decline like falling off a cliff, because of the combination of their jaw-dropping vaccination rate, changing the population almost overnight, and the high rate they started from. (When we vaccinate Prince Edward Island, nobody will notice.)
It's a odd feeling, and a very pleasurable one, to say something nice about Israel for a change. They've got me so inspired and impressed that I'm minded to offer the country a respectful suggestion:
You'll be done vaccinating your whole country in a matter of weeks. Now that the team is running a full speed, why not keep them on, and start vaccinating the heck out of all your neighbours? If only to see the astonishment on their faces, when your doctors show up.
http://brander.ca/c19#point92
They were talking about their concerns about the new COVID-19 pandemic, and especially of their problems with those minimizing it. The Pentagon had just waved off the disease with a comment that Wuhan just "had a bad flu season". Dr. James Lawless, U. Nebraska, is here commenting on that understatement.
Lawless is in the news again (link at image) because near the end of February 2020, just after the first US deaths on February 20, calculated that the US could lose 480,000 souls to it. Worldometers just cracked 450,000 the other day, and they are still losing over 3,000 per day. They will hit that 480,000 just before the one-year anniversary of the first death, giving Lawless a 99% accuracy rating.
What we heard at the time were "models", like Nigel Ferguson's two months later, that offered numbers from 50,000 to 2.2 million for America's risks. Lawless was just throwing out a number from the middle of a wide range; it's really dumb luck ("luck", hah) that he happened to nail it so very closely.
I'm eager (so to speak) to get on with a few topics that need another day or so of data - is BC finally back to crushing the curve? Will Israel now show a really dramatic case decline? But now that we are hitting various anniversaries, I thought to take a day off to look back.
We still don't know how much worse it will get; the variants have thrown all our hard-won expertise of a year into the trash bin. Lawless warns of the possibility of hundreds of thousands more. So much depends on the acceptance of the vaccines, on mutation rates.
The one-year anniversary may not be Red Sunset, but only Red Afternoon.
http://brander.ca/c19#reddawn
Biden's path to being seen as America's adult-president saviour and virus warrior rests on two things: keeping a lid on the ever-faster-spreading virus for six months, and getting to vaccine-based herd immunity in about that time.
He's off to a terrific start, from a week before he was inaugurated. As the graph shows, daily cases peaked 8 days before the inaugural - the newsies hardly noticed because of all the drama around the military occupation of Washington at the time. So Biden basically gets all the credit, in the public mind.
Can he keep that up? So hard to say, as it's all about human behaviour. But, if, just if, his haters are tired of anti-mask demonstrations and all that, if he can just promote a lot more mask-wearing successfully, there's no reason that the whole American curve can't be crushed again. Even the extreme-right Dakotas have done it already. Biden may also get credit for all the harsh lessons the virus itself has taught America this last Fall.
The other half is that he has to do significantly better than his million-vaccinations-a-day promise. There's no reason why not. Unlike Canada, America has the economic and diplomatic muscle to ensure that vaccine makers don't neglect it, and its own manufacturing. His promise was timid: it had already been 60% done, if mostly from state efforts, despite bumbling federal "help".
How is the 1.3M doses/day, shown on the right, only 60% of the way there? Remember, it's two doses per PERSON. The vaccination rate will, about now, have to accomodate those showing up for their second shot.
Biden's real goal, for PR purposes, can be calculated. Today is 153 days from July 4th, 2021. They have vaccinated 31 million Americans, and 70% of the American population (herd immunity) is 21 million. So Biden has 153 days to vaccinate almost exactly 200 million people with 400 million doses (and another 25 million for those already dosed once). Then he can stand up on the steps of the Capitol again, on Independence Day, and declare American Independence from the tyranny of the virus. That actually requires the game to be pushed up further from 1.65M/day to 2.84M/day, an increase of 72%.
Making that declaration at the start of summer, rather than Fall, would make it an exultant summer where socializing was widespread, and the economy came roaring back with a vengeance.
If he can pull all that off, it'll be a bigger victory than any since WW2.
http://brander.ca/c19#biden
The people who aggressively fight masks, and distance, and complain, complain, about restrictions, are actually my second-biggest peeve of the pandemic. The worst are the people who are supposedly trying to fight it, but do so with slow, stupid, blind, incompetence, and even if those are absent, with plodding, timid unwillingness to innovate or change.
Universities are often Big Dumb Bureaucracies that exhibit the worst of the latter, but all of them are charged with the opposite: with being society's innovators and developers. Some universities, as the linked article notes, have done bad, dumb jobs at protecting their community, and those are all over our news pages, pleading against parties and having to close.
The story of Indiana University reminds us that they have for a thousand years been separate communities, "town and gown", giving them a kind of autonomy to work out their own community solutions:
"Through a partnership with medical educators and government officials in Kenya, many of our local faculty and staff had gained expertise in health-care initiatives requiring substantial community outreach. With their help, we hired and trained a corps of contact tracers. Early in the pandemic, I had marveled at how Singapore had a goal of tracking down the source of each identified COVID-19 infection within two hours. In the fall, IU's median time to close a case was half of that."
...
"Collecting a huge quantity of samples was an additional logistical nightmare. But at IU, we realized that our event staff - which has experience at moving massive numbers of people and equipment for football and basketball games, concerts, and commencements - could run our testing operation. Our information-technology services, adept at collecting and processing data as well as building websites and apps, could create dashboards, set up tracking systems, and process test results. And when other institutions found ways to innovate, we copied them."
Could Canada have afforded $700 per citizen for massive testing and contact-tracing that would have allowed a semblance of normality, a lot of business, and of course, education? A real hit, some $27 billion, but of course, we could have done it. We just weren't as smart as Indiana U.
The conceit of this blog is that the pandemic is a "game", or really, a test, to which all nations (and provinces and states) are subjected, some doing well. As universities are, of ancient tradition, their own little states, the freshman class for 2021 can judge them by how honestly, and cleverly, and competently they met the challenge. That makes Indiana Univerity the top of the new Ivy League.
This article really buoyed up my day, though the rain is crashing down again. Strongest possible recommendation.
http://brander.ca/c19#iu
When I got my SQL going well, and a pivot table up, I was able to quickly add and subtract health regions from the graphs, and I finally saw that Fraser and the rest (primarily us here in Vancouver Coastal) have different histories.
Fraser, to be clear, still has a higher per-capita infection rate than the rest, and is most of the infections. Notice that the scales on these graphs are different, the Fraser nearly twice as many as the rest put together. (Fraser is 1.8M, the rest together, just over 3M, people.)
Fraser still needs to get back to decline, that high per-capita is the biggest transmission problem in BC. But the behaviour the rest of us are displaying is execrable: actually increasing case-loads, if anything, while the doctors plead for responsibility. Never mind how many people at Whistler come from out-of-province: right now, nobody should be coming from in-province, either. Go cross-country skiing.
My dithering about why this is happening was answered clearly by Dr. Henry in yesterday's conference: it's socializing. It's NOT work. It's not that Fraser people have to go into buildings to work. The contact-tracing is coming back with "social contacts", over and over. She says, that even infections at work aren't happening while working; they're happening in the coffee room, over lunch, and in meetings with no masks. Meetings with NO MASKS? You idiots.
But most of it isn't even at work, it's in small gatherings, within families, within groups of friends at home. We have to cut that out.
We're doing a weekend games-party with former work people tonight. There will be chicken wings, chips, beers and shots, and good times. And games, all over Zoom. We can suck that up a few more months.
http://brander.ca/c19#ourblame
Then, more hours looking for the "culprit" in the phenomenon of BC simply going level on its case-count for the last two weeks. (See left.) We were starting down the curve, I had it figured we'd be down to low counts by March. Then we just...levelled off. At the unfortunate figure of over 500 cases/day.
Who was not getting their numbers down? Is this Fraser, home to many who work with their hands for a living, catching it at work? Were Vancouver Coastal (those "coastal elites", the smug swine) doing too much partying? Was it going down in some regions, but not in others?
None of them change. It's remarkable, really, the consistency across all five health regions - not one goes up or down much in the last two weeks.
If you want to pick on somebody, pick on Fraser - their infections-per-day is about a third more per capita than the other large region, Vancouver Coastal. (1.8 million for Fraser vs 1.2 million for Coastal - they have nearly double the cases with only 45% more people). But Fraser is steady, not getting worse.
We're all not doing enough. Dr. Bonnie has asked for "more" and got the reply, basically "what more can we do?". Well, our stores and restaurants are all still open.
Dr. Bonnie, people are NOT listening to you. NONE of us. I don't see what choice you have but to close up some stuff, if only to get our attention. We seem to be thinking this is just normal, what more can we do.
The variants are coming. Time is short. Let's get drastic.
http://brander.ca/c19#evenblame
That's weird, in this day and age, but I get it. Most of the "public" input on the pandemic has been from nutbars; if I were an MP, I'd have three layers of filters between public pandemic comments, and my in-box. The group seems to be restricted to scientists, petitioning the government for tight controls on borders, brief, tight lockdowns, and quick response to increased infections with immediate restrictions. They have economic analyses, political-popularity analyses - these were the kids who did extra homework.
They're right, obviously - pandemic strategies have always been pretty obvious, in general, only the specifics ever need tweaks. We're still arguing about whether to increase restrictions as we watch infections rise, which is the very definition of "out of touch" (with the pandemic).
They may have left nothing for me to click on to support them, but I think I'll write my MP anyway - on paper - and drop it at her office.
It's not like there's any time.
http://brander.ca/c19#canshield
By "movie ending", I mean the standard, inevitable one, only tweaked a bit by The Andromeda Strain, (1969), the novel and instant movie about the alien plague, that was stopped by the medical team in the underground laboratory.
Michael Crichton was the only writer I've known to even partially subvert the dramatic convention that any countdown-to-disaster must only be averted with a second or so left. Preferably, with the audience browbeaten by a large, generally red digital countdown clock. (These clocks are invariably present on bombs that were never intended to be found, as well.)
In Strain, the nuclear bomb will destroy the facility to contain the disease, must be stopped by a man climbing the internal core, against the defensive system - he makes it, stops the bomb, but needs hospital treatment. When he wakes up, he's told that the countdown - which he did not know, no timer, rule-break number one - was at 35 seconds.
"Hah! 35 seconds! Not even close!"
But just for fun, Crichton throws in them telling him: "Well, exciting for us - all air is normally sucked out of our level at 30 seconds to detonation". This is still subversion of the usual trope, because (a) it was more seconds than the usual 1 or 2, and (b) we only find out when everybody is laughing later.
Other than that brave violation of norms, by a 29-year-old first-time author that was tired of those endings 51 years ago, it's been countdowns to the last second, as a rule.
Nobody wants that drama in real life, however addictive for screenwriters. But you have to wonder, as we read that AstraZeneca can't produce as much early vaccine as they thought, whether we get a movie ending to the pandemic.
If the vaccinations are nowhere near 50% by April - and that's likely - and if the variants are as scary-good transmitters as they fear, then the infection rate could just explode in the Spring, right past all efforts at lockdown.
That's just a disaster movie, Contagion here at last, but if we don't have enough vaccines in February and March, we may have more than we can inject by April or May. Jump back to my post about excess sanitizer ... our commercial systems and supply chains, crazed with lust to win the race for those sweet, sweet vaccine profits, may be in overdrive, and showering us with the stuff by summer. In my movie, this is just when the new, worst-ever, wave, starts causing panic, because we spent April locking down again, and May discovering it didn't work.
At which point, everybody who can possibly give the jab may be pressed into service: drug stores, dentists, safe-injection centres, school nurses. A race that gets more frantic every week.
I would rather not have the movie ending, thank-you very much; but the virus, and its laws of evolution, are in charge, and since the vaccine companies couldn't possibly be under more pressure, there's little more we can do but get the stuff out promptly and efficiently.
http://brander.ca/c19#movie
One is at 45% vaccination, one at 2.6%. Enough said about that. Everybody's talking about that issue, but I just wanted to pile on. Israel is proof it can be done, and should have everybody demanding to know what our problem is. (OUR problem - I only picked out Quebec because of the same population as Israel.)
Nope, my main topic is the good news from Israel. In a very, very large "trial", there are now over 128,000 Israelis that have had their second shot, and a week for their systems to process that, and another week to see if they still caught COVID.
In the general population, 0.65% caught it that, week. Among the fully vaccinated, twenty people out of 128,000 did: 0.015%. In other words, they've validated the "95% protection" claim with really large numbers.
It does not get better for sane people, but might help the nutbars, that there's no news of autism, paralysis, or any other vaccine boogeymen, after millions of people have had the first shot.
This really confirms it, for any of little faith: we have the tools to get out of this mess. COVID will be around for decades, taking a nibble here and there, even staging an outbreak when it mutates enough to need a new vaccine, but our new mRNA technology will strike back with amazing speed every time, and it is all but finished as a predator, as a drag on our society. It may have to become a yearly re-vaccination. So what? I'm fine with that. If the new vaccine research gives us a yearly "stops most colds" shot, I'll happily line up for flu, cold, and covid vaccines - maybe they can make a yearly cocktail.
It's Israel, of all nations, that got to proclaim the human victory over our common enemy to all. Nearly every piece of news out of Israel has been depressing, or even infuriating, for me, for three decades. I'm so pleased to say something nice.
http://brander.ca/c19#israel
Then, today, it's mentioned by Reuters has having become one of the worst spots in Europe. Then I checked the numbers, and holy cow, just look at them. Look at that tiny, barely-there, brilliantly small first wave, way back. Their second wave started later than others, not late summer, but well into October.
A month later, they were pushing it down well enough, then as the Christmas season hit, the crushing stalled - practically on Christmas Day, it turned sharply around and took off like a jackrabbit, just crazy growth.
Their death rate today, is passing 230 per day, as if Canada were losing 860 Canadians per day. If they follow the usual pandemic statistics, they will be losing over two and half times as many in three more weeks, perhaps 600 per day , for a population of just over 10 million. And then, even worse, probably - look a that case-count chart, it's not even starting to level off. Portugal is going to hit those terrible numbers like 1800 dead per million, currently only suffered by the UK, USA, Belgium.
It might help to compare to the famous, terrible American death-counts of 3,000/day and every 4,000/day recently. 600/day for Portugal is like America losing 20,000 per day. That's how they'll go from heroes to bottom-of-the-league in eight weeks flat.
It's so sobering. "Time and fortune makes fools of us all", and certainly the pandemic does. I'll be not surprised if the next stories of viral ravages come from New Zealand or South Korea. If it can happen to Portugal, it can happen to anybody.
What happened? Hard to tell - Portgual isn't much noticed in the news. Everything I could search up was about the election they had the other day, in the middle of all this. The story is probably between the lines in this Reuters article from weeks ago. They relaxed lockdown over Christmas, and one suspects, people got really "relaxed", must have visited everybody, lulled by their long success, and the apparent crushing of the second wave.
But between the lines, the story is about maybe meeting next week to decide to lock back down again...despite the date, January 7, being after cases were already higher than the peak of their second wave, and had been going up like a rocket for 10 days. They responded too slowly, and it got away from them, just that fast.
Pity poor Portugal, and take heed.
http://brander.ca/c19#portugal
We Skyped to the fam in Spain yesterday, and I was blindsided as they remarked how bad their third wave was got, though it's receding now. Third wave?
Oh, yeah. While North America was only reading their own staggering pandemic numbers and arguing politics, much of Europe is fighting a third wave, with success, while we can't push down our second.
Europe is large, and it's pandemics are very different, just across borders between similar countries, like Belgium and France (Canada and USA can relate.) So I'm going with a good 'ol 1994 HTML table:
There's nothing much to say here, save that their Oxford vaccine is their only saving grace now. While their numbers are going down, the variant they discovered will soon be the virus there is, and a fourth wave in March will be worse yet.
Well, they took heed: this is the fastest crushing of a second wave anywhere, and no third wave whatsoever, no Christmas bump, nothing. Again, not a success story compared to Canada: their death rate has just this week dropped down to the same as Canada's, by population. As ours peaks this week and heads down, I hope it declines as fast as Belgium's though: they're good at this once they get going.
Now, it's Endless Bummer.
If they can't shake off the pandemic fatigue thing, or whatever is keeping their infections up, the variant is going to lay a severe beating upon them. Come on, Germany: pull yourselves together and get in the game.
http://brander.ca/c19#europe3
The news, of course, will note in about a week that Canada has passed 20,000 deaths, that'll be the round number that grabs a headline.
To actually provide some "COVID Cup Colour Commentary", the USA is 'losing' at its effort to kill more people per million than Britain. Even the last administration's game is no match for the sheer incompetence of Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers. Handing your population over to the virus requires an ability to deny reality, and while the GOP took that to Olympian heights with denial of vote counts, the Brexiteers are hardened reality-deniers that put their backs into it.
While the United States has been marvelled at for bumping off of 4,000 Americans per day, that's still just 12 Americans per million, per day. The UK, however, has been managing 1300 and 1400 per day this last week, a staggering 20 Britons per million! Every day! You have to admit, they have game.
OK, my sarcasm chip just blew, I can't write any more of that.
We were warned that the second wave would be worse than the first, and I couldn't believe it. I figured, all those months of "practice", building new systems, getting used to distancing, we'd have tests pouring from our ears by now, we'll crush that second wave like it was candy floss.
Now, I'm just hoping that we can push the numbers down a ways below peak, perhaps down below the peaks of last Spring, before the new variants become dominant and we really lose control. That terrifying topic, and new hopes for that massive testing, will be upcoming topics.
http://brander.ca/c19#500club
Eisenhower had seen the entirely of the military establishment, right to the top; then he had seen the entirely of the political establishment, and supervised it. Near the start of his terms, he also noted this:
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
I covered this topic, before I even invented CCCC, with a separate essay with the extreme title of "US Military Kills a Million Americans". (This was March 20, and just how bad the pandemic would get was still up in the air. There were predictions of up to 2.2 million deaths in America.)
That essay runs on much longer than CCCC posts do, has some charts and graphs, and a stunning picture of Olivia Wilde. (Her Dad has done the best journalism on the subject.) The only update is that the $70B raise the Pentagon got that year was followed by another $20B raise a few months ago: an above-inflation raise in a year where everybody else is taking cuts. (The CDC budget is still about $12B, though I bet they're finally in for an increase!)
The other new point to add is that nobody noticed the sixtieth anniversary of that fundamental speech. Nobody talked about the $20B raise a few months back; it was bipartisan. No newspaper mentioned it more than in-passing, most of the articles about what programs the money was for. Nobody compared it to the cost of that unaffordable "Free College" (Estimated at $40B/year by The Atlantic). It's simply not a topic in their newspapers, in their last election, in their halls of power.
Pity dying Americans, of course, but remember: nearly all of them are content, exchanging two hospitals for a bomber - and buying more bombers than everybody else put together.
http://brander.ca/c19#eisenhower
Biden's pandemic plan (Washington Post link from image) will be helpful, of course, giving more federal support and coordination to what is basically a state-level fight. Canada's own experience, with such different pandemics in the Prairies, Atlantic, and Central Canada, shows how regional and specific the fights are. Alone, however, his plan can't rescue the US from the deep pit they've dug themselves into, which is largely the result of those "unsafe behaviours" that this blog exists to rail about.
Biden has the power to change behaviours just by changing the conversation. He can change it fastest by literal bullying. He can't bully the virus-deniers of course, that would bring backlash. But he can bully the media, almost with impunity: they're used to it after the last guy. When media give oxygen to 'the other side' of the story, giving air time to people ranting about vaccines, and masks, and distancing, all being ineffective, Biden could start calling Fox News "The Virus P.R. Agency". The Wall St. Journal could become "The Ventilator Lobby". Biden could repeat "They're getting people killed" about once a day without oversaturating. I really think he could shut up a lot of repetition of bad-faith arguments.
The Republican Party? How about a special commemoration service for Herman Cain, and for Luke Letlow, the GOP Congressman-elect from 2020 that never got to serve because he died from COVID at 41(!). Biden could casually refer to Cain as having been killed by a virus he picked up a Trump rally (though that is unprovable), because it's widely perceived that way. He could go on and on about how young Letlow was, and how much he still had to give. Then there would be tones of sorrow-not-in-anger about how Letlow's party had such a lamentably lax attitude towards masks while Letlow campaigned, that the campaign probably cost him his life.
What are McConnell and the other GOP princes to do, boycott the ceremony for their own?
He can visit the dying, visit a care-home in full medical PPE, and talk to the cameras about how these people had years left - and are now dying because people opened stores, threw parties, went on vacations. He could speak with a ringing voice about the sacrifices Americans made in war, the food rations, the travel rationing.
He could bring a sense of shame. Hey, who remembers shame?
I'm kind of kidding myself, of course. Biden's a lover, not a fighter. He won't think up mean nicknames, or push very hard. He'd never exploit the deaths of GOP members to defeat the politics that killed them. He'll do better, (he could hardly not) but it won't go all that well. This is America.
http://brander.ca/c19#bully
Krugman might have added that many sciences have gone along, publishing discovered truths and getting minor notice for them, until their truth offended Money, and a War on Truth began:
It was kind of marvellous, their impenetrability to data. Fifty losses in court? Nah. Two of them at the Supreme Court, with the three shiny new judges? Nope. All the Republican Governors and Returning Officers earnestly pleading that they'd done their jobs very carefully, and checked twice, every ballot was watched by scrutineers? Nothing.
My final straw was the very Republican, vote-suppressing Governor and Sec. State of Georgia, patiently explaining that the video of "ballots being pulled from suitcases", was selectively-edited CCTV footage of ballots being taken back out of official storage boxes they'd been put into for the night, before the counters were told they were going to keep going in overtime. It was the constrast to the glee with which the stolen-election believers had brandished the video as absolute proof that got me: engaging with such people is utterly hopeless.
When I got to the forum where it was taken as obvious that the Capitol rioters were really antifa agent provocateurs, I didn't bat an eye. No denial is surprising now.
It's like a joke-phrase from a cop show, or something, "I wouldn't believe that guy if he had two judges as witnesses". You can save your breath, even if you have two judges. Or three Supreme Court Judges. We can all stop arguing now. Just discuss the matter long enough to find out whether your respondent sounds like one of them, then smile and ask about sports.
The War for Science goes on; but the effort has to be at education, a focus on the young. One must engage with elected officials, but arguing with fellow citizens who've made their decision, just takes energy away from something that might work.
http://brander.ca/c19#sciencemarch
So, today's an easy and quick one, just a recommend for this upbeat little article in
Brilliant. Creative. Simple! Effective.
Living in a car, RV, or van - "down by the river", or better yet, in a Duke University parking lot so you can afford your degree, is a problematic solution to housing, for society, but a brilliant one for the individual.
I was much taken by an article in Harpers in 2014, about "Workampers", seniors who lost it all in the crash, and had to work into their 70s, with no home any more but a van or RV. They were (and are) like modern Okies, working the summers at odd jobs, seasonal packing at Amazon warehouses, and wintering in vast Arizona RV archipelagos, "economically dormant", spending a few hundred a month on food and the lot.
The article was about how bad our society is that old people are driven to this. I agree, but their own personal, creative solution for their plight filled me with admiration, as with Ken Ilgunas, and his Duke University success a few years earlier.
It's just an efficient use of resources: a "tiny home", that's not a hipster DIY, but factory-made, with mobility, and with no (permanent) real-estate costs. The workampers further benefit from a consumer society that sells off a camper for under $10,000 when it's old and dowdy, but has tens of thousands of miles left on it.
And here, with the pandemic, the "bad" thing about a camper - that it's just a tiny place with the cold outdoors all around it - makes it the perfect isolation ward for one.
Congratulations, PHS! Smart thinking.
Society in general, however, is only shown up as uncreative dummies, for missing this as a larger solution. ATCO didn't start off as a multi-industry giant that owns the Gas Company; it stands for "Alberta Trailer Company" and got stinking rich selling modular work-camp trailers to Saudi Arabian projects at insane markups. If they'd been called a year ago, they could have created trailers that had four or five of these one-person "wards" per trailer, for a few thousand each, once they were stamping them out every hour.
We have to think this out for next time.
http://brander.ca/c19#campers
Good 'ol Free Market: it can be counted on to produce huge bounty and low prices - after the emergency is over, and the overproduction has to be dumped.
You have to pity the fool still trying to market the same thing at $59.99, on the left. If ever there was a commodity, it's a straightforward chemical. (Though single-malt sanitizer is probably available on Rodeo Drive for $299.99 a tube.)
"Resilience" is basically about "inefficiency". An overstaffed crew is resilient against losing a guy or two; a resilient hospital has spare beds. Modern commerce is all about eliminating all resilience in favour of "just in time", which is impossible if you have a sudden new need.
It wouldn't kill society to have warehouses of hand sanitizer around at all times. The warehouse cost, for a whole society, would not be that high. The stuff keeps forever, you'd just have to cycle the warehouse contents every year or so. The point could be multiplied by a lot of other things that society might have sudden need for. We always have a lot of spare clothing about in stores, but normally have just seven days of food. We never got down to handing out MREs by the Army, like they did in Contagion (and ran out), but then, this wasn't the worst pandemic possible, at all - a really bad one would shut down whole industries and disrupt them all.
And then there's stores of temporary housing and repair materials, in the event of really major earthquake, the other happens-every-century event that nobody prepares for, because, well - a whole century. But it's coming.
The other place to store spares and have resilience is yourself. We didn't need to hit the stores for hand sanitizer; I'd seen Contagion! We had two large bottles and a small one, for years. (We still have most of them; we mostly just washed with soap a lot.) We also have a few weeks of canned food, which takes up little storage space and costs nothing, since we cycle through the food anyway.
That Free Market has been in for some praise, lately, people pointing out how fast those despised Big Pharma companies swung into virus-fighting. Well, sure: with seven billion sales in the offing, that was no surprise. It's low-profit vaccines and resilience that they suck at.
http://brander.ca/c19#resilience
I was wearily wondering whether to bother to note the point - about 426,000 - where the death-toll would equal the sum of military losses in every American war, subtracting only WW2 and Civil - when random searching turned up the coincidence that this is also nearly the number that died in Auschwitz. (Auschwitz itself was just a fraction of the whole 6-million of the Holocaust.)
Which brings us to the death rate. Historians are still sorting that out, since a really well-run Holocaust (at least fascists make the ovens run on time) leaves few witnesses. While the Nazis' "Operation Reinhard" did kick the rate up to 15,000 bodies per day for over three months, most of the Holocaust rarely hit 100,000 dead per month, or about 3,000 per day.
America is now going to hit that 4,000 per day as an actual rate, not just for Monday spikes catching up weekend reports. They're in Holocaust territory. Granted, America's "death camps" are hospitals, desperately pumping oxygen into human bodies to save them, rather than cyanide to kill them, but the output remains the same: over 100,000 cold bodies in the next month.
If you were getting numb to it, I hope this simile brings back your sense of horror. You're welcome.
http://brander.ca/c19#auschwitz
Sure, BC is more like 5 million, and Alberta just 4, but that only shows to Alberta's benefit, gives it a 20% advantage on the graph at right.
The graph just shows the number of "New Cases Reported Today" in BC, divided by the same report from Alberta, for the last 100 days or so, the whole second wave. The case counts in August are down below 100, mostly in the sixties for Alberta and the thirties and forties for BC. I noticed that Alberta always had about twice the count of BC way back, during the first wave.
I'm not sure why the ratio continued. As you can see the BC-over-Alberta case ratio was almost never under one, was mostly about 1.5 through the early Fall, and has been trending upwards in recent months, past two, now nearing three.
I didn't bother with a trend-line. This is a very dispersed cloud of points, and even hinting that it comes close to a steady relationship would be wrong. In fact, CCCC is inflicting all this data on readers because it would have been wrong to just write "BC is twice as smart as Alberta", without clarifying just how very rough that "twice" is.
The question is really whether the overall "dumbness" I'm poking Alberta for is because of the "cynical spreaders" identified by an Angus Reid survey back in August. Angus Reid defined the term as "those who flout public safety rules, have expanded their social circles to larger groups including strangers, don't physically distance, and are ambivalent toward handwashing and mask-wearing, among other actions", according to this CBC story a few months back.
What's interesting is that the story identifies 18% of BC residents as "cynical spreaders" and 28% in Alberta. Are the cynical spreaders most of the story? Or is Alberta a higher-case-count than BC because of different types of work, different housing?
We know that it's the Pareto Pandemic, with 80% of transmissions coming from 20% of infectees. You'd only have to increase the number of superspreaders a bit to get a large increase in cases.
It's tempting, of course, to blame Bad People for Bad Events. Then you can do something about them. It's a lot tougher if it's just Alberta having a lot of high-transmission workplaces, and you have to start picking on businesses.
I'm really waiting for the big report that will come out in 2022, or late this year... the one that has the data we're currently being denied:
So we know whether to be just angry at them, or take more legal action...next time.
http://brander.ca/c19#bcoverab
I'm in favour of "divisive". I want to divide the world into vaccine-acceptors, who are welcome in newly-opened theatres and bars, and idiots, who are not.
I want there to be strong reasons to get the jab. (Like keeping, or getting back, your job.)
But also, the concept of passports might let us get a 10% jump towards that holy 70% immune state. There's the silver lining to the virus on such a ferocious tear right now, with the CDC warning that the more-transmissable variant will soon be dominant.
If we started now, while we are a month or more away from general-population vaccination, handing out passports to all the survivors, the sad truth is that nearly 10% of Canada, and well over 10% of America, are probably immune already. Give them the cheap antibody test, a passport, and firm instructions to get vaccinated anyway - sometime in late September, when the rush is over and 70% already achieved.
I know that many have said that immunity is uncertain, may last as little as six months. But it's just hit the wires that immunity declines only slightly over the first eight months, so you probably have at least a year - and the great bulk of infections have been since Fall.
We could jump from about 2% at the end of this month, to 22% at the end of February - because we vaccinated 10%, and handed passports to another 10%. By the first day of Spring, maybe 33% - and the bars running full-blast, with people toasting their new passports, and anti-vaxxers with their noses pressed against the window, complaining. (What they do best.)
In my dreams. Oh, well.
http://brander.ca/c19#passports
And what a chilling comparison it is these days, for California. Going left to right across the worldometers, you immediately note that they have four times as many total cases, 7% of population - but less than twice as many deaths. Do we have double their death-rate because they've done so much more testing and found more cases? Or is it our care-home disgrace that makes COVID in Canada twice as deadly?
But, of course, the numbers in the news that slap you are SIX TIMES as many current cases, and OVER three times as many deaths.
Canada's failures at testing became a throw-hands-in-air non-story months ago. Perhaps testing isn't as important as we thought - perhaps if you have a more rule-following population that has better financial support to stay home from work, you get the lower death rate without all the testing. Testing isn't a goal; the life-saving is.
We'll have to come back to California in about a week. Frankly, all the stats are still so messed-up by the "Double Dips" in data noted yesterday, that it's still too early for me to see Canada's case-load and death-counts in clear decline, though the last few days of numbers bring hope. California, on the other hand, is coming out of the data-fuzzing time with both the case-count, and especially the death-counts, still headed up, up, up.
It's not just that the scales on the two graphs at left are much larger - it's that direction of the curve that's terrifying for California. This is after they went under heavier restrictions in early Dember - clearly, totally ineffective, and no sign so far that only the holidays are to blame.
I've got no conclusion. I'll just say, I think today I'll put my picture of Canadian flags at English Bay beach on Dora's Page. I'm very grateful to live here and not there.
http://brander.ca/c19#calcan
So I'll just write about numbers and graphs. The news noted that the USA had another record-breaking death-count yesterday. Something over 4,300, though my fave, worldometers, was 'merely' at 4,281. But the high number may relate to just catching up from the weekend - worldometers was at only just over 2,000 yesterday, and under 2,000/day on the weekend.
For months, the "weekend dip" has made it folly to look at anything but the seven-day moving average of a pandemic statistics graph. (Blue line, at left.)
The holidays caused data-losses and data-delays that were worse than that, however. Reporting was so constrained over American Thanksgiving, and even worse over the Christmas/New-Year's two-week period, that the graph of increasing cases has these prominent dips - which are then "paid for" by untruthfully high numbers after the dip.
In short, I'm saying that America is not yet really losing over 4,000 lives per day. It is probably reaching 3,500, however, and the case-counts (again, see left) are still increasing. Pandemic responses with restrictions and behaviour are local - can it be that the whole country is so distracted by their political drama, that they are just not doing pandemic response, not even as late and partially as Ontario?
They are certainly headed for 4,000 and more per day, with all those cases coming. I have hope that Canada will see major improvement in February, but I think the USA is going to keep getting worse for weeks yet.
http://brander.ca/c19#dips
Opioid Prescriptions filled per month, 2015: 1.59 million
Outpatient Clinic Vists per Month, Just Surrey Outpatient Hospital: 11,166
Bottles of Liquor Sold in BC this month (via Canadian average): 1,096,491
Number of Massages (or other "alternative health therapies" covered by insurance): 877,193
We are a large, wealthy, powerful society. We spend $415 per person per year, just on cosmetics. We have huge distribution chains, shipping and transportation for hundreds of different products delivered to each citizen, every month. We also deliver complicated services: one-sixth of the population (in theory) gets a dentist visit each month. (Dentists are able to give needles, not just into your arm, but your mouth, safely.)
When you hear a politician or public health employee describing the vaccination project as large, complicated, or difficult, stop listening. It may be so - for them. They haven't done it before. They aren't Shoppers Drug Mart, or London Drugs, or Safeway. They don't know a thing about real distribution problems, about scale. They're used to dealing with quarter-percent of the population that need their services at any one time.
But you know who does deal with the whole population all the time? Shoppers Drug Mart. London Drugs. And Safeway. And Canada's 21,000 dentists that process one-sixth of the population, every month.
Public health are not the part of our society to do this. They've shown that they can't do the job. They've been given a reasonable amount of time to show what they had eight months to prepare for. They have failed.
Pass the job to those who can.
http://brander.ca/c19#procedures
Canada, for four straight weeks now, has been doing only one-third that well. Now, understand, most of my upset is at the actual terrible performance, not at being beaten by America in some game. Consider that performance.
Alberta and BC have been racing each other for "best" for a week, and Alberta has pulled ahead, with a full 1% of the population vaccinated, to our 0.9%! (We are beaten only by tiny Prince Edward Island, which is so small, it has the advantage of going from 1.2% to 1.3%, if they can just vaccinate the whole McGillicuddy clan today.)
Today's number, in the vaccination tracker, for Alberta and BC combined, is 91,203 vaccinations for ~9 million people, for that ~1%. The two provinces have 161 hospital-care facilities each, or 322 total.
Not claiming that every hospital is a vaccination site, or that hospitals are the only ones. Let's just compare the size of the medical resources available to the work done. "91,203" sounds like a lot, but it isn't.
91,203 vacciations / 322 hospitals = 283 vaccinations per hospital
Canada averages 2.5 hospital beds per thousand people. If Alberta/BC are typical, then we have done under five vaccinations per hospital bed.
The first vaccines arrived in BC on December 14. But, hey, let's round the number of vaccination days down to 20, so I don't have to grab my calculator. 283 over 20 is barely fourteen vaccinations per day, per hospital.
What I love about good data is that it requires no comment.
http://brander.ca/c19#slowvax
Nobody gets to write an article that just asserts that plutonium is really safe, and all nuclear safety protocols are a hoax; at least, not and get any reply. They can put that on a sign and wander the streets, attempting to engage. Science sees no need for journals to do work to prove assertions wrong.
No, of course the way that science works is that if you have a claim, you yourself must gather convincing data, then publish it to support that claim. The onus is on the claimant.
Paul Krugman has now been doing the prove-em-wrong side of that game for thirty years, and wrote a book, Zombie Ideas, about having to beat down the same propositions, over and over (tax cuts pay for themselves, minimum wages kill jobs). "Zombie", because, though "thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead - but won't stay dead because it serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both."
You can't reply to trolling with science. In effect, journalists fall for this, over and over. Some days it seems like half the op-eds are professors patiently debunking some outrageous claim from a politician that the politician never showed evidence for, and will repeat again and again after the "debunking".
The notion: that lockdowns to "crush the curve" are harder on the economy than letting the virus run free, has been debunked (and shown wrong in practice, by Australia, Taiwan, and others) - nonetheless continues to be the backbone of most arguments!
The dynamic is actually captured in the famous Monty Python comedy sketch about "I'd Like To Have An Argument, Please",(upper left), where the guy paying for proper argument complains that the other side is just contradicting him, not establishing "a collective series of statement to establish a proposition" .
The other side, meanwhile, is working the X-files dynamic: "I Want To Believe". When somebody is fitting their data to the beliefs, the diametric opposite of science, you are wasting your time like arguing with John Cleese in the sketch.
It was kind of (sick) fun to troll, but the really important skill is learning not to be trolled. It's fair to give people one chance to respond to data, but if they don't address the data itself in their reply, you have to disengage immediately, not continue.
Politicians need to just get up and say it plainly: "The notion that fighting the disease costs more than accepting the disease is wrong. It has been proven wrong. Whole nations now have economic recovery, proving it wrong again, and again, in practice. Continuing to claim something so proven wrong is a lie, a contemptible, vicious lie that is killing people. It doesn't deserve any more of our time to reply to it; the lie deserves only our contempt. Stop insulting our intelligence".
We've had enough trolling. The trolls have killed too many, already.
http://brander.ca/c19#notscience
But, of course, it's been hard to look away from the greatest news trainwreck, and it's hard for me to shut up in the comments column, and I discovered that I'd accidentally become a troll. This is off-topic of the pandemic, except that wild Internet conspiracy theories (masks, HCQ, virus-hoax, vaccines...) propounded by Internet trollling are a major problem with the pandemic fight. But the first troll (a failed effort, stopped by the vigilant National Post) was just about Jonathan Kay's extraordinary claim in the National Post yesterday that "The Storming of the US Capitol Wasn't About White Supremacy". I'd just come off the story at upper right, so I felt an urge to comment with the screen-snap at left.
I was actually proud of it; I referenced both the hugely popular Jeff Foxworthy comedy routine of 20 years back, and Maya Angelou's "believe them" quote, and was brief, for once. So what was my sin?
I can only figure that, for the National Post, "redneck" is a racist-like insult, I should have spelled "r*****k", and Jeff Foxworthy needs to be "cancelled" or something. No more references to THAT comedy routine! I'd thought that the enduring popularity of the Foxworthy routines positioned "redneck" as a proud subculture, like "hippie", "nerd", or "cowboy".
It's either that, or the National Post figures that "White Supremacist" is an unforgivable thing to say. I'd rather not go there. (The sensitivity to "redneck" is doubly-confusing because it started off as a name for left-wing labour movement protesters. Yes, really.)
What was far more disturbing, was how amused and even a little delighted I was by the revelation of their sensitivity to the word. Whose the 'snowflake' now? Nyah, nyah! Weird.
So, today, I performed a trolling experiment. Not so much on the National Post, as on myself.
Neither you nor I need much summary of it: there are no new studies mentioned, there's no actual news about the headline-topic in the article. Just a review of long-known studies that lockdown is hard on you. It didn't deserve top-billing as "news". So I figured it was a good place for my experiment, at right.
As you can read, especially the last sentence, it's insulting; it's trolling for an emotional response. It's not great trolling, since it starts with actual information which is correct. So I added the last sentence for the required deliberate nastiness. Since the whole alt-right tone is about"strength", and "toughness", and manliness, conflating pandemic protestors with "weakling" is about as inflamatory as I could get. Without swearing or saying "redneck", at least.
That's why they do it. I've let myself get mad this week, and it pops out as anger at those still whining about public health measures even as the dying gets worse and worse. So I was filled with this unholy glee at tweaking their noses.
It's not a good look. It's not, not really, a good feeling. The notion that people sit at the computer all day, getting hit after hit of that unholy-glee, smirking feeling, to feel better...man, I get it now. And now that I get it, I feel that much sorrier for them. The anger will come back now and again, but more and more, just sorry.
http://brander.ca/c19#trolling
It's an outrageous simplification that no real epidemiologist would stand by; I've realized my superpower is my ability to ignore proper science, when a rough estimate is all that's needed.
It's actually the superpower that Engineering has over Science, the big difference between us. Scientists seek Truth, and have to get things right. Engineers seek A Probably-Good Answer By Wednesday, and sacrifice ultimate truth for expedient results. (And that's Civil Engineers! Man, Military Engineers are stacking the bodies in the mass graves, while the Scientists have finally concluded that the enemy was about to attack.)
The confirmation that Yeah, We Are So Screwed came yesterday, when Dr. Henry announced a still-higher case-load, we are absolutely back to growing again, after those two heartening weeks of decline; all the fears about holiday gatherings have been proven right.
But look left for the good news: the fairly-fast decline was an R of 0.88, just a loss of 12% every five days. The current growth is a mirror: 12% gains in cases every five days. Considering how far below 2.8 that 1.12 already is, the additional restrictions to get us back down to 0.88 should be small.
We can do that. My hopeful timeline for low, summer, case-loads by the end of January is shot, of course, but we could still get there by Valentine's Day, if we could get even a little below 0.88 for the next five weeks.
CCCC will be hectoring for that, for a while yet. This is the point in the Big Football Game movie, where the team are bruised, and tired, and down ten points, going into the fourth quarter. It's time for the Big Push.
http://brander.ca/c19#12pct
The credit to one Alex White, a few days back, will have to serve for the math joke, a subject I'd rather retreat to, today.
No, heck, back to politics. Here's my joke from yesterday, at which even my wife did not laugh:
Today, America waits with bated breath... to find out whether it will continue to have a bad heath-care system because Republicans keep control of Congress, or because Joe Biden won't do jack for them anyway!
Sorry.
As you can see, "Joke Day" on a pandemic blog is pretty dark humour. But, relax; there will be no jokes about coffins and ventilators. Just, "This is the perfect time to close the border, when all the Conservative politicians are outside!".
But, no, I don't think that will happen. It's not just because of the Sarah Palin post at left, which uses the exact same image I found so funny this morning. It angrily disputes that a mob that was on TV the whole time it walked from the White House incitement speech, to storming the Capitol, with MAGA and Confederate flags flying...was actually a MAGA crowd, was not "antifa false-flag".
(Now, that's funny.)
No, I know that most supporters are unreachable, because a good friend and relative of mine today posted about an important political issue on Facebook: that a self-proclaimed "BLM activist" (with no actual ties to the organization, when you read the article) had tweeted joy at the death of a police officer. That was the big issue, this morning. She spent the summer proclaiming her support for "law-and-order", of course.
So, no. Events like yesterday's will have no effect on the political support these people enjoy. About all it will do is make jokes of them, to people who are still reachable. I can only hope that their pandemic opinions are taken more and more as jokes, very dark, very bad jokes, as well.
But my favourite?
"I'm just wondering why not one of these conservative, mask-hating televangelists have shown up at hospitals to perform miracle cures on even one Coronavirus patient."
Not funny?
http://brander.ca/c19#jokes
I'm forced to calculate that I'm at the bottom of the list.
My simple calcuation yesterday used that R-factor of 2.8, as if every infectee went out to find 2.8 people. But as CCCC readers with photographic memories all know, this is the Pareto Pandemic, where 70% of infectees infect nobody, 10% infect one person, and 20% infect a dozen.
By vaccinating the old who don't have jobs and don't get out much we miss the opportunity to crush the curve with the vaccines by prioritizing the superspreaders.
That is a second priority, I think, because the current wave is killing so many in care homes, again. We are driven to save them with vaccines, because the care-home industry has failed - again - in full view, with warning, they failed, again. What do we have to do to get some standards? But, as a very famous failure put it, the situation is what it is. One cannot but support getting those vulnerable people out of harm's way, ASAP. (And CCCC's support for remote First Nations communities, which need just a few hundred jabs apiece to let the whole community breathe free, is on record.)
But the really vulnerable are just a few percent of the population. At the 10% mark, they'll have all the health-care workers, the very sick, and everybody over 75. At that point, priority should turn to people of any age and health status that have to work in any kind of contact with others - everybody who cannot work from home, in particular, everybody who is near anybody else on the job.
Because people often start in manual labour and other blue-collar work, that will dramatically shift the priority group to those in the 20-40 age band, who have almost zero risk of dying from the virus - and unvaccinated sixty-somethings like myself will be checking into graveyards for months of that.
But I have very good options to keep myself safe. My 88-year-old mother-in-law feels so safe, we'll have to drag her to the vaccination, I suspect - because she has her groceries delivered, needs nothing else, cancelled Christmas, and doesn't come within three metres of anybody at her door. Retirees don't have to go out. We'll have to use the threat of not coming for Easter to get her into a clinic in April.
So the safest people, if they aren't stupid, are retirees who retired young, in their early sixties and late fifties...like myself. I'm afraid my system puts me at the end of the line. At least I can proudly proclaim it, and not be accused of directed reasoning.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxwho
The simplest vaccine calculation you can do is for the end-state, where "everything is back to normal", and people behave like they did in November of 2019. Back then, the best number anybody had for "R0" was 2.8 - the average infectee went on to infect 2.8 others.
An average of five days later, the 2.8 would each infect 2.8 more - it works out to doubling twice a week, as case numbers did, in the very early days.
The vaccine doesn't require a lot of math. Say it reduces chances of infection by 90%. So that "2.8" just becomes "0.28" infected, assuming the infectee contacts nothing but vaccinated people. If half the people she encounters are vaccinated then it's:
New R = 50%(2.8) + 50%(2.8 x 10%) = 1.54 ,
as your new "R", for a population where half are vaccinated, and half are not, and (crucial point) everybody behaves like it's November 2019, which they assuredly won't, if only half are vaccinated.
We are currently struggling to get R down to one, with some success in most parts of Canada, so vaccines can only speed up the reduction. The question is at what point people will start to misbehave on distancing, faster than vaccines can make up for it. If people are dumb enough, we could well stumble into a third wave in late spring, with half the population vaccinated. Re-read the number above: if everybody went right back to acting "normal", then R would be well over 1.0, at 1.54, and away we'd go with a wave.
Shrinking the case-load, and keeping it down, will have far more to do with those "safe behaviours" that CCCC champions, than the effects of vaccines, well into summer.
The math does let you "prove" that "70% of population for herd immunity" number that you've heard since vaccines were first discussed:
Thirty percent would still be at 2.8. Seventy percent would be at 5% of 2.8, so:
30%(2.8) + 70%(2.8 x 5%) = 0.938
...or just enough under 1.0, that an outbreak would fade away, not grow. Dr. Fauci recently upgraded his estimate to 80%. This may reflect his concerns about the "new variant", or just conservatism on that original 2.8, which was always, really, "somewhere between 2 and 3". Even the simplest of these calculations has quite an error bar.
The last column is for Ontario, today. Consider that Ontario, in the news last night for horrifying new case numbers, has doubled those numbers in a month. That's six of those five-day "generations" of the infection, so Ontario's "R" for the last month has averaged 1.12. (1.12 to the sixth power = 2.0)
It's going further out on a limb than a professional would (which is the value of asking a non-professional, with no reputation to protect - and not burdened with too much knowledge that might lose me in maybes!) to use the graph at right to estimate some early effects. The "1.5" and "1.4" at right, are the ratios between case-loads, and case-loads five days later - an estimate of R for that month in BC. It was the great surge of our second wave, up to our present plight.
But we got there by staying for over a month at just 1.5 - the result of all our many bad-behaviours, from Thanksgiving suppers and parties, to more outings to stores and restaurants, all the controversies in the news at the time. Still, that's way below 2.8, because many things like theatres were closed, travel reduced, schools observing distancing.
If we could just manage that lame, half-assed distancing that caused the second wave, but had 30% vaccinated, presumably around April, it would not cause a wave any more, just hold level or even decline.
So, here's the CCCC vaccination timeline, the news that no reputable news-source would dare to offer:
Unless, of course, you can't walk into a theatre or bar without a "vaccination passport", which CCCC unreservedly advocates.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxR
But we haven't seen "a few million" doses, at 3 weeks after the first shipment; we haven't seen one million. Or an eighth of a million, according to the CTV tracker at left. We have vaccinated less than a quarter of the population that the United States has, even as Americans call that "a slow start".
What's odd, to me, is that the media seem to be letting them get away with it. I'd have thought the National Post would be blaming Trudeau for every unvaccinated arm, where "unvaccinated" means the 300,000 more we'd need done by now to be at the same rate as the "slow" United States.
I'm kind of reluctant to base any posts on stats, just now; it'll be a week yet, I bet, before everybody is back to work, cleared off the backlogs, and generally caught up from the Christmas/New Year's staffing issues. I'm sure that the various case-counts and death-counts and so on, are off just now, though I'd be surprised if the vaccine work were affected, after the many apologies required when Ontario took off just Xmas and Boxing Day from the jabbing.
At the three-week mark, over holidays, one can also be a little forgiving of a slow start, for all the time they had to prepare. But they need to pick up their socks. They're embarrassing us. (And, statistically speaking, killing us.)
http://brander.ca/c19#canvax
Cummings never did; the big outrage was his failure to resign. Six months later, Johnson was still taking damage from it.
The real warning about how this is genuinely bad, not just political "bad optics", came from The Lancet on August Sixth. As the Bloomberg quick summary tells, survey results on 40,000 people showed that public confidence of the government dropped "sharply", and stayed down, since: the when you betray trust, you lose it for a long, long time. It's crippling to government authority, which depends on the public believing them.
Politicians' pleadings that their trips were "legal" under the rules were not new, either. Dominic Cummings said the same thing, that the trip was legal, and very necessary. That didn't help.
The rest of us have those excuses, too, but we didn't use them.
And all that was done and nailed down as new political wisdom, over four months before any of Jason Kenney's or Rob Ford's servants decided to ignore it. Political parties that cared about pandemic leadership, and saving lives, would have had presentations and seminars on the Cummings story, and the Lancet article. The public health bureaucracy, if it really needed a new fight in speaking truth to power, would have presented, respectfully, talks on how important it is for all the public officials to show COVID-rule-respect leadership, to serve the public with good examples that will save lives.
The parties obviously did none of that. The failure is being portrayed as personal moral lapses, but it is also a lapse of political savvy and political competence. The NDP at least promptly fired their scofflaw; Ford depended on a voluntary resignation, but Jason Kenney, ever the political stumblebum, is actually doubling down the same way Johnson did, supporting Cummings.
Johnson may pay for that by not having to preside over the inevitable consequences of his Brexit, which may be exactly his plan. Kenney might lose his office, too, but I don't think it's a plan. He's too stupid.
http://brander.ca/c19#leadership
Well, here's my very own plan for China to advance itself in the world and do dirt unto its enemies and competitors. If I'd seen something like this happening, I'd have been suspicious, too.
If I'd made the coronavirus in a lab (or just discovered it in nature, and contained the spread before anybody knew about it - same result) - and were a Chinese saboteur - I'd attack Taiwan, of course.
China has competitors around the world they feel ambivalence towards, because America and Europe and Japan are also their biggest customers; it doesn't do to too impoverish people who spend money on you. Taiwan, on the other hand, is an outright enemy, the home of those who deny the Chinese government even legitimacy.
I'd spread it around Taiwan, and Taiwan's major trading partners, entirely from Taiwan. Once some young spies had been through the virus and could handle it with personal safety, the spread would be precisely targeted by my evil agents. (Evil agents with Taiwan citizenship; I'm sure that China has had many there for decades.)
We'd spend the first week, just spraying the air in Taiwan's Jianguo Wet Market, to make sure the pandemic narrative had a believable start.
To make sure it caught on though, the next week would be around Taiwan's cities, and pump the spray into bars and other packed places.
Week three, as they're just starting to get cases from the Wet Market stall owners into the hospitals, we'd already be onto outgoing flights from Taiwan, spraying my virus-water into the cabin air. That would ensure it would spread to at least a few other countries. I'd pick flights to Taiwan's best friends. Taiwan would be blamed: the place it broke out, the place it came from. All Taiwan's fault.
Taiwan and China have no direct flights, of course, but entries from the targeted countries could be asked if they'd been in Taiwan lately. China, with much warning, would be tracking every person coming in, so they could chase them down later. The instant Taiwan announced anything, China could clamp down on visitors with testing (which would be miraculously ready in incredible time) so that China had basically zero cases, no outbreak, no casualties, because they protected themselves so competently from The Taiwan Virus.
By week four, all operations would cease, when the viral-growth of the disease, it's nature as a potential pandemic, just starting to be recognized.
What I would not do is what happened:
...the end result being a terrible global pandemic that can be laid at China's doorstep - at least to the extent that they could have contained it in Wuhan if they'd been honest and competent.
Taiwan, meanwhile, was basically untouched, because they did get enough warning, and displayed exemplary national discipline in masking and locking down, beating it handily. Taiwan shines as an example of competence, especially next to China.
Since many of the rest of us have displayed amazing incompetence of our own, (hello, Quebec care-homes), and because China is very economically powerful, they'll basically get away with it. I doubt if any "world court" of any kind will be convened to punish them with trade tariffs or anything (that would hurt us, too...)
But China bears great fault in the pandemic, and everybody knows it. There's even a "conspiracy", to the extent that they secretly bullied the WHO, and the WHO laid down for it. But still: everybody knows it. Many of their largest trading partners have been as economically damaged as by a war, and hundreds of thousands have died. (Best of luck to the Chinese tourism agencies.)
Sure, China's dictators are bad and heartless enough to infect their own people, if that had been the best way to engineer a deliberate pandemic - but it wasn't. My Taiwan plan would have been infinitely better, more effective, and cheaper((!) for China.
If what we got was a conspiracy, it was the most-incompetent one in history. Call me next time.
http://brander.ca/c19#conspiracy
The UK researchers have also given it an official name, "Variant of Concern 202012/01" or "VOC". With luck, it will be adopted and cranks whining "Why say 'UK variant' but not 'China virus'?" can shut up, seeing as how CCCC has been proven right to note immediately that it would be found world-wide as soon as we looked.
The article is quite frightening, I'm afraid, at least from a restrictions-and-economic-pain point of view. While no more deadly, it is much more transmissable. Skipping the meaning of "R numbers" for once, the bottom line is that the restrictions the UK has been going through recently would not be enough to end a wave of this variant. Much more painful restrictions may be necessary. It may make the "essential services" more difficult and dangerous.
We have to remember that an epidemic can shut down a business with no government help: if half the meat-packing plant is out sick for weeks on end, it has to shut down. The uninfected, after getting a taste of how easily it transmits around a plant, or factory, or construction worksite, may just claim to be sick and stay home out of fear.
We've been thinking the next month or so will be bad, because of the baked-in case-load from the past month - but we could be looking at multiple bad months as it proves impossible to get the wave crushed, or crushed waves revive, the variant getting around all restrictions.
The New Year is traditionally time for straightening out, smartening up, going dry, starting exercise programs. The societal New Year's Resolution may have to be to Get Really Serious about distancing and masks and staying in - just the last news we wanted.
http://brander.ca/c19#VOC
It's like Pandora's Box, the legend of all the evils of the world packed into one container, opened foolishly, letting all disease and war and disaster out into the world. But it's a legend about how we survive these: at the bottom of the box lay Hope - and it, too, flew out into the world.
So, today is the bottom of the box for 2020, and CCCC is pleased to offer a link to the new dashboard to watch: CTV's vaccine distribution tracker. (Also linked from sample graphics at right and left).
As CCCC has done, it allows us to follow along on the "competition" that isn't, the progress of the global vaccination effort, and Canada's programs. Unlike the bitter, ironic "competition" - at dying - on the other trackers, this really is a postive, actual race to follow. The countries and regions that deploy vaccines the fastest will have better outcomes in global economic competition.
The next month is going to be pretty awful in certain locales. While Canada seems to be getting a grip on the second wave at last (we'll really know when the holidays are over, and people get tests they've put off), and while much of the USA is actually reducing hospital loads, there's going to be some staggering statistics before it gets better.
During those times, click on your vaccine tracker. The next month should show some serious ramp-up in vaccinations per day, and the dashboard will be changing ever-more-rapidly. That's got to provide some Hope that it's darkest in January, because its just before dawn.
http://brander.ca/c19#pandora
Certainly, we'll need a system for proving you're vaccinated, (or have antibodies from catching it in the last six months...the exact months need to be nailed down on that one.) Europe is already looking into "vaccination passport" documents.
The schools, and even the work requirement, would be hard to enforce, except that the pandemic response so far, has given schools and employers the PERFECT response to complaints about excluding the unvaccinated: you can continue your schooling or the work from home, like much of 2020.
We all agreed that the kids were still being schooled; maybe not as well, but it was still a school year. People at work over Microsoft Teams, were agreed to be at work, and deserving of their paycheque. So we aren't excluding anybody from anything, telling anti-vaxxer parents that the price of their beliefs is keeping the kid on remote-learning. It's now an acceptable substitute.
Some people may not be vaccinated - or claim not - just so they can continue working from home. But I get a strong sense from the white-collar employees I know, that while there are many good things about work-from-home, career advancement when other employees can bump into the boss every day and get literal face time (not "FaceTime©")...is not one of them. A willingness to come in may be the marker of an ambitious careerist in the coming decade.
So I see clear sailing for just not giving an inch to anti-vaxxers this time around. And every incentive, obviously: this one's too important, to put up with their shit any longer.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxsnob
That does still have us 51st-from-worst on Earth, I guess, and we're only a few percent worse than Germany, looked to as such a success. (The second wave has been hard on a lot of success stories.)
A few days ago, I sadly noted the the USA entering the "1000DPM Club", a thousand deaths per million, previously the territory of Spain and Italy. The bitter news, as we pass 400 DPM, is that the IHME COVID-19 Projections Dashboard for Canada, is currently predicting a median scenario (no fast vaccine-rollout, no universal mask rule) of 33,240 deaths in Canada by April 1, (the anniversary date of CCCC), as far ahead as it makes any sense to predict.
That would be 876 per million, and since the dying won't stop for months after that, Canada has excellent odds of going over 900, and may reach the 1000-club itself, under the IHME "easing" scenario, where we do what the USA did in the summer.
I really think we can do better than that.
http://brander.ca/c19#400DPM
At left, a reminder of the October 16 graph from worldometers beside that post, and at right, yesterday's graph, with the now-tiny "corner" dip pointed out so that you can see it at all.
All this time, and people still are not getting, not at gut-level, what "exponential" means. I think that the messaging needs to show more bombs going off, maybe show some of those amazing super-slow-motion movies of the burn going through a pot of gunpowder as it flashes, or the hilarious simulation of a nuclear explosion with mousetraps and ping-pong balls.
People seem to think that the lid has been placed firmly on by getting the case-load down; problem solved. No. It's an explosion with the lid on. The restrictions keep the lid on. Well, the lid is well-off, now, and Canada has been slooowly levelling off the increase; the national case-load was barely growing by the time the holidays hit. America, the same, actually - just at over FOUR TIMES Canada's per-capita case-load. After the holidays, everybody is expecting another jump, and more weeks of struggle to get the growth-rate actually negative.
Negative growth-rate - sustained for some days - that's when you "turn the corner", Mr. President.
http://brander.ca/c19#corner2
Because it took time to detect it, and because most nations are in a second wave, with high cases, and because travel is not being restricted much, half a million people flew in the United States on the holiday, it's of course everywhere, and will gradually take over from the old version, naturally.
The very, very obvious is that the fight against the new variant is the same old fight: we can hold it down by opposing transmission and crushing those curves. That will shut down all variants, and keep more-transmissable ones from taking over.
It's just more urgent now, to crush that curve, if it wasn't urgent enough for you before. It was for most people I know, so the news is almost meaningless for us; we can't do any more. But people who haven't been as serious, need yet more pleading. And demands. And fines.
http://brander.ca/c19#variant
There was roast chicken (two people isn't enough for turkey) and a fireplace, and lots of Christmas music. We Zoomed and Skyped with Calgary and Madrid, exchanged many e-messages with friends; I caught up with one I hadn't had a whole conversation with in many years. We did "planks" exercises over Zoom with workout buddies.
And we get to have zero sympathy for those who just had to have more. No, you didn't. We toasted all the years my Dad spent Christmas in Britain, waiting for the attack that never came, and in Holland, 1945. He never spoke of them as bad Christmases, he knew how many other Soldiers were suffering much, much worse.
We toasted them, too, and had a Merry Christmas.
http://brander.ca/c19#boxing
http://brander.ca/c19#xmas
It's not as bad as I thought, nine days ago. I was thinking that we were going to sit on that 650/day "ledge" in the mountain, that we seemed trapped into at the time, for the rest of the holidays. Instead, after more than a week there, we started climbing down the mountain again.
How unpredictable that was, makes fun of my attempt to assume a linear drop, with the red line at left, but it's a first approximation that says if we can not have a bump after Xmas day, and keep it up like this, we could see the summer case-load again by late January.
Late January is not soon enough for vaccination to greatly affect community transmission probabilities, especially since we'll be focused until then on health-care workers, and the care-home set.
One can only hope we don't just balloon back up again, because people get into a psychology - again - that we've beaten it and the whole thing is over.
That's next month's problem. For now, I'm celebrating that resumed decline as a fine Christmas present, indeed.
http://brander.ca/c19#xmasBC
As readers know (plural may be speculative), CCCC follows the pandemic statistics are worldometers.org, which uses news reports rather than the Johns-Hopkins dashboard that runs some days behind. At left, last night's final totals, with the USA at just under 331,000 dead. They have just under 332 million people, (far right column), so the deaths-per-million (highlighted column) will hit 1,000 today.
The 1000-deaths-per-million club is rarefied atmosphere. Just those former European Imperial Powers that have had massive deaths of their elderly, mostly, along with some poor but urbanized nations like Peru. As you can see in the middle of the table, the UK just joined the other day. The two formerly great nations, now labouring under the worst leaderships in the developed world, are competing to finish the COVID Cup at the "Bottom of the Major League", as the CCCC kick-off essay put it.
I feel embarrassed for getting mad at BC a week ago with "Yep, We Are So Screwed" after seeing a traffic jam. Compared the UK, and the keen new variant they've allowed to develop by not crushing the curve, (see yesterday for link), we're doing well.
The repeating pattern seems to be that the population has to be taught over and over again, in some places, that the virus will go exponential if you don't change your behaviour. They let it get away again (and again, in America) and the virus has to teach them to pay attention. The elected leaders are slow to react, wait whole weeks, but finally impose restrictions. Gradually, people obey - partly from enforcement; in small part from genuine fear of the virus, though many keep denying and denying it; mostly because others are. Finally, the curve bends, at great cost.
That's how it works in the COVID Cup nations-of-failure. The virus finally enforces the same basic steps that smart nations take pro-actively and without foot-dragging, and charges heavily for the lessons. The UK and USA are now paying that high tuition a second (or, in some US states, a third) time. That's how you join the Thousand Deaths per Million Club.
http://brander.ca/c19#1000DPM
It started with me perusing the many stories excoriating the UK government of Boris Johnson for their current pandemic plight: quarantined by the rest of the world for generating a new coronavirus variant. "Generating", because of this article about the string of failures that made it possible. If covid is allowed to have a colony of hundreds of thousands in your nation, for months, the probability of evolution creating new variants is that much higher than if you have few. The "lets just keep running with covid cases, not crush them down" philosophy isn't just making people sick and dead; it's helping the Enemy invent new weapons.
It came to me that there's a common thread of arrogance, to the worst-behaving nations. The USA and Britain aren't just the two most-obviously-arrogant nations about imagining they can steamroll over a pandemic; they were the ones that broke the UN Charter to prosecute aggressive war. They were the two most-culpable nations in the financial crisis, just imagining that they could keep pushing up a property bubble forever; a kind of arrogance underlay that belief, too. Whole cultures can have a belief that bad things simply cannot touch them. (The current use of the term "privilege" revolves around those who just believe this unconsciously, assume it.)
I was chewing on that, whether it diluted the evidence that many EU banks involved in the financial crisis as well, when it hit me that nearly all the really-bad outcomes in Europe: Belgium, Italy, Spain, France, in that order - were former imperial powers. In Italy's case, I don't mean ancient times, they had African colonies in the last century. The exception is Portugal - indeed, it's their colony of Brazil that, under a fascist government, is having a terrible pandemic.
But the "arrogant national psychology" theory can even take a bolster there: Greece and Portugal were deeply humbled in the last ten years by that same 2008 financial crisis, preyed upon by foreign lenders.
Like all vague Theories of History, it probably benefits from some cherry-picking. I skipped Japan, a total exception...or is it? They were humbled with nuclear weapons. Russia was and is very imperial, but you can't trust their pandemic reports.
Ah, well, my "theory" would hold up well in a barroom, if not a classroom, I contend, and it holds up well enough for me to offer whole nations advice that's so appropriate for Christmas:
Blessings will come to the Humble, Ye Nations! And the Proud and Arrogant Shall Be Laid Low.
http://brander.ca/c19#empire
The first day of winter looks very typical in Vancouver: 1C and 30mm of rain beating just above my head. Just like my post on the pandemic timing for politics, the next 13 weeks have everything stacked against them.
It's winter, for one thing. Cases are high, and expected to surge; the political acceptance of fighting COVID with restrictions is fraying; the economy is crumbling despite (often confused) efforts to support the COVID's "economic victims"; and the vaccines will be frustratingly ineffective at limiting transmission for the whole time.
It's just going to suck.
But the medieval reference should remind us that times have been worse. There is no discontent here as bad as my father missing six Christmases-at-home in a row, 1939 through 1944. A time that included far more dying. We've been watching the mini-series "World Without End", from the Ken Follet novel about the early 14th century, the Hundred Year's War and the Black Death. Frankly, the lives of the peasants during the "good times" in that story were worse than our lowest month of this winter. And then a third of them died.
If you've got a home, and enough money to get by on, you're one of the luckiest humans in all recorded history. Keep your bubble close, call your Mom, enjoy the rich food that continues to pour from the working part of the economy, courtesy of the risks and sacrifices of many workers, tip well.
And Who-ville didn't even need any presents, so buck up.
http://brander.ca/c19#lear
But, being the boss doesn't mean you are out-of-touch with the science, and Rick Bright has been a vaccine expert for decades. He would be completely up on the new "mRNA" vaccines that have amazed us all, this month. And here's the thing: as recently as last May, he was skeptical of the 12-18 month time frame for the vaccine rollout.
The story at "The Hill" linked above was from May 14th. The Pfizer vaccine product was approved just seven months later - less three days. The Hill makes it sound like he was predicting another eighteen months before it would come, though I suspect he was talking about a timeline that started last January, when the vaccine work began. He was really saying that next month through next June would be the timeline, 'if all goes well, and it never does'.
So, the miracle here is just that it was a month earlier than the earliest hoped-for date by a cautious, experienced expert - who warned that it could be several months more. As experts stress, most vaccines used to take years; HIV has never had a vaccine, not in over 35 years, now.
That's miracle enough for me. The program is just getting rolling, but it should be in full flight in a few more days. Texas put up a report yesterday that they'd injected 26,007 doses: 21,820 of them in the previous 24 hours. Literally hundreds of thousands of arms will receive a Christmas Miracle.
http://brander.ca/c19#bright
The residents, exposed to COVID-19 for most of their endless, "25-hour" workdays, were at the bottom of the priority list, well below X-ray techs.
They're been prioritized, of course, by social status within the hospital community - which is somewhere between the status of the assistant billing clerks, and the oxygen tanks. There have long been previous articles about this: terrible pay, worked half to death, napping anywhere from their long, long shifts.
The issue has always been shrugged at as some kind of "hazing" ritual, before they become specialist doctors that, in the States at least, may pull in half a million a year. (Lawyers are also worked like mules, for nothing, for years, earning their way up to have the privilege of abusing others the same way. Is that kind of kick-down mentality really what you want in people most likely to end up in politics?)
The Stanford administrators are attracting even more abuse for the brand-new buzzword in their defense: "algorithm". But we're on to that one. Here's their mistake:
Calling a "policy" an "algorithm" is just describing a policy somebody typed into a computer. If you'd assigned the vaccination list to humans, you'd just call it "policy", and skipped the new buzzword. (It would also be an "algorithm" if it were executed by a human computer.) The medical residents were ignored, at the top of this policy-making, because human beings didn't even think of them.
There's some spy fictions where the spy is effective because she is a woman, or black, or dressed as a bum or service-person, because those spied upon simply don't even see such people, they don't have names. It turns out the medical residents were simply...invisible...as they have been for a long time.
We also suddenly discovered all those people who live in care-homes. If somebody had really thought about them, the care-homes would have been prepared for the pandemic last January and February, and we'd have saved thousands of lives in Canada. But we just didn't think of that. They were invisible. So are people in jail, apparently, though there were frantic articles in the spring about protecting them, one the other day about vaccinating them. It probably won't happen, except a few locations, like Massachusetts, the bleeding-heart liberals.
As for the very poor, the homeless, they are never invisible, really...but we try hard and manage not to see them. I'm not seeing any vaccination program for them, either.
http://brander.ca/c19#culture
I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard lately (and, considering the last month, that's really going a ways)...even though I don't watch sports. I want them to vaccinate the football leagues, though I think the whole sport should go away because of brain injuries.
The reason should be blindingly obvious: people regard sports teams as their heroes, kids in particular want to dress in their jerseys, wear their shoes. But the fandom of course goes up through all ages.
I want all those kids and sports fans vying for a place in line to get the NHL-themed vaccinations, where the band-aid has a Calgary Flames flame on it. I want kids studying up on vaccine safety, so as to shut down the feeble arguments of their anti-vaxxer parents.
And in the states, those stories about Black people having an (understandable) fear of vaccinations, totally shut down by advertisements made by LeBron James - with him delivering the "get vaccinated" speech as his own needle goes in. Then another, three weeks later, where he berates fans for not getting in line yet, if they haven't. Then he can turn to the nurse as she slaps on the LeBron band-aid, and say "Thank you so much; you may have just saved my life." (turns to camera) "Now save your own life; save your mom's life; save everybody's life. Get in line, and tell 'em LeBron sent you."
My logic applies to everybody who might be paid to advertise a product, to give it their endorsement. So, I'm sorry, but the logic applies to Gwynneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian, as well. It applies double to conservative media heroes like Kid Rock. Again, I'm sorry.
For whatever reason, they are looked to as leaders; let's get them leading people into line.
http://brander.ca/c19#sports
Think the coronavirus is exclusively for the old? The old, and the victims of bad government. Canadians in the age group 50-64 have half the death rate of Americans in the age group 30-49. Americans are particularly good at killing off the 30-49 age group with coronavirus. The ratio of death rates is a "mere" 7-8 times worse for both the 18-29 and the 50-64 age groups, but twelve times worse for the 30-49s. Why is that? Forcing people in the prime of life to work those "essential" jobs, like meat packing, with no workplace protections?
My study of this arose from the realization that there are two pandemics that are completely different in their epidemiology: the care-home pandemic, and the general-population pandemic. Care homes quickly become widely infected, because you can't find a better carrier than the staff who help people dress, walk, and eat: the virus races through them - and the death rates are over ten times higher than the general population.
Canada has done a spectacularly bad job of her care-homes, especially in Quebec and Ontario. We have to subtract it to judge how badly or well we did with the general-population pandemic.
Proper epidemiologists can sort through the two pandemics in future years, with great precision: we know who died in homes. For a first glance, however, we can compare just the general-population pandemics alone, by restricting the age groups to the "young", under 65, and especially the under-50 population that are all still at work and school. (Some young are in care-homes from paralysis, etc, but not enough to affect statistics.)
The Canadian statistics of death are separated out by age at the Health Canada Coronavirus site, the American at the CDC site. I collected them for a month, to see if the ratio was changing as new, high death rates hit America the last month. They hadn't changed, really, Canada is into a second wave of its own. But that just means that America is consistently performing about ten times worse than Canada at protecting the general population from coronavirus infection and death. (All are collected in this spreadsheet.)
These are cumulative numbers, you see the slowly-rising death grand totals over the weeks. As the study over time showed little changing, I'll just quote from the final line for December 12.
It's clarifying to exclude the very old, you get away from those numbers so large they mean almost nothing: 300,000 and more. But surely, the notion that America has lost 1114 people in the 18-29 age group, when only 131 would have died had they been Canadian, brings it down to a thousand dead people just starting their lives, whose deaths can be blamed on America, not COVID-19.
At age group 50-64, people are mostly still at work, people with teenagers, and kids in college. But that subtraction is 41,673-6,088, or over 35,000 dead in the USA, that would be still at work and home, if Canadian public health were serving them.
The harshest comparison is between the 50-64 Canadian column, and the American 30-49 column: half as bad. Twice as many Americans, per million, have died in their 30-49 age group, as our 50-64 age group. America would have over five thousand people alive, (11,659-6,088) between 30-49, if they were as safe as Canadians from 50-64.
I'm just belabouring the same numbers, by showing different views of them. The comparisons that some American politicans made to Canada during their campaign, were actually extremely kind to their country. A really fair comparison of the two systems of government, the two cultures, the two nations, is really about the general-population pandemic, not a comparison of the one industry of care-homes.
In that comparison, Canada looks more like one of the COVID Cup major-leaguers like Germany, nearly Australia. Not just two or three times better than America, but ten times.
Once again, the pandemic has highlighted and greatly exaggerated societal differences, and especially social failures, that we already knew about. Canada has a lot to fix in their care-homes. America has a lot to fix, period.
http://brander.ca/c19#dyingyoung
Within the ranks of the old and infirm, those in care-homes need priority because their environment exposes them to massively high infection risks compared to those in their own homes; but, after that, the elders of First Nations should get to be ahead of other elders, for that matter.
It's not just a sense of moral debt, hundreds of years old (how much interest is that, then?) that calls for this, of course. I wouldn't even try to sell it on that alone, since we don't seem to feel any other debts to them (not for land, not even for clean water). It's because they have such a shockingly higher statistic of bad outcomes from catching COVID, as with persons of colour in the USA.
Canada's own populations of colour can make similar claims, but satisfying theirs is distinctly...awkward. We obviously have no spot on your ID that certifies you as such. With the First Nations, of course, we've long had "official status", lists of names...and much more importantly, there are some 600+ separate commuities to rush those vaccinations out to.
Which is where my idealism smacks into the hard reality that places without clean water are also scarce on -70C fridges.
Hard reality can be softened by smart engineers. Whether there is some portable-refrigeration tech, some plan to have everybody waiting for the plane in Moosonee, to get their shot, before the liquid nitrogen runs dry, we can do our best. Whether they are at the head of the current line, or the next line that forms when the vaccine that only needs -20C shows up soon, we should let them know we care.
http://brander.ca/c19#1N1st
Tough luck for the parents and grandparents of a lot of people making that decision.
The follow-up, of course, is that I was exactly right: still over 700 cases a day, all weekend, again. It'll stay there. We're going to lose a dozen to 20 people a day in BC for over a month, probably 500 dead that might have been saved. Yes, most of them very old, but there will be enough young people in the mix to add up to that Saskatchewan bus crash, or the Nova Scotia mass murder - horrifying news in a non-pandemic context.
But we plucky British Columbians are going to take that hit just so we can go shopping and visiting and stay ahead at work. The tendency to think it won't happen to you, is behind why restrictions are so inconsistent. The officials know the urge is there, and so fear to push against it too hard, they know they are herding cats. The successful places like New Zealand and Australia have had success because they've had buy-in.
We had buy-in, but, clearly we are losing it. That, and not public health mistakes, is why we are so screwed.
With luck, rather than getting numb to the death-toll over the next three weeks, a growing sense of concern will come back, and when the revels are ended, we'll get back to crushing that curve, one last time.
http://brander.ca/c19#screwed
But he's won a journalism award recently for his good works with The Tyee, which I recommend again and again, we support it, and may be upping our contribution soon, I'm finding a lot of good articles there.
The other day, Nikiforuk wrote a wonderful summing-up of Jason Kenney's stupid, weak, disasterous pandemic strategy.
I'll jump to the conclusion for you:
So who's the Alberta basher? Own it, Mr. Premier. You just bashed your province.
http://brander.ca/c19#nikiforuk
And it struck me that not only had I seen some pretty long lines to get into stores yesterday, I was looking at a Georgia street choked with slow-moving vehicles at four in the afternoon. It was a typical-looking Saturday before Xmas shopper's rush hour.
Most of the "restrictions" still depend on personal choices, and people are personally choosing to do the Christmas stuff. I'm reading a lot into a packed street, but my hopes that the curve would start getting crushed, got crushed.
I think the numbers are going to be bad through the New Year. Maybe then we can get serious and make some progress. As I look back at late March through early May, it was actually about the same: the downside-slopes of the curves were gentle, the infections going down slowly - and that was with more business closed, the schools closed. Sitting around every weekend expecting a dramatic turnaround was naive.
The advocates of "circuit breaker" lockdowns, where you lock down really hard for just a few weeks, are probably naive, also. Absent massive policing of the "hard" lockdown, you'd probably still get only a gentle downward trend, and be unable to just go back to normal in two weeks. Imagining it will happen around Christmas, when all the good messaging is swimming upstream against ingrained traditions, was awfully optimistic.
I'm switching my hopes that "Dry January", will also be "Spaced-Out January", and we'll have some normality around the end of it. That, and the knowledge that at least the medical staff are protected, will cheer me up considerably.
http://brander.ca/c19#crushed
That's hitting 100/day for Canada, with 2000 deaths to come. The US is expecting over 3000/day for the rest of the month, and into January, their curves not even changing yet. For them, another hundred thousand dead - passing their WW2 military losses - is now inevitable by early January. For Canada, sixteen thousand dead by then, and even if the curve is then rapidly crushed, stays there until vaccines reach over 60% in the late summer, we'll probably hit twenty thousand dead. It's predictable, and changing people's behaviour is now so hard, it feels inevitable.
It's not the inevitable deaths to those already sick that get to me. It's the weird notion that I could be passing people on the street that look OK, but will show symptoms tomorrow, and not see Christmas - the Walking Dead. (I'll bring out that term to pass along a joke from the other day:
I must have read about six SF stories now, pretty much relating back to the legend of Cassandra, about people who can predict the future - but only predict terrible things, and be unable to change them. Generally, they're basically horror stories for the Twilight Zone. That's what it feels like, watching the train come at you, down the tracks you're tied to.
It's going to be a tough month for Christmas cheer. I can only hope "The Epiphany" (January 6th) actually brings one for the ongoing denial movement.
http://brander.ca/c19#cassandra
"Early on in the pandemic" is the only time for which the now-famous "R0" was a reflection of what it would be if everybody went back "to normal", presuming we can even remember that. The Rt numbers ever since, reflect at least some caution in even the dumbest locations. That original R0 was 2.8.
Your extremely simple model of vaccination is that you can multiply R0 by the percent of vaccinated people that will still catch it from an infectee, and that's you post-vaccine Rt.
So, we need 66% effectiveness, because 2.8/3 is less than one. As long as it's under one, an infection will die out naturally, fewer victims with every "generation" of transmission.
Unfortunately, 100% population vaccination isn't going to happen. If we only vaccinate half the population, well, the other half still have Rt=2.8, so the overall population is at 1.4, even if the other half had zero risk. (Again, this is a very simple model.)
Even with the incredible 95% effective vaccines, you still have to vaccinate 65% of the population, because the remaining 35% will have that 2.8 Rt, for 0.95 overall. The 5% infection rate in the vaccinated 65% of the population take that nearly up to one.
The good news is that not every member of the population is an equal-risk infector. Remember that this is the Pareto Pandemic, the infection mostly the result of superspreaders, the 20% of infectees that average a dozen victims each, responsible for 80% of the infections.
It will be crucial to vaccinate that lot. People who contact many others are work, sports, education, and other institutional settings are the really vital vaccinations.
They should be mandatory for the job, in those professions, in those schools, for the sport access in those sports.
Period.
http://brander.ca/c19#vaxmath
But the other "round number headline" yesterday, was "over 3000 dead in a single day", that is, "more than 9/11". There's just no reason to assume that much less than 100,000 will die in the next month, they've kind of sentenced themselves to that by the infection-rate of the last weeks. They should hit 405,399 (WW2) around the middle of January. (On January 21, 2021, of course, all 410,000 will become Biden's Fault.) Only their Civil War death toll (~655,000) remains unlikely.
They could reach even that number, before vaccines finally take effect, but I suspect the next month will school even their most ardent denialists into changing behaviours. Or, at least, I continue to hope.
For now, though, it's just their third-worst war. It was a stupid mistake to call it "The China Virus" - mostly because the attempt - to create a public assumption of foreign attack - simply didn't catch, always a humiliating failure for a demagogue. Also, now, because, if this was a war with China, then, man, China really beat your ass, soundly. (Why, exactly, they infected themselves first as a strategy, would remain a puzzler, of course.)
http://brander.ca/c19#294265
Despite our own raising of the Christmas Lights for the first time in Vancouver, this year, it's painful that we'll be with family only over Skype. (Once again, praise be, the pandemic waited until nearly everybody had Internet that would support Skype.) It's tough. The longer an inconvenience goes on, the more you feel "due" for a break. But my parents got through Christmas 1939 through Christmas 1944 apart from their families, six of them in a row. We'll manage the one.
Can those who feel this is just impossible, spare a thought for those whose Christmas has been "cancelled" by the death of a family member? It's really hard, losing somebody when it's close to Christmas: quite the damper.
Many families can be philosophical about COVID losses, if they're that fraction that were in the last few years of life, their deaths expected for some time already. Even now, that is over half of them. Still - at Christmas. Hard.
Spare more thought for those about to lose people with decades left. Chuck Yeager made it to 97. Canada currently has some 2000 people, age band 50-70, fighting for their lives in the ICU. 1200 in that age band have already died in Canada, and some hundreds of those 2000 are going to leave those ICUs in body bags. Right Around Christmas.
Christmas is definitely cancelled for those thousands of families in Canada, probably for a hundred thousand families in the United States, just counting the losses that shocked their families as "not their time".
So please, if you were still thinking of travelling or gathering, don't. Call off Christmas, so it won't be called off in a far more terrible way, for others - possibly others in your own family.
http://brander.ca/c19#xmascancelled
But Keith pointed out the differences from last weekend: 2020 new cases instead of over 2300, last weekend; the case-counts dropped in all health regions except the far north, which has just a few. Considering that these are three-day sums, and a week apart, it's significant.
We aren't really on the downside of the curve yet, we're pretty much sitting on top of it. Yes, the 7-day rolling average of daily case-counts, at left, looks like a downside, but we're just a couple of higher days away from that looking like a fluctuation. Don't let your breath out yet. But: it is no longer an exponential increase, or any increase; it's very likely started a downward trend. If we can just keep it up.
Manitoba and Saskatchewan are in similar straits: clear signs that that R-factor has broken down below one, the curve turning. But Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, no sign of a turnaround. For the nation, things are still looking bad.
Let's all push on this, we really need to see their three numbers change next weekend for sure.
http://brander.ca/c19#patience
December the Seventh, Two Thousand and Twenty, will not live in infamy, though at least as many Americans will die today, of a foreign (indeed, originally, Asian) attack. The virus' attack, of course, was the least-sneaky attack in American history. In 1941, 2400 dying was a terrible shock; today is just another day in 2020 America.
The Monday number, however, will be false, really, an artifact of the simplest, silliest data-mangle: the weekend. Here in BC, they simply don't report the Saturday/Sunday case-loads or death-counts, until 3pm Monday, which is why I am "weekend waiting". I'll get three days of case numbers at once. In my dreams, they will be in the 700s, 600s, and 500s respectively, indicating that the curve is being crushed, and we're on the other side. In my dreams. After a couple of Mondays like that, I'm mainly hoping they just stop going up. Fingers crossed.
But the worldometers numbers for the USA come in every day, its just that some counties don't report on weekends, some do. So you see the "weekend dip", shown at right - that being the most-extreme "weekend dip" ever in USA daily-cases, because of their (roughly) five-day superweekend for Thanksgiving. Mostly, you can filter out weekend dips with a 7-day moving average line (blue), but Thanksgiving was so big, it created this bizarre dip even in the average.
This last weekend dip will result in a catch-up today that might inflate their numbers - already ticking up to the high 2000s - above that 3000 round number that will trigger all the 9/11 references in the headlines.
The poor newsies: they'll be torn between doing a Pearl Harbour reference, and a 9/11 reference: what rhetorical gymnastics will they use?
Oh, yeah, the poor dead Americans, too. Shame about them.
http://brander.ca/c19#wknd
We've been doling out the "Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings" movies, one per weekend, for over a month now. Last night's conclusion to "The Two Towers" was lighter on the magical enchantments, and heavy on the sort-of 14th-century medieval battles of armor and sword, with a high chance of dying.
"Lord of the Rings" has now brought some three generations to the game of Dungeons and Dragons. I think it's one of the greatest things for childhood education, ever. I'm sorry I only discovered it in my twenties, when I already had a science degree with a stats course.
It's educational, because losing roll after roll of the dice in a fight teaches you, the hard way, slowly, how statistics work, which is the opposite of how drama works, how war stories work.
Both Star Trek and Star Wars, the real children's classics of our day, feature the drama approach. Kirk and Spock are about to sneak into the bad guy's fortress, when Spock starts to say "Captain, the odds of a successful attack are.. "..."Spock! Don't tell me the odds". A dozen years later, C-3PO is trying to tell Han Solo that the odds of flying through an asteroid field are...and gets almost exactly the same reply: Never tell me the odds!.
In Dungeons and Dragons, successful players learn the opposite message: Always tell me the odds! That's what real-life warriors want, too, at least after their first battle. The last thing they want is drama. If everybody thought that way all the time, we'd have had a fraction of the casualties we've had from the pandemic. We'd have almost no arguments right now about the right things to do, save arguments over what the odds are. What are the odds of infection in a bar? In a restaurant? Outdoors versus indoors?. (Hint: given the choice, take the dragon on your left, not the bar on your right. At least in South Dakota, today.)
When the first wave was crushed, the risk inherent in going out and being near people was greatly reduced. But it wasn't zero, and the more you went out and did, the more infections happened, the more the risk increased. That's the risk-based view: that every contact was still a risk, still to be minimized. You could minimize with masks, with limited outings, with smaller gatherings.
Many people took the dramatic view instead: the Monster had been defeated, we were now in the broad sunlit uplands of safety, go do anything. Never tell me the odds, you'll ruin the wedding. And here we are.
We need the makers of Dungeons and Dragons to create a new game called "going out". You have to throw a bunch of dice every time you go out. Out to the store: you're infected if six dice come up all ones. Out to a wedding for 50: you're infected if you throw a single die and it comes up one, because the risk is hundreds of times higher. A few hours of playing that game, rolling those dice, might teach people to take fewer such risks in real life.
As proof, I offer the point that no group of Dungeons and Dragons players have ever actually attempted to storm a castle. Which should be good enough proof for your average anti-vaxxer, after all.
http://brander.ca/c19#dd
But, no, this global conspiracy should involve about 99% of the human race, and be announced on the pages of major newspapers.
This is the year the forces of common sense can strike back. Last year was the one where (mostly liberal) anti-science idiots in Seattle caused the 2019 measles outbreak, covering their children in spots, and themselves in shame.
Secondly, this year has provided a little white lie that can be exploited: that remote learning and remote work is acceptable. This year, schools are going to claim that children deserved to be promoted, and graduated with diplomas, after distance learning. We know it wasn't that great, but that's the story.
So, those who would claim they have some 'right' to go to school or work unvaccinated, and risk the lives of others, can just be told they're on permanent remote status - remote work, remote schooling - until vaccinated. I suppose for work, we could accept wearing a mask and distancing.
I suggested this in a newspaper comment this morning, and got a reply that many are finding remote work to be preferable, and it might be taken as a reward, not punishment. A minor concern, to me. Long before the pandemic, it was accepted workplace wisdom that the more personal contact with bosses, the better for your career. It's better to be near her office, better to bump into her at coffee and in elevators - "elevator speech" is even a common term. Remote-work being a Good Thing will die within weeks of most people going back to the office. I did a few months of remote work just before retiring, and found it very harmful to my human connections.
I do agree that you get more flies with honey. Vaccines should be promoted gently and respectfully through the next Fall. But for Fall 2021, schools in particular must demand vaccines, parent groups must threaten to not let children attend schools that tolerate non-vaccination. Best of all, now that we have the "you'll have to go remote" threat, we can insist on it for all vaccines, not just covid.
Then something good can come out of all this. I'd love to see some social progress with income inequality and child-care and all that, but I'd take a mighty win over the anti-vaxxer idiots as a Great Year.
http://brander.ca/c19#antivax
I liked it so much, I went to the trouble of googling Dr. Jones, to offer the link to her 23-some scientific publications; she also does a lot of science-fact articles for local Wisconsin journalism.
It's the best take-down I've read, in all this time, on the very idea of "natural herd immunity". Most just point out you need a dead minimum of 60% infected to get there (and this is, by the way, a round number guess: waves might not stop until you hit 70%, or 80%), compute the death-toll of that,(millions) and assume the argument is won.
Alas, the argument keeps coming back, and those who keep reviving the zombie, barely disguise their contempt for the deaths of the old, wave them away with "keep them safe in homes", so Dr. Jones decided a more comprehensive, fully dispositive argument was needed to shut them down.
She goes over how long it would take, many months: as more are infected, the rate slows..for...a...long...time...before it stops. It would come at first in this huge wave that would overwhelm hospitals, crush medical staff, eliminate all other treatment for any other problem. Then the wave would recede, but come back, wave after wave, as the virus reached ever-more protected groups.
You'd try to manage it, to restrict the size of the waves, keep the medical system functioning - but also try to push it, so it wouldn't take six months, like controlled firebreaks in firefighting. You'd fail; it isn't really possible to control it.
If you deliberately pushed contacts, say across a university, to force the university community to "local immunity", it would escape to other communities. (It would be this great "opportunity" for teenagers to legally, if only statistically, murder unpopular elderly professors, though, so there's that.)
You'd try to protect care-homes, but how to protect all the vulnerable people who live outside them, just have severe diabetes, but are needed at work? You'd lose up to 30% of those with severe "pre-existing conditions". One useful thing about the discussion, for American health-care debates, is determining who, exactly, could not possibly care less about "pre-existing conditions".
Actually walking through how the scenario would work out, in a little detail, is devastating. Nobody would propose it. All the proposers have glossed over these details, easily predictable as they are.
But people kept proposing; Sweden actually tried it, and is now very sorry.
We can put it behind us, now, with the first UK vaccinations out next week. But we really have to remember all the people who kept pushing it. They should be marked for life, like those who promoted the Iraq War.
That means, of course, that any journalists in question, are up for a promotion.
http://brander.ca/c19#herd
But you need a few days in a row of steady declines before you can hope it's the crest behind you. I keep hoping, every day, for a couple of weeks now.
Yesterday's 800-some for BC (I can't even be bothered to look it up), was a crushing disappointment. The soaring numbers are not news; the message from public health and the premier could not be more clear. Everybody knows how this goes, by now.
Most people I see, in my very limited corner of Vancouver, are clearly getting more cautious. More masks, more caution in stores. The restaurant I saw the other day was alarming, but as I walked the street yesterday, I could see it was an exception. A lot of people are voluntarily restricting activity.
The finger-pointing, very possibly unfair, (because the problem is work, not recreation), is at "Fraser Health Region", that is, cities of the lower mainland just east of Vancouver proper. We may need a pro-mask, pro-restrictions car rally, or something, drive through those streets honking...I don't know. People have got to get the message.
If contact-tracing says that Fraser cases are coming from work, then for heaven's sake, bite the bullet, BC, and shut down those types of work for a few weeks.
I need to see that peak in the rear-view mirror. It's not just about the disease risk; I need to feel some pride in the community, you guys are testing my faith.
http://brander.ca/c19#rearview
And, I'm done for the day, except for drawing a connection to the pandemic. "Herding Cats" had already been used so much to describe "managing computer programmers" that they could reference the joke on a major-network commercial. Programmers are considered quirky, introverted, hard-to-reach, and prone to distraction by pet projects. Like most stereotypes, it's a wild exaggeration of a few truths, of course: most supervisors, after another drink, will admit that hard-to-manage people are also common through the rest of the office. (Programmers often have more option to leave, so you can't smack them down as easily.)
It's become clear that the public-health officers of Canada fear that they're herding cats. I mean, we have case-loads right now bigger than anything that happened in the first wave. Those case-loads, and a little fear of more, had us all banging pots, barely venturing out for groceries, and hoarding toilet paper for reasons that remain unexplained. Now, we're angry that the bars are closing at 10 pm. I passed a restaurant the other day, that had about four tables going in a 20x20 space, and my jaw dropped open as I stared. It was a low ceiling, no windows open. I wouldn't have wanted to pick up takeout, much less sit down.
The social media push-back includes belief systems that the hospitals are not even busy; we're back to the "hoax". Meanwhile, in Australia, they correctly spotted over three months ago that they needed lockdown to crush a second wave, crushed it, and have been fine for Several weeks. (Granted, they're going into summer over there, that helps.) It's been over a month since anybody died of COVID there.
Canada can get out of this mess. We just have to do the same stuff we've been told to do for nine months. We wouldn't even need to lock down, if people could just take their behaviour seriously when they are out. But, I'm trying to herd cats. If the cats won't herd, you've got to lock them down.
http://brander.ca/c19#herdingcats
Religious people have always jumped at the opportunity to view natural disasters as a Message from God. This is touted about hurricanes in general - they keep happening because of sin - and specific hurricanes have causes, taxation in the case of Hurricane Irene in 2011. At that time, the Republican in question wondered
When I googled to find stories on the religious reaction to the pandemic, all the stories that came up dated back to the beginnings in April. The Charlottesville Observer collected some reactions. Just 11% of religious respondents blamed it on "human sinfulness", most of the rest on "governments", either foreign or domestic.
I bring this up as a conclusion to the previous three days of marvelling at the timing of the pandemic, and how perfectly BAD it was for the Republicans: all of the pandemic pain, none of the pandemic victory. (If they can get the first vaccines injected by December ninth, a heroic achievement, those first recipients will be considered 95% immune when the second, 28-days-later injection has had a few weeks to work, a total of 42 days later: Biden's inauguration day. I could argue the pandemic was timed to the day to screw the current president.)
If the pandemic is the product of "intelligent design", the intelligence clearly wanted him screwed. If you can't see that plainly, then I'm with Michelle Bachman: "I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians."
http://brander.ca/c19#message
I'm going to assume a Democrat's election, again taking advice from David Frum that the old "42%" would have been no higher, just as the pandemic made it go no lower. So, one year exactly makes it interesting, because the pandemic would have hit exactly the same: with the now-outgoing President ignoring it entirely.
What would have been hard on the Democrats, of course, is that the entire thing would have been relentlessly blamed on them, from January 20th, onward. As long as they have to fight it somehow, the crisis is a "hoax"; but the instant a politcal enemy can be blamed for it, there's a sudden transformation into Major Catastrophe.
I was reminded of a "fantasy episode" of the TV show, The Good Fight, where a character is hit on the head and experiences a longish dream that Clinton had won in 2016. It's explained to her that the administration had announced a cure for cancer a year later...and was now being bitterly attacked by conservatives, with much equivocation and timid concessions by the liberals, for having done so too slowly.
In America, four dead in Benghazi was a Major Catastrophe, but 40,000 dead was "less than most flu seasons". Be assured that the same 40,000 dead, if laid at Democratic feet, would be 10,000 times as bad as Benghazi.
I doubt that Democrats could have held it down to 40,000, of course. There's only so much the federal government can do with "messaging".
It's fascinating and futile to attempt to guess what the US death toll would have been, up to now, with a good administration in charge, following Obama's "Pandemic Playbook". Better, certainly, but much better?
It doesn't matter, though. No number of dead would have been small enough to get a pass. The Democrats would certainly have wielded the "COVID Cup Defense", that is, showed how the USA did better than many other countries. Since Britain and France, Italy and Spain would still have done terribly, there'd be worse cases to point to.
But, at the end of the day, it would have been a Democrat failure and embarrassment, it would have done them some damage, even if they'd pulled out of it long before 2022. My overall point is that this pandemic was timed, almost to the month, to dump all the bad times on a Republican, and all the vaccination season and subsequent economic burst, will hit in the first months of the new administration.
From Biden's point of view, the timing of the pandemic was perfect. One can criticize the Republicans for performance (and must), but you can't deny they were handed the most atrocious bit of bad luck in recent political history.
http://brander.ca/c19#covid20
That's just not true, epidemiologically, or for most of the world. The networking, and mRNA vaccines, were all nearly as good a year ago, good enough. Most nations had about the same politics; Australia and South Korea would still have done well, and Britain, under Johnson, very badly. Canada would have done the same. Indeed, I'm pleased, as a Canadian, to say it would have been the same under Harper, as little as I like his politics; Canadian conservatives would not have responded with magical thinking. Our conservatives are better than theirs.
But the United States? Well, for the pandemic itself, again the same. The administration denied it, no matter whether there were 15 cases - or 150,000 per day. The American response to the COVID-18 pandemic would have produced the exact same devastating documentary of incompetence.
But the final political outcome might have been harder for their Democrats. Perhaps not. I mind an interview with David Frum, who noted that that the deathless "42%", that we kept seeing as support for four years, never changed for any other reason, so the lack of a pandemic wouldn't have brought any more GOP support; the pandemic, he said, did not win Biden anything, because also nothing could increase that unending "42%".
But what if they'd successfully taken credit for beating the pandemic? It's well-known that people only judge you on the economy of the election year. Ronald Reagan presided over a recession for two years. It ended mostly because of work at the Fed on money supply, but he still ran on "are you better off now than four years ago", and picked up a lot of votes. Another legend is that "The economy, stupid", was why a sudden recession ended the first Bush presidency, despite him winning a war a year earlier.
If it had been COVID-18, then the vaccines would have come out in December of 2019. By the political conventions of August, the population would have been hitting 50% vaccinated, and another 10% immune from disease, because of their huge infection rate; the conventions would have gone on, rallies would have been huge, and you-know-who would have relentlessly pressed a message of his own heroic responsibility for every dose of vaccine. The economy is expected to explode in six months, and it would have been five months into that explosion on their election day.
I concede that Frum is basically correct, but I think that the vote would have been at least closer - and as we've seen from the frantic, pathetic attempts to cast doubt on the election, that would have been damaging.
2020 was far luckier, for their Democrats, and frankly, for democracy. Happiness is relative. Be happy. Tomorrow: what if it were COVID-20? Also a Bad Thing for American Democrats.
http://brander.ca/c19#covid18
It could have been worse. Much. It could have been an earlier year.
The horrors of a pandemic were highlighted in 2011, by the movie "Contagion", which is also all that world leaders needed for a briefing, really. Nations that did what the smart places did in that movie, are the ones looking very good these days. The SARS scare had already hit, years before, and MERS, the next year. What if COVID-19 had been COVID-13, hit soon after?
It would have hit a world with much more of it at war. Indeed, it would have been very bad in the Middle East if a pandemic had hit in 2004, with war raging.
Even several years back would have found our economy much less able to handle lockdown with only 10% of the economic output shut down. The Zoom corporation was founded in 2011. Skype already existed, but given its many bugs, I doubt that half the office workers in the developed world could have been using it, simultaneously, and most of the school students, without collapse. Our (very limited) success with telework and teleschooling, has also come from the continuous upgrades to the Internet infrastructure in recent years, to let streaming work. It wasn't there a half-dozen years ago.
And speaking of streaming, lockdown has been considerably more tolerable with all those streaming options. Not a huge improvement on 100 cable channels, but every bit has helped with morale. Those months with the library closed, and no discs rentable, were hard enough as it was.
But for the big finish, those mRNA vaccines that are now amazing us with how quickly they came out, how high a protection they offer, and how they're actually safer than the old kind, are very new. This is the first time they've been deployed in large numbers, for humans. The technology to make them at all, at scale, was only developed a few years before "Contagion" came out, and it's very unlikely they would have been approved, or even attempted, before about 2015 at the earliest.
SARS-COV-2 actually waited, very politely, for us to be much more ready for it than we were, even half-dozen years ago.
So, those observations apply to 2020 "the good year" for the whole developed world. Coming up, how it was the perfect year, almost to the exact month, for it to hit the USA -- politically speaking, for their liberals. It was so badly timed for the GOP, that one is tempted to buy into their conspiracy theories.
More on that, the next two days.
http://brander.ca/c19#2020yay1
That's because it's patriotism. Patriotism is always "sappy". Only a sap would buy into patriotism, sacrifice for others. Patriotism can get you killed, it's always best to be completely cynical and self-serving. Britons who started prattling about "we're all in this together" when The Blitz fell upon London, frequently died for their Kumbaya attitudes. Some, because they stayed in London to help the wounded, some even marched off to war, to stop the bombers. What saps.
And nothing damages "The Economy" like patriotism. To repeat, World War II subtracted 30% from the American economy to defense production, for three years. Britain fared much worse, enduring food rationing almost to 1950. It would have been vastly cheaper to have an "Anschluss", like Austria, learn a few Hitler salutes. Edward VIII was all ready to take over as a pro-German King. There were only a few hundred thousand Jews in Britain at the time. Boris Johnson nearly signed off on that many deaths from coronavirus, just a few months back, before Ferguson's presentation stopped him.
Yup, it's a lot, to ask people to sacrifice convenience, time, work, money for their country. Those opposed to all that certainly have a point. Where they go wrong is imagining that they're being asked to do all this to:
The unpatriotic are getting themselves killed, but they're getting the patriots killed, too. We need to start calling them what they are: unpatriotic.
http://brander.ca/c19#patriotism
Let the laws of probability be nudged, nay, be stretched, to preclude any of us carrying the virus thou hast granted us, to show us the sins of our society. Should thy virus be present, pray alter the laws of physics, to prevent our very breaths becoming aerosol bioweapons. Be it thy will for the aerosols to fill the room, grant the elders present, the luck to not become infected.
Should thy Divine Plan include their illness, let the new treatments be not hard to find in this time of plague; let their ability to shift the probability of death downward by a third, include their cases in that third.
Do not kill us for our foolishness, for we really did mean well.
In Jesus name, we pray.
Amen.
http://brander.ca/c19#usthanksgiving
But she figures that having higher case-loads than Ontario, with three times the population, still doesn't justify all that much.
The contrast with last night's CBC piece on the draconian lockdowns in Australia is sharp. They had public support, and they worked. Australia is back economic productivity today, with a total national death toll of one-twelfth of Canada's. Even people who'd lost their bar in Australia, sadly accepted the need for the actions, on camera. Everybody seemed to understand this led to the minimum economic damage, was not a trade-off with money.
My Facebook poster is resistant to current public-health policy, but on a spectrum of resistance - with these views near the other end:
I disagree with these, but we all have to live in the same society with them.
I was angry at Facebook for the stuff I had to read on it, for the stupid temptation it gave me to reply, to argue. After the last three weeks, that's all drained out. There's an ocean of it, and you don't shout at the ocean.
I'm sure that Australia has a fair-sized population of people who could have gone the same way. We need to look to these successful nations: what strategies did they employ? How did they talk about this? What they did worked. What was it?
Jason Kenney's approach is not working for some of these resisters, either: I saw the "pedophile" word hauled out on him today, on Facebook, presumably for the degree of lockdown he did reluctantly accept. I didn't bother to read the post in detail. I need to read up on Australia, not shout at the ocean.
http://brander.ca/c19#resistance
It's weird, to me it feels like there isn't news right now, in spite of all the exponentials, and the vaccines, and the stores paradoxically packed, because they're so dangerous they must be closed immediately. (I'm not sure how bad that is. I'm currently irritated by shaggy locks because I was afraid to get a haircut two weeks ago. But ONE week ago, I spent a half-hour in a Best Buy...without getting within a metre of anybody for more than seconds, the new mask on tight. It didn't feel scary. Others may be less-cautious.)
It all feels like minor news, as we wait for each day's case-counts. That's the real serious news, about how Christmas is going to go, it's being decided now. The weekend numbers for BC were fairly depressing, over 600 per day. But there was a glimmer of hope, in that the previous two days were in the 700s. It's good news when the second derivative of the daily case-counts goes negative. The first derivative is the change in case-counts per day. When that goes negative, you're going down from 700 to 600 to 500, and the curve is being crushed. But it's already great news, already almost over, when the rate of increase slows.
I'm not sure if BC is yet into declining new cases, but I'm pretty sure the rate of increase has at least slowed. We need a few more days of data-points, from mid-week when the data flows consistently, to be sure. Maybe people have stepped back from contacts, from activities, broken the exponential chain.
If so, we may be better people than some. A WaPo article today openly worries that restrictions and lockdowns will just get no response in parts of America.
Once again, the people may not respond...the virus always will. It won't even take Christmas off.
http://brander.ca/c19#derivative
And I can testify the people are hanging in there; we just got off the Zoom call with the relatives in Madrid, and the baby is looking healthy, the toddler is healthy and happy and bouncing about, the two adults are doing well enough with remote work, and morale is high.
PJ O'Rourke made the great comment on "morale"; it really means "how well people are doing when they aren't doing well at all". PJ notes that we speak of morale in prisons, morale on warships, morale at work. Nobody talks about the morale level of a vacation, or a love affair, or a night out on the town. So, well as things are going, it's still "morale". But they're going to make it to Spring, that's for sure.
So are we. As we go into a few weeks of the scourging punishments of Job, to which we are sentenced by the case-rates of the last few weeks, at least be sure that if we crush this curve well and hold it down, it'll be the last.
http://brander.ca/c19#zoomcall
For lots of people, that "little spot" is most of their brain, and every hour in a group is like white-knuckle flying. They don't want to be rude, though, so they bravely accept invitations, tough it out, even put in a conversational sally or two, armpits soaking the undershirt.
Imagine how happy they are, this week! Saved, at last, after impatiently expecting a lockdown for the last week. Or three! Authorities really didn't move until they were arm-twisted. I wrote of Dr. Bonnie using "surgery" the other week. She was thinking that the key contact issues had been identified, and could be addressed, but, nope - all surgery failed, and we're back to April. Her poor colleague, Dina Henshaw in Alberta, is looking much worse right now. Most of Alberta's people are about to lock down, whatever Kenney says. Toronto, of course, has no more options.
In America, especially, this couldn't have come at a worse time for socializing: for them, the whole Thanksgiving-through-New-Year's season is a single giant family togetherness holiday. Alas, even the American "virus hoax" deniers can't really deny 2,000 dead per day, now specializing in the reddest states and counties.
For introverts, the Spring was The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, finally, everybody required to act the way they'd rather act all the time. There's going to be a great deal of unhappiness over the next couple of months, as the wave crests and slowly recedes. I'm glad that some people just got the nicest Christmas present.
http://brander.ca/c19#introverts
The Post has a routine article about the numeric comparisons that absorbed me when the ticker crossed the "Vietnam Dead" line of 58,000. It compares the 250,000 to other disasters of American history.
It's still below the numbers for the Civil War (600,000+) and World War II (405,000), and the 1918 flu (nearly 700,000). Other than that, this disaster is the single biggest.
We are just a few days away, probably two weeks, from the last number I bothered to fix up from the casualties of war page on Wikipedia. It's 294,265 - and it's the grand total of all American casualties of all wars, subtracting only the Civil War, and WW II. From their Revolutionary War (50,000) and the "Northwest Indian War, 1785-1796" (35 casualties) at the top of the page, to the "Islamic State Intervention 2014" (157 dead) and the "Raid on Yemen 2017" (1 dead), it comes to 294,265. We'll see it around December Sixth.
The Post article does note some models show the US reaching 438,000 deaths by March 21, and actually exceeding even the WW II numbers. That would be a death rate of 1320 per million, higher than any current in the world - though by then Belgium will have pulled well ahead.
The war comparisons trigger my interest because of the variance in public reaction. During a war, every loss is publicized, keenly felt. The notion that in another month, the US might be experiencing the same losses as 9/11, every day, seems almost bizarre - 9/11 changed the US politics so much, but the losses of a hundred time as much seem only to have confirmed them.
http://brander.ca/c19#250000
Every day seems to bring more good news about vaccines, and every news organ jumps on those stories. The one that caught my eye this morning might as well have been a product placement, since it touts just the one business: at left, the 460 Fitness Gym in Blacksburg Virginia
Finally, finally, finally, somebody heard the "6 foot rule" and instead of saying "SIX feet? Outrageous!", said "Let's make it ten feet, then". The tape marks out your workout space, which is self-contained. No crossing into others' spaces, or sharing any equipment.
That would not have been enough, not in a gym, where people are emitting fog clouds of aerosols that can cross even a ten-foot limit, can cross a room. The key was airflow. Gym owner Velvet Minnick worked with Linsey Marr, a civil engineering professor. (Finally! Somebody asked us! We were waiting!) Marr is an expert in airborne transmission and recommended the "athlete stations" be at the doors you see at back, and those kept open. With the windspeeds in the area, the airflow was several times the normal amount. Where cold forced some doors closed, they enforced mask requirements. "We don't see outbreaks above a certain ventilation rate", Marr notes.
It's a nice symmetry: you don't wind up on a ventilator, if you ventilate your space to start with.
The amount of human exhalations in the air is monitored with a carbon dioxide meter, a neat, commercially-available approach.
The benefits were shown by disaster averted: one coach tested positive, and it turned out he'd worked with no less than 50 athletes in the space, while infectious. There wasn't a single infection.
The 460 Fitness solution can't be applied everywhere, but fans and ventilation can be greatly improved in a lot of places, like bars and restaurants. Examples like these show us how much life we can get back, altered but recognizable. The vaccine news is heartening for the Spring, but we have a winter to get through, and as much life as possible needs to go on.
http://brander.ca/c19#airflow
And hardly any states are more for GOP politics; Wyoming delivered 70% of its vote to them this year, more than any in the nation.
Alas for them, this is associated with being States of Denial. The most-chilling story came up Monday in the Post: A nurse in South Dakota telling of patients that deny the virus is real, right up to their death.
Is the pandemic about fighting a disease, or about a radical agenda to take away all our possessions? That's where the argument goes, two sentences after attempting to discuss mask-wearing, or school closure. School re-openings are actually, the finest-grained public health decisions that are made right now, because they are far below the state, province, or even city level: there are 10,000 school systems in the US, which were studied by two political science professors for whether they re-opened or not - and what that was associated with.
It had NO association with the level of infection at the time. None.
It had a slight association with teacher's unions: the stronger the union, the more likely it was to close and go to remote instruction. A little.
But the only strong correlation with re-opening was the number of GOP voters. It's an almost entirely political decision, in most districts. The infection risk is not really considered.
So the butcher's bill for this belief system is now coming in. British Columbia and Ontario both have about 40 people per million in hospital right now, the dotted line low-down on the chart at right. Their prairie states have almost ten times that. BC is now losing about ten people per day to covid, and we know that is doomed to double and more over the next few weeks. But the four states are will be losing 80 people per day, all next week.
Whether it goes on up to 100 and 200 per day, for under 3 million people, is up to them, really. They just have to leave the State of Denial.
http://brander.ca/c19#efficiency
Well, take heart from Spain. Site of some of the pandemic's worst horrors, they had a new wave come for them in August, at left, that was higher than the first one. (At least in confirmed cases; those first waves may have been larger than we could prove, not enough tests.)
You notice that they were not successful at crushing that curve, it only dipped briefly in the middle of September for a few weeks, then began to soar again in October. The failure came from another success we can really cheer:
The other victory is just in the last three weeks: having soared up to an even-higher third wave, they got serious with restrictions in October, and it's now clear the curve is decisively going down. They have another month to put in, clearly, at the rate they're going. But it can be done.
Additional cheer comes from The Tyee article about the places beating COVID-19, one of which is Atlantic Canada - they'd be a world leader like South Korea or New Zealand, were they a separate country.
And the Globe has a great article about the state of Victoria in Australia and how they got it down and kept it down, a fulsome victory from the word "go".
The motto is "Go for Zero"; let's join in.
http://brander.ca/c19#spainwin
A friend who used to work there with me sent me a link the other day to a Financial Post article by non-health expert Terence Cocoran on the topic of how we may be valuing human life just too darn much with this lockdown stuff. Maybe the hit on "the economy" (a term I've come to distrust) is too expensive. Virus fighting is apparently so expensive it has to value human life at an over-the-top $17 million to make financial sense.
Then, the article notes the plummeting death rates from the virus, as we've kept more old people from getting it, and learned a few therapies. The analysis skips over how the death rate would soar again if the hospitals clogged, or how the whole "economy" would suffer if case-rates went so high that a quarter of the population was at home, either sick, caring for same, or afraid to go out, if over 50.
There was more discussion of these issues, and more detail, from an journalist-specialist on the subject, Cass Sunstein, author of "The Cost-Benefit Revolution", in an article in Bloomberg.
Also, it came to opposite conclusions, citing a study that showed about a $5 trillion profit for America in locking down, that is, the unfought pandemic would cost $5 trillion more than the cost of fighting it. It does acknowledge that we could slip into negative numbers if the depression stretched out long enough. (Dating to March 22, it had no idea that good vaccines would come so early.)
The Financial Post worldview is neatly expressed by an article this morning: "Posthaste: Great news about a new vaccine, but the rollouts are still a year away and that may be too late for many firms."
For many firms? For the businesses, for the machines owned by wealthy investors to return profits? The vaccine will be too late for them? Yup, the article summarizes the vaccine schedule situation, then the economic forecasts, and calls out this sentence with its own paragraph:
For many businesses, the vaccine may come too late.
The word "people" does appear in the article, when it is summarizing how many need the vaccine.
But they just don't notice that the vaccine will come too late for a lot of people, who are going to die. Indeed, one of those business problems is that after they die, they stop buying stuff, and definitely don't show up to work.
It's how unconscious this telling slip was, how they don't notice the signal they're sending, that's kind of delightful. I suppose tomorrow's article will look on the bright side, how the huge surge now hitting America will be good news for the funeral industry.
http://brander.ca/c19#costbenefit
Well, Andre' may not be a physician or biologist, but, damn, he really did pick it all up on the job, and has been winning awards and plaudits for his coverage for many years. His work on the pandemic has been exemplary. (His thumbnail up there is a link to his page at the paper, with all his work.)
What I have just discovered about the Globe is that I can support its best work by dropping $7 on the weekend edition in paper, more for the now-novel experience of reading the news at a table, with breakfast dripping onto the page. Yesterday's edition had an excellent opinion piece, which, like all Picard's "opinion" pieces, have more facts and figures than most news stories.
Doug Ford is properly excoriated for his loosening of restrictions while putting in his "colour coded system", the one I made fun of months before he invented it; loosening, as cases increased.
And, Jason Kenney is hit for his "I trust the public" line that is the opposite of leadership.
Best of all, Picard makes the simple, clear call for an inflexible set of rules: at so many cases, or so much positivity, restrictions increase whether politically convenient, or not.
Support your independent media, but don't miss Andre', either.
http://brander.ca/c19#picard
It's excellent journalism, and the podcast format is a great presentation of it, hearing the voices of the families, the actual residents, the care-givers about the emotional topic. What I'll add today is for those who'd rather not depress themselves with sad stories of people in a bad way, of stupid bureaucracies and suffering caused to save a few pennies.
That's understandable, so please at least listen to the very last episode, "The Most Dangerous Story", in which you hear about a care-home that tried something different, and succeeded beyond expectations. It's inspiring, and heartwarming, and positive. It'll do you good.
It does start off with the most effectively chilling thing I've ever heard on podcast, or radio before it. With some terrific writing, and skilled sound-editing, they somehow took me into the mind of a man replaying, over, and over, and over, every day, the worst half-hour of his life. A man searching frantically for a safe door from an air-raid, those moments coming back, in his dementia, as he searches for his own room in the care-home. And then you are shown his route out of Hell.
I had to stop typing there to wipe my eyes, just remembering it from four months ago. Let that be my review. It was just brilliantly effective story-telling, and Canadaland's Arshy Mann deserves a couple of journalism awards for producing it.
http://brander.ca/c19#canadaland
When Bonnie Henry gave a specific growth rate on the news yesterday (Daily Case-rates have doubled in 13 days), it took half a minute to work out the new "Rt", the number of people in turn infected by each new case, at this time.
For a rough number (and no other numbers are possible in pandemics, we now know), you just divide the doubling time by five, because the average time between "generations" is five days. In this case, 13/5 = 2.6. You then go to your calculator and take that root of two, because it's taking 2.6 "generations" to double. So 2 (y-root-of-x button) 2.6, (equals button)...and we have 1.3.
Currently, on average, every new infectee in BC is infecting 1.3 other people. We know that this average couldn't be further from the truth, of course, my headline is just a joke. The reality is still that most people don't infect anybody, a few infect one other, and a small number of "superspreaders" is 80% of the transmission. It's the "Pareto Pandemic". So far, Dr. Bonnie has been trying surgery on our activities to just cut out the superspreading events, and leave most activity intact.
The latest is that the superspreading seems to be mostly in the home, around the table, as it were. That's a hard thing to ask people to give up. But I missed a chance to connect with an old friend from work, whom I haven't seen in years, just yesterday - and we cancelled both Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I'll admit, it's a bit of a struggle to promote my next plug for Canadian independent journalism, the National Observer, at right. They've put some resources into the pandemic, but don't have a dedicated health expert. While they express a great interest in First Nations issues, they've done almost nothing on the effects of the pandemic on First Nations communities.
However, they've been good at covering the economic issues from the pandemic, and the problems in our jails. Give them a look, they're mostly reader-supported, and thus more independent than most of your other news.
http://brander.ca/c19#no
Today's plug is for The Tyee, a small BC paper that does everything from regional to international, and is highly independent.
The graphic at left links to a nice opinion piece - on how the stupidity that powers American right-wing politics, is also the stupidity that is killing people in the pandemic. Admittedly, the data comes from an American news source, the dry Associated Press newswire.
It seems that they went down below the state level that I graphed three weeks back as "Statistical Proof GOP States are Getting Sicker", to the county level, and found the correlation has become tighter still. Of the 372 counties with the highest number of infections, 93% voted GOP.
What I liked about the Tyee opinion piece by freelancer Mitchell Anderson was the willingness to estimate a butcher's bill for American mismanagement, a number I've struggled to justify. Anderson, Canadian, simply compares them to us:
Best of all, Anderson actually then has the nerve to switch topics, though switching away from "150,000 dead" takes discipline. He goes on to compare the dumbness to our own with opioids, and how many lives we could save there. It's a Canadian article, concerned with Canadian problems. We can still improve our own pandemic response, and we can use the lessons learned to save more lives taken by other mistakes.
We don't have to obsess over neighbours who are vastly more dumbass still - the message I need to take to my heart, and get better.
http://brander.ca/c19#tyee
Officially, yes, no ceremonies at the big cenotaphs in the centre of cities. But Vancouver has more than one cenotaph. This one had its hundredth anniversary this year, and the community around it was not about to stay away from it for any stupid pandemic. They, and we, the crowd, found a way to do it.
Those holding the ceremony stayed distant and masked except at the microphone.
The cenotaph is just in Stanley Park, in the nicest-gardened part of it - just west of the Aquarium. It's nestled in the trees that grow by the little creek, that runs behind the sea lion pool. (The sea lions make their comical-sounding calls all through each solemn ceremony, every year. This year, those calls are bittersweet comedy, because we can't go visit them.) So the crowd just had to spread out like this, and did so naturally, no prompting.
The police honour guard were distant enough up on their horses, I suppose, who were good as gold throughout. The "nine o'clock gun", just a kilometre distant, boomed 21 times throughout the hour, the echoes vollying across the harbour, but the horses remained calm.
Various dignitaries "attended" by livestream, and P.A. system. There was a half-hour of stories told, about how the Nisei fought for Canada, despite not having the vote. They fought for us, anyway - twice. They asked for the vote in 1915, got accepted into the army when desperately needed in 1916, and got the vote...in 1949. After the second war, which had internment, for their families, for thanks. This was Hedy Fry, the local MP, and their descendant. So was the MLA who spoke next.
Afterwards, we walked back through the least-known memorial of them all: the garden devoted to plaques about the air force trainees in BC. It's the most beautiful part of the park.
This year, the garden has a new plaque. Just installed a few months ago. This place is so little-known that we were quite alone. But Remembrance continues, in an unbroken chain.
Remembrance of the dead has a second layer of meaning this year, of course; we've lost so many. Canada, about a third as many as died for us in WW1 (61,000). In America, already more than twice as many as the 110,000 they lost, and their current government has surely doomed them to that rising to three times as many, before the still-rising wave is crushed. The news today is that the American government is now basically doing nothing about the pandemic.
It reminds me of those movies about WW1, like Gallipoli, or Paths of Glory, about how people were dying in one failed attempt after another to save face, and yet the generals were stubbornly stupid, letting them continue dying pointlessly.
http://brander.ca/c19#rememday
Yes, even the Grinch couldn't steal Christmas, and we'll be fine with our Skype sessions with the family. But it sure is a crushing disappointment. It would be worse if we were one of those locations in America or Britain where stupid behaviour could be blamed for this second wave (often third, in America) that's ensured we'll all be living more-limited lives again for much of the next month or more.
But, one must admit, BC has been pretty good, had nothing but the best advice from public health, and mostly taken it. The second wave is mostly just Fall indoors, school, the accumulation of more and more businesses opening, I think. The evidence is the aforementioned "surgery" of only restricting family gatherings, and a few businesses. There's nobody to blame, for which we should all be grateful. Any cracks in the feeling that "we're all in it together" can literally be deadly.
No wonder everybody is crying with gladness at the 90% vaccine from Pfizer, which has Canadian work in it. It's a dramatic new way of making vaccines, and the now-high chance of it working means that all vaccines could soon be coming out better and faster, following mutations faster. Another great new research in the field is from a Canadian company, and showing excellent results. (Two stories in the same day, that contain the phrase "even better than we hoped". The researchers must have been restraining an urge to twerk.)
As the PM says, it shows a light at the end of the tunnel. Between the grey, dark Fall weather, and the pall cast over Christmas, the multiple vaccine lights winking on this month are sorely needed for morale.
http://brander.ca/c19#xmascancel
Occupant
Dear Sir:
You are welcome to all the lawsuits and recounts you want, but I think you know, deeper down, how they are going to play out. Also, you know that I will be under intense pressure - from millions - to ensure that the Justice Department enforces every law that you may have crossed paths with, in the last decade or so. I gather there are four areas where they really won't let me ignore.
They aren't going to give me a choice: if I don't pursue that, the whole emoluments clause of the Constitution becomes a dead letter, not just a mere law.
So it's awkward for you, attempting a self-pardon, when that would establish any president entirely above the law; and it's awkward for me, because I don't want your supporters going crazy with their M16s, during the endless trials.
Indeed, I don't need your trials being "The Conversation" for about...oh, four years of appeals, I'm sure...when I'm trying to get policy discussed and passed.
So here's my solution: I can pardon you, and not be lynched for it, if and only if it would save a hundred thousand lives. Normally, that would be impossible, but, what a coincidence, here were are the one year of all American history where I could plausibly claim that. Epidemiologists will back me up on it: on the one hand, you're getting people killed. On ther other, you can save lives by just...going away. What a gift.
So: I'll pardon you. Hell, I'll pardon your family. I'll even pardon Steven Mnuchin for breaking the law to withhold your tax returns, if you care. If - and only if, Mr. Pence resigns tomorrow at 11:58 AM, you resign at 11:59, and Justice Roberts swears in Nancy Pelosi as the 46th President at noon. She will form a caretaker government of my proposed appointees, that will immediately implement a stringent pandemic response.
It's a terrible and shameful thing, a man being able to save a hundred thousand lives, by nothing more than getting the hell out of the way, 70 days early. It's a worse thing that 71 million voted for the problem in the system. But here I am, it's now my job to deal with it. My job and Nancy's.
She will not pardon you. I will pardon you in just over two months, provided you spend those two months tweeting and announcing exactly what you're told to say, which will be messages of heartfelt support for the new administration, and strongly urging your supporters to work with us in a spirit of peaceful, American transition. A lawyer will be at your side, all the time, ensuring you don't slip up, and you will cooperate, or lose your pardons. Your support must be so forceful it's impossible to walk back, after the pardons.
Be good at it, and Nancy and I will have a serious talk with the New York prosecutors, stressing the New Yorker lives saved, and get you off on everything. Just be good for 70 days, and you walk.
The beauty of this is that my supporters will know I won a hard bargain for those pardons, that you'd never have left for less. But your supporters will think that you had the big conversion in your great and unmatched wisdom, and I pardoned you out of respect, because they're incapable of thinking that you were beaten, frightened, and controlled.
Tweet "covfefe" again if you agree. Only you and I will ever see this page.
(signed) Joe.
http://brander.ca/c19#modest
Bad news for wedding and other party planners, for indoor gyms, for restaurants that hoped to push a few tables together to host a meeting, but otherwise, business as usual on Main Street. A lot of people with shaky jobs can breathe out now. (Just breathe out through a mask.)
Interestingly, the restrictions are far more intrusive into personal lives than a mere business lockdown. Telling people how many family members can gather together? Pretty busybody of her, and totally unenforceable. It really depends on voluntary cooperation.
Nope, I'm going to hope that Dr. B has the right mix of advice again, is going to nudge and urge and chivvy the public into crushing the second curve, and I'll be able to get my haircut in a few weeks.
It's not even about my personal risk, I really doubt I could catch it at the barber shop. It's about performing the act of being cautious, in the hope it will make others more likely to be the same, not just when seeing me, but all day. It's how we can all contribute. Those cases are getting truly alarming, and we have to get serious in response.
http://brander.ca/c19#surgery
America's numbers are exploding, but so are Canada's, Britain's, all across Europe. Lockdowns there are already being announced. At left, the overall world graphs just hit the very highest one-day rate of death reports ever. Not without warning, it followed weeks of smooth, unresisted exponential growth.
9,205 people around the world died in one day, of covid, and the curves assure us that we're just days away from the 10,000 deaths/day period, which could go on for some weeks, even with frantic lockdowns to crush the curve. Again.
It's pretty frightening, seeing the BC case numbers simply soar. Everybody seems baffled, it's like "We're doing everything you said! What does it want from us?". Well, "it" wants a lockdown, I guess. Covid communicates its wants by killing people, so you have to accept the message.
It would be a novel "lockdown" if she left all the stores and restaurants open, but forbade people to gather outside the home in any social way. Much harder to police, harder to turn into politics, since people's jobs are not being hurt.
Alas, they're actually the worst-hit of the new surge, so they have to get a mention. While they were consumed with shouting at each other, the worldometers site, some days ahead of the "official" counts from Johns Hopkins, has just rolled up some very round, and terrible, numbers for them, at left.
They just hit ten million cases, yesterday. They whizzed past that mark, as they also have just started breaking records for new cases per day. At this rate, they'll now add a million new cases every week, ten thousand of whom will die. Probably a thousand non-elderly adults per week.
OK, to finish, I did check the news, and, yes, it is huge pandemic news that their administration will shift, to one that is willing and able to fight the pandemic, in 74 days. Unfortunately, I see over 100,000 dead by then, most of them could have been saved.
Has it become harder to care about that, when I got so angry at so many of them the other day? Not really. One can feel compassion for suicides.
http://brander.ca/c19#lockloom
I've had to admit that being interested in major American papers is only a short step above social-media doomscrolling.
America's limitation of two political parties has degenerated down to just two opposed cultures. I mean, damn, we thought WE had "two solitudes", two cultures that didn't understand each other. Quebec and the rest get along beautifully by comparison to them.
America's terrible politics have crippled their pandemic response. One side feels such a need to promote their politics, that they'll promote them with bad public health moves. (NO, you can't blame one guy. He was supported by his party. Who were afraid of his supporters. Because of their toxic political atmosphere, and because many of them actually agreed with him, which makes blaming his "mental illnesses" problematic.)
Everybody's heard about toxic work environments, too many of us have been in them. When every project turns into a drama; when every meeting is a fight, because somebody had to pick a fight, because every day at work is about dominating others in the team, first, and getting the job done, distant second.
American governance is a toxic work environment. I first started reading their news daily when Clinton was trying to get them Canadian health care. It was popular in polls, he'd pretty much run on it and won, it seemed to be inevitable. If they do get universal health care by, say, 2026, that would be thirty years later. Keeping in mind that Clinton was 30 years behind Canada getting Medicare. When Team C can do something by 1966, and Team A is still arguing sixty years later, their work environment is profoundly unproductive. It also can't manage a one-year project, like this year.
American politics doesn't just look like a reality show on TV, the great political discovery it took a TV star to spot. It really is manufactured drama, just like those shows create it with deliberately toxic situations.
This week's drama couldn't happen in Canada, because our system was better designed. We spend something like three to four times as much per vote on elections, than Americans do. That's why we don't have "voting machines" and "hanging chads": we simply pay retired people enough money to just count them all, in small batches. We have many more voting locations that only have to count a few thousand pieces of paper, each, which only takes a few hours. That's it. All their current voting problems, still going this morning, are artificial.
In 1915, every time WW1 soldiers fought and died over the same five hundred yards of ground, back and forth, each battle was a great drama indeed. After the war was over, a account of it is repetitive and boring. It'll be the same one day, reading about pitched fights over minor improvements in health care. This week, for instance, the election is against the guy who wants to move another 500 yards towards the far-off goal of having what we got in 1966, and the guy who wants to take back the 500 yards Obama got in 2014.
Oh, yeah: according to worldometers, 3514 Americans died since the start of November third. More than on 9/11. I don't belive the news noticed.
http://brander.ca/c19#toxic
News addictions are perfect pandemic companions: you stay in, you work out your emotions and rage at all sorts of things, you fall into hypnotized fascination with the rolling numbers. It's the little brother of Facebook doom-scrolling: there's always another news story, another page you haven't checked for hours.
So, I cancelled my New York Times subscription yesterday, after over 15 years. It's baby steps: that one was $275 a year, whereas the weirdly bottom-basement deal with the Washington Post is literally just $20/year. So that's harder to cancel. What I need to cancel is the amount of it I suck up. Crazy as trying to eat the all-you-can-eat buffet: you just make yourself sick. And fat. Headed.
Also, I have to switch to supporting Canadian news. I'm already into CanadaLand for $10/month, and I'm bumping to $14, and throwing in a gift to help them fight a lawsuit from "The Rebel", Canada's own effort at alt-right trolling for profit. We subscribe to The Tyee and the National Observer, also. I'm going to spend more time on our problems, even if they aren't as entertaining and outraging.
They are, at least, saner.
I've been saving, I don't know why, an intended post about CanadaLand's coverage of the care-home debacle. It's wonderful, the last episode in particular deserving some sort of award. Coming up soon.
http://brander.ca/c19#news
I also could make the case with "sick" as a metaphor for military and diplomatic failures and economic woes, but they're also the literally sickest nation; and the literally sickest states had the highest votes for the sick man in the mental-illness sense.
What government the Americans end up with, is a problem for tomorrow or the next day, whatever. And mostly, their problem. I'm just writing about my revulsion at their voting patterns. Even supposing a "win", it'll feel like a loss for being so close.
I really expected better. Much better. I went through all this before, in 2016, concluding I had to quit caring about that country, and here I sit, exposed as an idiot who couldn't quit them. Each of these crises has made me think, over and over, like Charlie Brown running at Lucy's football, surely this, this, extraordinary crisis, will move them. But it's Biblical disappointment, where God kept "hardening Pharoah's heart" against the chosen people.
Every time, we find their hearts are too hard to change. Not for failed war promises, for discovery of torture, for financial collapse of the mightiest capitalist towers (of money). And now, not for a failed handling of a pandemic that will take 300,000 lives by Christmas. A challenge the whole world has met, nearly all better than them. What more proof did they need that this political philosophy didn't work in the real world?
I should have been ignoring them as best I could, as promised in 2016. I would have been much less sickened today.
http://brander.ca/c19#sickening
As mentioned in previous posts, we had to watch it in smaller chunks, because you get reminded of all the past failures, and get angry at them again.
It's a remarkable achievement to make any movie in a short time, and during a pandemic, just amazing. They basically invented a self-operating movie camera to send to people, so they could interview them over Skype, but not use the Skype feed, rather a real camera that made for movie-quality interviews. A technical-achievement Oscar may be due.
Alex Gibney has, of course, been making most of America's best documentaries for many years now. He goes back 40 years, but became well-known after his Enron takedown in 2005, and the torture story "Taxi to the Dark Side", in 2007. He's not afraid of tackling high-tech, with Steve Jobs, Russian Hackers, Wikileaks, and Stuxnet, all in the last half-dozen years. He'll go after people who fight back hard and dirty, as with Scientology, and it's not his first foray into criticizing the current administration.
He's grabbed excellent interviews with people inside the response, subsequently fired, and not. John Oliver, incidentally, summarized the documentary's best bits down into about 10 minutes just the other night on his "Last Week Tonight" show, also a don't-miss.
(Also, yes, I'm shrinking the font a size. I've just switched from Chrome to Firefox, and realized just how oversized it looks on most browsers.)
http://brander.ca/c19#watch
Nah.
Their papers lately are filled with praise of the Democrats, coming from the two biggest "centre-right" Republican pundits. (The articles are literally titled "Five Great Things Biden Has Already Done" and "Seven Big Things Biden Got Right", indicating that the Post's Jennifer Rubin is 7/5ths as enthusiastic as the Time's David Brooks.) They are, obviously, most pleased of all that the Democrats picked the most-right-wing representative they've got, compromised and compromised again and again.
From an electoral point of view, pardon my coldness here, nothing could have gone more right than for all those poor people to die recently. The soaring case-loads were in the reddest states, and swing-states, are wonderful. It's smashing that the other side self-inflicted covid at the highest level. It's great, for the Democrats, that the economy is in the tank. Hell, even the weather is looking good, which is good for turnout, which is good for Democrats. For a challenger, all this hell is perfect. And the "October Surprise Laptop" fizzled. Things could not have gone "better" (for an electoral challenger.)
And as America speeds up towards a quarter-million dead, about 200,000 of whom could have been saved, multiple states are still "50/50", or "a tossup", and the Presidential election still has some doubt.
For me, that just underscores how nearly-irredeemable the country is, how dragged down the normal Americans are by the abnormal. Those are the only terms I can come up with, where "normal" means "the political centre of most other developed nations". The political centre where starting wars or running torture chambers is crazy talk; where having universal health insurance is obvious; where gerrymandering is impossible, and voting takes minutes, not hours. That's NORMAL, goddammit.
Much of America is normal. The rest of us don't have 25% of our population as evangelical "Christians" that love killing and openly hate minorities, refuse to worship with them.
Their liberals believe that their conservatives are racist (or tolerant of it in allies) but don't believe that conservatism itself is inherently racist. How well they know it: their own party used to be the (more) racist one. Conservative voters, on the other hand, really do believe that liberalism is evil, inherent in the philosophy itself. That's abnormal, in most nations.
The failure of the Iraq War did not change their beliefs; the failure of the American economy did not change their economic beliefs; and now the world's-worst response to the pandemic has failed to convince more than a few of them to switch votes for one election. This election will not remove their great power to hold America back, preventing making the changes that changing times demand.
They are on-course to be the big Losers of the 21st century, and it's just painful to watch. How I pity them.
OK, PS: I promise to take some of this back -- IF it turns out that the analyses are more-wrong on this election than the last one, and in the opposite direction. Maybe the depressing coverage is exaggerated, as the media bent over backwards to not make the same mistake.
If all the swing-states are won handily, if multiple unexpected states like Texas are shock wins; if the Senate gains as many seats as the Democrats wildest dreams. Americans can surprise you now and then. But what I've seen so far - not the extreme antics of right-wing activists, but the lack of change from the great majority that are not activist - will have me pitying again by the weekend.
http://brander.ca/c19#losers
A further read revealed a puzzle: they only analysed 18 rallies. That's over 1600 infections per rally, which is totally ludicrous, as a first-order effect. Few of the rallies had more than 16,000 at them, say, so it would require 10% of the rallygoers to be infected, outdoors, in a few hours. If the rally were held in a low-ceilinged bar, maybe. Outdoors, no way.
However, the association can easily include not just second-order infections, from those who did go to the rally, it can include associated effects. The rallies are parties for those who attend; perhaps they also had home parties, BBQs, tail-gaters, fundraising dinner parties. Perhaps the rally tended to cause a general reduction in mask-wearing in the whole county, as aggressive anti-maskers hassled mask-wearers, if only with glares.
Or, possibly, the rallies were picked for NOT actually being that similar to counties around them, that the economists compared them to. Perhaps they were much more likely to continue dangerous behaviours after the cases ticked up.
And, lastly, the Stanford economists could have WAY overestimated, because of various errors - and the report would still be devastating, if you ask me. Suppose they're a whole order of magnitude high. Suppose the rallies "only" cost 3,000 infections and 70 deaths. Actually, go two orders of magnitude: 300 infections and seven deaths. That would still be awful, shameful, and even criminal. ("Benghazi" was only four, and it got a Michael Bay movie.)
http://brander.ca/c19#rallies2
It's an easy day for a blog, when there's one story to draw attention to: provide the link, and post. This blog has always had a fascination with following the numbers, the way a pandemic can be described and predicted with statistics. And my closest thing to "controversy" (if there were enough readers to have a discussion at some point), was when I could not find any evidence of infections caused by that first rally in Tulsa.
The Oklahoma public health official, I noted, was careful not to blame the rally specifically, only on the many different events all going on; you'll note that the many, many rallies in the last few weeks have followed that pattern, with local officials expressing displeasure and concern, but no specific blame.
That's because analyses like mine of Tulsa, are hard to do; my Tulsa work only worked for one cause happening on one night, and it could only find a lack of increasing infections; if there had been any increase, ascribing it to the rally would have been harder. With many infectious events happening, the local officials can't be positive about any blame. This approach is different, using much more data across many events.
As the article will detail for you, the economists are well-skilled in the "natural experiments" of comparing statistics from different counties, controlling for all other variables, and correlating behaviours with outcomes. They compared counties with and without rallies, but all other things similar, and the 30,000 infections, 700 deaths estimate is the result.
It will be disputed and denigrated, of course. It may even be challenged and ultimately adjusted by other studies; but the adjustments won't be huge, or Stanford will be in for an academic black eye. It's most-likely about right.
It covers rallies from Tulsa to September 22, and of course, there have been many more since, in time of greater infection prevalence, greater risk per rally. The final analysis will surely come in at over 1000 dead, many of whom did not attend, or were even related to those who did.
http://brander.ca/c19#rallies
At left, not the case-count, or death-count, but just which places hit their peak in the last week. This lets out all the coasts, apparently. Maybe we don't come into countries by boat, any more, maybe you could fly from Beijing to Boisie direct, but most arrivals are at coastal cities. The virus "burned through" the coasts in the Spring, and they learned. Their second waves are much lower than their firsts, though America's overall, (see yesterday, below) is much higher.
So the map looks like a devouring that has eaten its way into the innards, feasting on the soft underbelly. And it is a very "soft" underbelly, to the virus. The occupants of politically red states are still not protecting themselves from it. Its hour really has come 'round: you can't beat the meal that, as you gnaw your way through the intestines into the liver, just keeps baring its belly and repeating "this is not happening".
The pandemic isn't Iwo Jima, with guys just like you falling to your left and right. The worst locations (Lombardy, New Jersey) have lost "only" a few thousand people per million, a few tenths of a percent. The majority of those were already in care. It's perfectly possible to deny it, unless you stand outside the hospitals, watching the bodies come out.
It would be terrific if those red states could learn something from this expensive, blood-soaked lesson, but my every previous hope that they'd learn something, from the Iraq War, say, or the Great Recession, has been humiliated. Statistically, they've only learned a little - maybe several percent have shifted views, and that probably temporarily - from the endless shocks of the last four years. So, no, losing a tenth-percent of their population to preventable stupidity won't do it, either. They'll be ready for eating when the next one comes, too.
http://brander.ca/c19#beast
America I expected to do worst, because they have the worst democracy. We just had our election in BC, and while I didn't like the result, the election mechanics were fine, voting was easy, the result undisputed. No courts will be called, no guns brandished.
In America, what's going on for recent weeks of early-voting, and for a week to come, is a cringeworthy shitshow of endless lineups, threats, fights over process. What other democracy have you seen this in? Nowhere in Europe, nowhere in the developed world. Indeed, right now, Mexican election officials are probably pitying their American counterparts for living in a real shithole.
For all my obsessions about pandemic statistics, I missed the forest for the trees until I looked, just yesterday, at the Big Picture of our two nations' case charts - alternating at left, if your browser does GIF animations.
What I somehow never commented on is the giant hump in the middle of the American graph, where Canada has three months of crushed-curve. Canada is, alas, well into a second wave that's going to go twice as tall as the first. But America is into a third wave, without ever more than mildly depressing the previous waves.
Our "crushed" period, from the first day of Summer to Labour Day, has cases 70% lower than the peak of the first wave; Americans only ever got that first wave down about 30%. Their next wave, more than twice as tall, was only depressed by 40%, that is, to a point higher than the first peak! Which is why some describe the USA as really still in its first wave. (Also, the USA graph has a scale 20X larger than ours, though the population ratio is under nine.)
CCCC readers will know the complexity that the "second wave" was in different states, mostly having their first wave. I wrote about it back in August, when their second wave peaked, and I hoped they would learn from this one (some red states finally realizing it wasn't just filthy big cities), "or
it will be a hard Fall". It's a hard Fall. Now the reddest states are getting it, and I wonder if now they will learn.
I figure, not. They won't learn. I don't think they can learn, because so few are accepting new facts any more. Also, the astonishing news that Florida and Ohio are still swing-states, still unclear on who might be better, convinces me that America is a very slow learner indeed.
Is this because they have the worst democracy? Would they be a better, more fact-based nation now if they'd gone with a parliament? The American system is complicated. Complicated things (like tax law) lend themselves to being gamed. Gaming generally requires lying and misdirection.
As the man said, I wouldn't subject that theory to peer-review, but I would subject it to beer-review: I'd argue it in a bar. If I could go to a bar.
http://brander.ca/c19#worst
Last night, we finally got to the 90-minute point in "Totally Under Control", the Alex Gibney documentary on the American pandemic response. We'd reached where Jared Kushner is handed the problem of buying PPE for America. They had an office that normally does that as their area of professional competence, but they were "government".
The whole effort was just a show. They never bought a single mask, and then the regime blamed the states (you may recall the famous line about "our stockpile").. That was six minutes after we started watching. It then went on into the other Kushner step, which was all the states fighting over PPE, and having to bid over the Feds, having to protect purchases from Fed confiscation. We had to turn it off when it moved on to the miracle drug cures.
But I was still pitying those 19-year-olds with their home laptops, trying to save nurses and doctors with their Gmail accounts, when I came across this George Monbiot column today in The Guardian, about the teenage contact-tracers in Britain.
Once again, people with no skills were hired, though at least on minimum wage rather than free. That wasn't so bad for the job of phoning a list of names to be told to isolate, but then they gave them the medical professional's job of interviewing positives to get all the names. It was, says an informant, a shitshow.
Because of incompetence and graft. Graft? Well, there's twelve billion pounds missing, much of it to private firms doing what government could have done, on no-penalty contracts. It resembles the windfall profits of all those American PPE suppliers that had their prices bid way up.
The finishing touch was election news this morning, about the lead in Wisconsin is "significant", but "narrow" in Michigan, and Ohio is "50/50". How the hell can Americans be so stupid it isn't 70/30 everywhere??.
I don't know which I'm more angry at, the conservative looters, or their willing enablers.
http://brander.ca/c19#anger
I anticipated his column today with my post about "The Great Barrington Merchants of Doubt" nine days back, pointing out that the Barrington Bunch were the same Bunch that worked to sow doubt about global warming, and before that about tobacco health hazards.
With climate change, the three points were: (1) climate change isn't even happening; (2) there's nothing we can do about it anyway, without destroying "the economy", and (3) it's being exaggerated by bad-faith scientists that get more (research?) money from claiming there's a problem.
With covid, those three points have all come out now. The denial that the "hoax" is even a real problem started back in January, and continues even today, somehow. The complaint that we can't fight it without the cure being worse because "economy" is identical; and now a rally the other day claimed that coronavirus fatalities are being exaggerated because "doctors get more money and hospitals get more money", Krugman writes, with the above link to the exact quote.
All three issues have in common that it takes science and statistics to be clear on the problem; they involve trust in experts. It seems bizarre now that the link between smoking and cancer was ever a controversy, and of course the similar nonsense about climate and covid will seem just as stupid (to all) in another generation.
Sadly, I'm sure in another generation, there will be some other problem that takes stats to see - and the Merchants of Doubt will be back, denigrating honest scientists, defending "the economy" from people who don't want "the economy" to kill them, and claiming the whole thing is not even happening.
http://brander.ca/c19#denial
But.
So, today, the story (also linked from her byline, above) on top, was 100% cry-of-outrage, without actual new news. It castigated, not just the administration for the sheer number of dead, the staggering size of their failure, but the media for not holding him responsible enough. Relentless rhetoric: "Even more damning, we hear a confession straight from the lips" (about yesterdays admission of failure to control). "This is simply monstrous", and the charge against the rest of the media is:
And to her (former, I guess) fellow Republicans:
http://brander.ca/c19#rubin
The second article is on your front page this morning. "We Are Not Going To Control The Pandemic", says the White House Chief of Staff. "Mitigation" will be their whole strategy.
Their plea that the "contagious virus" is inherently uncontrollable sounds pretty weird in comparison to all the other countries that have done exactly that. No doubt, control can be lost again, as it recently has in Spain and Belgium, and certainly Canada and Germany are struggling for it. But star performers New Zealand and South Korea are still totally under control, their "second waves" already crushed.
Those lives will almost certainly be lost. It can be laid directly at the feet of the federal administration, and many state administrations that have the same "ignore it" philosophy. Laid there along with the 100,000 and more that are already their fault.
It takes your breath away, after years of being "scandalized" by 3,000 deaths on 9/11, and 50 deaths in a shooting incident, or nine deaths in a terrorist attack. Suddenly, we're arguing about whether 100,000 or 200,000 are the fault of this, or that.
It shouldn't be so breath-taking, really: the financial crisis clearly caused tens of thousands of suicides, the opioid crisis will probably cost over 100,000 lives before it even starts to improve, the lack of universal health insurance was estimated to be costing America 45,000 lives per year - during the Obamacare debates ten years ago, so that would have been some 450,000 - just in the meantime. (Obamacare may have cut the rate about in half around 2015.) Those deaths were really just visible to statisticians; the same is half-true now, as the numerical complexities in Philip Bump's article attest, but they're visible enough to the journalists because of health system reports.
The conservatives would like them to vanish again, into a fog of statistics, like the 45,000 they're still fighting to keep killing every year with bad health care. It's not going to work.
http://brander.ca/c19#control
We're going to have to keep dealing with it, and that apparently means second lockdowns. Once the cases come too fast to contact-trace and isolate, the old exponentials will soar again, unless you get that Rt back down below 1.0 again, somehow. Maybe heavier mask-use and distancing can do it without lockdown; I sure hope so. Otherwise, it's inevitable; even without orders, people will start staying home out of fear.
http://brander.ca/c19#notmuch
The mask argument needs no words from me. Just look at that; the "R-squared" accuracy measure was only 0.35 for my "2016 vote" graph on the 17th; this is up above 0.7, it's really solid correlation. (Which, yes, is not causation...it just very probably is, so why take the chance?)
My wife is now making many masks, face-fitting and colourful. Our location is not mask-averse, and it means we don't need to feel desperate about those vaccines that may be quite some time, yet.
http://brander.ca/c19#maskgraph
But, finally, after three weeks since the new cases/day in the USA exceeded the highest numbers of late April, the death-rate went up above 1000/day yesterday. Canada's had been so low for months that ours has more than doubled since then.
Canada's cases and deaths follow the same patterns as the spring: the cities are the worst-hit, and the biggest cities in Ontario and Quebec, the worst of those. But the American cases have now moved out of their most-populous states and into their most-rural areas, as I noted about "Mulish Montana" the other day. The map (right) now looks like a reverse of a population map: bright red through all the emptiest plains.
Again, that's politics, as I noted with my graph of 2016 votes vs 2020 fall infections. Those politics didn't really get going in Canada, so it hasn't killed many of us yet, and it has spared our most-Conservative electoral ridings. Except the Alberta Health Minister. Probably a coincidence. This must cause a struggle for Alberta doctors and nurses; they can hardly laugh at anybody getting covid, but for Tyler Shandro, they must be wrestling with that.
http://brander.ca/c19#rural
The headline says "only" because back when I first looked in May, it seemed like the excess deaths might be another 100% added on to the covid toll; so 50% feels like a win.
The headline is that it's actually been worst, in percentage terms, for young people, 25-44, "percentage" because they don't normally do much dying to start with. We older bunch have sharp peaks in the graphs at left, more clearly caused by the first wave in April and May, old people dying of various diseases, with covid helping it along, but going undiagnosed as such.
The 25-44 graph goes right up to 40% higher than "normal" (2015-2019 average) in March and stays up there through August; it's only dropped with the Fall. Theories can abound, but they should wait on data - were these already-unhealthy younger people that had their disease exacerbated by covid, again without diagnosis? People afraid to seek care? Traffic accidents delivering our DoorDash? Staying home and taking too many drugs? We'll eventually get a report on the how the separate causes added up.
The silver lining is that deaths below age 25 actually dropped a bit. Again and again, give thanks, because most of these pandemics are the worst on children, not the best.
I'm very eager to see these stats for Canada. If they're different, it will probably say something about the differences between the health-care systems.
The other stats were by ethnicity, not age, and they show that again, the pandemic has hit communities of colour harder. Most of those peaks were a 100% increase in "excess deaths", not just 50%. Just as bad as feared in May. That probably(?) indicates that these communities have even more trouble being diagnosed with covid, and of course more health risks in general.
But I think all of it is proportional to covid; that is, had the covid toll in the USA been a quarter of what it has (and it could have been) then so would this number be that much smaller. Their Administration has that much more to answer for.
http://brander.ca/c19#excess2
Note the tenting at the nose: these contain wire strips sewn inside the top edge, allowing the wearer to mold the line over the bridge of the nose, so that you don't have twin fountains of steam, on either side of the nose, going straight up into your glasses. The bottom, at your chin, has darts so that the fabric folds over your chin and forces most air to go through the fabric.
The two are different grades, as it were. The upper one is a thinner fabric, right for clothing, could be worn for hours. The lower one is heavy fabric, and it actually does what some anti-maskers complain about: you can only breathe so fast, you couldn't exercise in it. That's my mask for the grocery store when it's at capacity, yikes, and I just want to dodge people, and get through it quickly. My industrial-strength mask, just a step or two below "N95".
I suggested just using a double-fold of twist-tie wire, the lower one has that. Even better was what Connie spotted and put in the upper one: those heavy-wire strips that come at the top of bags of coffee beans, for resealing. That's in the upper one, and it's perfect.
The Vancouver Aquarium has some new designs for sale, too, keeping them, as it were, afloat. That'll give me two Aquarium masks, a Grouse Mountain, these two, and some basic undecorated ones. Those were an early gift, from a neighbour, who started turning them out in numbers, to pass the spring; people who are good with fabric often can't stop at one mask. Check around your friends! If you gotta do it, you might as well have fun.
That said, I still see them as pointless when you are outdoors and a good three metres from everybody. I do wear them on any busy sidewalk, but the much quieter sidewalks near our house, we simply make a show of stepping out into the street to avoid people. There's a cultural value that's flipped: it would have looked insulting a year ago, now it's the polite thing to do.
http://brander.ca/c19#ourmasks
This California publication has a great article on them, from all the many sheriffs that picked this moment to "defend freedom", to the estimates of effectiveness that a universal mask-wearing month would control the American pandemic as well as a vaccine. The story of how Nashville, a city, has half the infection rates of rural counties around it, because it has a mask-mandate and they don't.
Up tomorrow: the cool new fun-masks my wife has been making!
http://brander.ca/c19#mulish
I'm glad of a re-run, however, to tout the new Guardian article on the connection between them and the "Merchants of Doubt". That lets me in turn tout The Merchants of Doubt, the 2010 Book and the outstanding 2014 documentary movie about the "scientists" (former, really) that peddled doubt about the dangers of tobacco, and the reality of climate change. (That was when the authors twigged, that these guys fancied themselves "experts" in such different areas.)
I've only seen the movie, but it was so enlightening. Like many, I'd thought they were paid to run around giving these talks an interviews. But no, they were philosophical Libertarians that personally loathed any government activity at all, invented their talks by themselves, did it all for expenses. The Koch brothers, and similar funders, paid for that much through Libertarian "think-tanks" (that is, lobbies and public-relations firms that do no peer-reviewed research at all and do not deserve the term). So it was pretty cheap compared to the profits selling tobacco and oil.
The new article traces how the Barringtons are also funded by the same type of source, a lobby group that openly campaigns for minimal government. It does explain a lot.
http://brander.ca/c19#merchants
The graph at left is simply the full picture, with the "New Cases Yesterday" (per million) as the Y-axis, and the "GOP+" percentage as the determining variable. The R-squared number, the measure of how predictive the GOP vote is, is not that great, but you can absolutely see there's some connection.
What's really interesting is that I also graphed that "Active Cases Per Million" column, and got bupkiss: just a cloud of points with no clear relationship between vote and virus. The "active cases" is kind of a summary of the last three or four weeks of "new cases", before those are closed-out as dead or recovered. (The duller graph is in the spreadsheet, if desired. Also, the one at left has all the states labeled.)
A tentative conclusion would be this: it was true, months ago, that the populous, citified blue states of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts were covid hotspots; and as little as a month back, you wouldn't have said that red states were red zones; but in the last few weeks, GOP voting in 2016 has become a useful predictor of sickness.
It's not bright to start drawing conclusions. I don't think there's been a rally in the Dakotas or Nebraska, the three worst, so don't go blaming those rallies. Indeed, if it were any kind of election activity that were causing these cases, they would be highest in swing states, not red states.
No conclusions, but at a guess: it's their behaviour, a guess I am drawn to by the blog motto at top. Covid risk-taking has become a cultural value of the American GOP supporters. In the last few weeks, they have paid for that value with cases; in the next few weeks, some will pay with their lives.
http://brander.ca/c19#gopcovid
The other corner that has been turned, is from the American coasts to the GOP-voting interior states, as seen at right.
They're so low-population, you don't notice how bad it is there until you correct for it. Montana had 723 cases yesterday. Not much? Well, it has exactly 1/20th the population of Florida, so that's like Florida having 14,460; and Florida actually had 3,356. Montana is five times as bad as Florida today.
Tell them they've "turned a corner".
http://brander.ca/c19#corner
I think the guys who write these take a 4-year-old's delight in peppering the story with the word "poo". (The virus, of course, may be coming from other wastes or just water washed off the hands, body, and counters.) Whatever, it's a clever, cheap, easy way to get information. As the article points out, its value in this pandemic may be limited, but the basic idea applies to multiple other public health problems - especially drug consumption.
Bravo, Ottawa: let's make it a national program, and a permanent one.
http://brander.ca/c19#ottawaww
But what has me bursting with pride, is that the debate was mostly not about the pandemic. It was a first topic, but just the one topic, and there was, to repeat yesterday's post, little drama surrounding it.
Maybe it just feels like a big deal because so much dysfunctional, lying, posturing nonsense is going on south of the border this month, but I was almost bouncing on the couch when the debate turned to housing, because pandemic issues, economic and medical, were exhausted.
We were both already laughing excitedly when the moderator got any of them to halt an interruption, by just asking, and a few times we applauded when an answer was on-topic and responsive to the question. We looked at each other, wow, this is just great. It seemed so novel!
As we turned down the sound, we checked our voting cards for tomorrow: a few blocks away, five days of early voting, plus mail voting, we're not expecting a lineup. We switched to some American news, where a guy was doing a selfie as he entered the voting place after 11 hours in line.
http://brander.ca/c19#debate
My wife an I enjoyed the bio-drama "RBG", but I just couldn't stomach paying any attention to the new confirmation stuff that's wall-to-wall on their news all week. I attempted a few lame jokes (Who is "A:B"? Amy Colon Barrett...) and trailed off; it's all such a predictable pantomime, and the stench of BS is so thick. Arm-waving dramatics intended to put a cloud of emotion about hot-button issues around an advance for plutocratic power (Barrett, I gather, is very reliable about taking the side of Money over Labour.)
What I did enjoy was this top-of-page article in the National Post yesterday: "Unlike the U.S., Canada does not do spectacle when it comes to picking Supreme Court judges". Absolutely right. It's the least-appropriate part of government for "spectacle", after all.
And then there's the BC Leader's Debate tonight. We have it set to record, and I realized with a touch of astonishment that I'm genuinely looking forward to it. Pandemic focus has had me looking away from most other Canadian news for months. What are we doing about real estate speculation and money-laundering? In very green BC, what's our climate plan? Does giving Horgan a majority mean he'll OK a pipeline?
The moderator, for her part hopes she won't need her mute button. Which she of course has, because these things are not there to serve the leaders, they exist to serve the needs of the people to be informed. And rules that are enforced promotes that. Which we understand, this being Canada, and "we" includes the Leaders.
It's such a relief. A relief to have real issues that will get some informative debate, in civil tones. Nobody wants "drama" during any other important conversation, with your doctor or banker or even your car-repairman.
The pandemic hook here, for the blog, is of course that nations with the least drama (think Germany, New Zealand) have also had the best pandemic response. Drama in politics is mostly invented; politicians make up "burning issues" to get people out to the polls at all. When a real problem comes along, you have to be able to separate the unimportant, invented "issues" from the real ones.
The States is the worst, of course, because they turned pandemic response into a fake issue; masks are obviously not that oppressive to wear, not if you already put up with swampy underwear on a hot day to obey other social expectations. Their conservatives made it up to have something to complain about, and tens of thousands have died for it.
We here in BC simply produce drama for others to watch, where drama belongs, on the other side of the TV screen. While the Americans are probably wishing for "No-Drama Obama" to come back, at this point.
http://brander.ca/c19#drama
You pretty much have to be so devout that you give thanks for your chastisement, for being humbled and reminded that pride is a sin. People's plans, not just for the year, but for their education, career, family, all laid waste.
It's a religious occasion, and one is reminded, this year, of the Book of Job: disease, death, and poverty were all rained down upon him, testing his faith.
The descriptions of all the different things that can (low probability) happen to you with a case of covid would have been a harder test for Job. Stories keep coming out of "long-haulers" with months of debilitating symptoms: "brain fog", wracking pains, endless fatigue; apparently permanent losses of hearing, that news yesterday.
The lesson being that it can always get worse. Be thankful that covid barely touches children, again and again. Be thankful if nobody you know has caught it - and with only a few percent of Western Canada infected, that's true of most of us. Be thankful it's not like AIDS, where there's been no vaccine in 35 years of trying.
It's not a good time to sit beside one of those care-home beds, watching a life get worse and worse, and then it's gone. But it does drive home that it can always get worse. So celebrate what you do have, of life, health, family, shelter, clothing, food. Not everybody is so lucky. Especially this year.
And don't just give thanks. Give. The food bank is our favourite. Especially this year.
http://brander.ca/c19#thanks
Today's cranky opinion is that the price of virtual commerce is shirking. Every office has people that find ways to avoid real work, but how much easier is it to do that from home? I chatted the other day with parents who found that one of their kids' teachers was really good at tasking and tracking the virtual students in her class, one adequate, and one so lax "we're not sure if he's going to learn anything this year"...and it was all about diligence, something hard for a school principal to monitor, except over time.
Bad employees happen, weak team members are on nearly every team. The job of a boss is to put together strong teams. Virtual offices just make that way harder. It's hard to guess where that goes. Modern business is terrible at rewarding real competence, and punishing performance that is merely poor. The change to virtual hits it in weak spot.
It'll raise the value of a really good supervisor, one who can spot BS over a bad connection, when most can't spot it being thrown in their face. Ambitious employees have a new skillset to develop.
http://brander.ca/c19#shirkers
The progress of Covid-19 is such that the dying on Halloween Day will happen to people infected this last week, or the next few days. It was possible to hold out faint hope for sanity until this week, and indeed, their president's own sufferings presented a possibility of a sudden turnaround.
I read just yesterday of Florida's largest retirement community, heavy GOP voters in '16, suddenly wanting masks at gatherings, one interviewee saying, "it was a hoax until he got it". (Their state has 15,000 dead, so he must have thought it a very clever "hoax" indeed...)
So what is baked-in? A national death rate of between 700 and 750 per day; Johns Hopkins should be giving a figure of 230,000 dead. It'll be possible to argue that the bungled response has killed a round 200,000 people, perhaps 10,000 of them under the age of 50. Worse for the incumbents running for the GOP, the dying will be highly concentrated in some of their hardest fights: Florida, and amazingly, Texas.
Personally, I've gone beyond shock at American attitudes and values. Four years back, I wrote about how 2016 shouldn't even have come close, it should have been 80/20 against the corrupt con-man rapist, etc etc. Now, I'm watching polls that say maybe Ohio will actually cross the 50% line, maybe, maybe. Each percentage point costing thousands dead.
The coronavirus is moving America towards liberalism like bouncers manhandling a fighting, ranting drunk out of a bar, resisting them to the last. I suppose their Democrats will cheer their mighty victory, but all I see is a dysfunctional family where the one least-crazy member managed to put out the fire started in the kitchen by the drunken ones. It'll still be the same family in the morning, and the drinking will start right after breakfast.
http://brander.ca/c19#carnage
But here's the thing: a month ago, I was very worried about BC hitting 100 new cases/day, and we're still around that number. Relatively speaking, that's feeling like success just now. The case-load is controllable with contact-tracing, just; as noted the other day. The "rest of Canada", by the way, is even better off; much.
Especially as the news from the States goes into Tom-Clancy-novel territory, I'm very conscious that the biggest problem in BC right now is that John Horgan is going to be rewarded for his perfidy, the cynical, faithless, public-endangering sumbitch.
Ordinarily, I'd be a lot more upset by that, but 2020 has given me perspective.
http://brander.ca/c19#yaybc
The three initiators of "The Great Barrington Declaration" (from a place called "Great Barrington"; the declaration, not so great) are epidemiologists, so it's polite to give them a hearing. That thousands of other "health professionals" (self-declared) have signed it, is pretty meaningless. I could call myself an "engineering professional" on a declaration against PCB chemicals; but the fact is, that I've never studied chemical toxin problems, and know nothing I haven't read in the news about them. It's empty grandiosity to flout your credentials outside your area: "I got a degree and am smart about something else", is all you're saying.
We have Sweden's experience: twice Canada's death-rate, five times Germany's. We kind of know the costs of their plan, already. They aren't suggesting anything Sweden hasn't tried, to limit the casualties. They are right, that we could split the population into older people that are locked down, and younger that are not. But for the USA, for instance, that would still mean sacrificing tens of thousands more, just between the ages of 25-44.
Their arguments, that the costs of getting to herd immunity are lower than the costs of restrictions, just don't hold water with me. Yes, there will be deaths from other diseases, from suicide and conflict, but they just don't compare. Significantly, the GBD doesn't include any kind of estimate of the death toll under their recommendations. If they're such great epidemiologists, where's their "Great Barrington Model"? They don't have one, because they know it would end the argument when people saw it.
Produce your estimate, gentlemen: show me your butcher's bill before you ask me to join in.
http://brander.ca/c19#barrington
The Vancouver fog is burning off, and it'll be a lovely sunny afternoon; that mean little man, Stephen Miller, has coronavirus, and the brilliant legal mind of Sandy Garossino, at the National Observer, has argued well that I should have permission to just enjoy it. ...so All is Right with the World.
http://brander.ca/c19#niceday
At least for now, anyway: the schools, so far, are not becoming covid hotbeds. I thought our schools were run by fools, but the staff and students (I'm crediting them, not the hapless planners) have managed to keep their distance and keep their health for a month. There have been cases, but no serious outbreaks, they've kept the lid on it. Most of the kids testing positive (0.7%) actually got it at home.
I do credit the kids, not in jest. We have this image of them as crawling over each other like puppies, but we hosted a 9-year-old for two weeks this summer, and it was she that sharply reminded us about hand-washing all the time. Her covid distancing on outings was impeccable. The Kids Are Alright.
Indeed, the report yesterday was all good. Well, sort of: still up at 120 cases/day, on average, but I trust Dr. H that the second derivative has now gone negative; we're just past the hump of the curve. They used to say you can only see the peak in the rear-view. I think their greater knowledge, and especially testing - the good part of the case-news was that positivity is now back to 1% - let their models spot it earlier, now.
Too bad about the locations for larger gatherings, but it seems preventing the super-spreads is the real key. Or the real "k". A recommended article is at the Atlantic on the "k factor", how much of spreading is in clusters. Of course, here at CCCC, it was dubbed "The Pareto Pandemic" (80% of infections from 20% of spreaders) when this was first spotted four months ago. Just sayin', to get over my serving of humble pie.)
Everybody in media is talking about the clusterf**k in the White House, of course. It's like slipping into a calming bath surrounded by candles to get a briefing from Bonnie Henry. That quiet, clear, calm voice telling you that science analysed the problem, found the minimum-trouble tweaks to make that would have the most effect, applied them, and they worked...and the danger is already receding.
http://brander.ca/c19#humblepie
Dream on. Even the noisy, dancing "vigil" outside Walter Reed is maskless.
It's funny, having had to reference my very first post just the other day to help estimate the fatality odds of Patient One, I now have to reference my second, from six months back, about "GOP Resists Torture" (by the facts). I wrote that it's hard to keep denying the seriousness of the pandemic as the bodies pile up. At that time, April second, the USA was at 7,676 bodies. It seemed large at the time, but it was 207,000+ bodies ago.
The GOP torture continued for half a year, shaving away at even their adamantine 42% support. Finally, the other day, I saw a poll that was 53%/39% - dropped 3% after 200,000 dead. It shaved off one GOP fan in fifty, every time another Vietnam War's worth of dead bodies went by. Man, that's commitment to the Cause.
So, no, this won't break into their shell, either. If it did, that would be kind of disgusting, meaning that a single individual mattered more to them than 200,000, many from their own neighbourhood. Much of that 3% drop, which is recent, may be because the pandemic finally made it to red states in a big way: the highest active cases/million right now is Mr. McConnell's Arizona.
With all that, with all that, don't expect to see new behaviours, do expect to see fiercer denials, hope at best for another "amazing" drop, down to 38%.
http://brander.ca/c19#nochange
The story, of course, needs only a brief refresh for anybody who had an English teacher with a dramatic turn, which is nearly everybody. There was a terrible plague, and the heartless Prince Prospero (proud of his "prosperity") gathers all the rich and powerful of his land into his castle to ride it out, above and aloof from the suffering and dying outside.
Indeed, it's a huge party and pageant:
At right, lead picture from a Politico article about "Dictator Chic" and how the comical overdecoration and grandiosity of dictators around the world looks similar..and similar to the housing of a certain real-estate heir. Readers who haven't read "Dictator Chic" are encouraged to look through the photos without the name at the bottom, to see if they can distinguish the "taste" of Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Ferdinand Marcos, and America's current President. Play "Guess the Owner"!
Clearly, the story is best a metaphor for the actual "castle", the heavily-guarded military fortress at 1600 Pennsylvania, with its new 13-foot, anti-antifa fence. The motley crew within had all drunk the Kool-Aid, were having meetings in small rooms every day, acting as if the 13-foot fence were also a giant N95 mask. It can't come to us, because we're clean and white and rich and powerful...is the only thing I can imagine was in their subconscious, though they wouldn't have phrased it like that, out loud.
It was today's headline, above, about the staff now are "freaking out", that finally made me haul out the Poe reference. "And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers..." They're "freaking out", partly because their jobs just got very complicated, partly because they weren't allowed to even think about this happening, much less have a PLAN prepared, like they didn't for the peons they pretended to serve...and partly because they might be next up for the Judgement of Covid. They've realized they were at far higher risk on the job than if they worked for an ad agency. Possibly higher risk than at one of those meat plants the Boss kept open, killing people.
This very unsafe place (caused by unsafe behaviours) has inspired me to alter the top line of the blog to show my oft-repeated phrase as the blog motto.
But, still no schadenfreude, I'm afraid. This is as funny as an Edgar Allen Poe story.
http://brander.ca/c19#masque
The movie title came to mind as it penetrated to me that the big story isn't about the one guy; it's that the whole pack of them were treating their jobs and lives as if they lived on the actual Mount Olympus, above and protected from the seething, diseased masses below their feet. Once the virus got in to such a foolishly-run place, it found easy prey.
Once again, my best line in this whole blog so far, I think, has been: "There are no safe places. There are only safe behaviours".
The Post has a long article on the psychology of those who thought they lived in the clouds. It wasn't just the president:
...
"The White House was a petri dish," said Olivia Troye, a former staffer to Vice President Pence, who orchestrated meetings of the White House's coronavirus task force meetings.
Aides were traveling regularly, attending large meetings and rarely wearing masks, Troye said, which made her uncomfortable. "Some of these offices are like closets, with people sitting on top of each other," Troye said.
"The fact of the matter was, 75 percent did not walk around with masks. Maybe 85 percent," she said. "It was a very small percentage of people who wore the masks all the time."
... [A couple of stories about SS agents no longer getting tested after rallies; and The Family hauling them around on multiple trips despite lockdown orders, the kind that UK politicians get in big trouble for violating.]
Secret Service agents expressed their anger and frustration to colleagues and friends Friday, saying that the president's actions have repeatedly put them at risk. "He's never cared about us," one agent told a confidant...
"This administration doesn't care about the Secret Service," one current agent relayed in an internal discussion group. "It's so obvious."
So there's a silver lining here. If the election goes for the Democrats, and the President refuses to come down from Olympus, the Secret Service agents will by vying for who gets that shift, so they can be the one to escort him from the premises.
http://brander.ca/c19#olympus
The odds of a population producing a lot of hospitalizations, especially a population of 74-year-old males, are certain. The odds on any one of them even having a bad time with covid-19, are only 50/50. Hospitalization, a bit over 10%. Maybe 20% odds of needing some clinical support, given age and obesity.
This patient has a large following that are prone to magical thinking. The Republican party has been inculcating them with magical thinking about economics for decades; they've sold wars with magical thinking. So this disease will be, magically, all their diseases.
This could turn out "well". Boris Johnson had a very bad case, hospitalization; came out with all his ideas about "herd immunity", no longer up for herd mentality. The news helped his nation see the disease as serious. Heck, this could save thousands of lives that way. But the odds of a similar happy outcome in the US are only about that 20%.
Almost anything less - if he's not completely off the screen for weeks, unable to make a TV appearance because he's so ill - can be claimed to be a no-problem little cold that he's slaying like a champion. Can only make a 5-minute TV appearance because he's sooo busy coordinating the campaign. The odds of it being mild enough to claim something like that are a good 70%.
Magically, in follower's minds, this will allow two contradictory beliefs to be held as proven before all our eyes:
None of this, by the way, is about the election. That's pretty much a(nother) Lost Cause already. Even the positives from the above "magical thinking" argument probably couldn't save it for the Republicans. This is all about the legacy. Does the election cost that Movement, or galvanize it? The real fight for liberals isn't the election: it's to change their country into one that won't just elect another. Ted Cruz is probably practising his Mussolini in front of a mirror already.
Republicans were already going to proclaim the loss "crooked", now they can just say "would have won without the virus".
Even if that 2% odds, of the Black Queen flipping up from the deck, come to pass, I'm sure he'll be turned into a Sainted Martyr, somehow - would have lived if he hadn't fought so hard for the Lost Cause.
In the very worst case, or in the quite-likely good cases, the movement gets a validation, the philosophy will claim a "win". So, again, two-thirds odds of this being a Bad Thing. You can hope for the good luck if you want; but remember: this is 2020.
(I type this blog into emacs, a text editor with no spell-checking. If I got "Schadenfreude" right in the headline, I want credit.)
http://brander.ca/c19#schadenfreude
The videos are shot for structural and operating inspections: is the pipe blocked? Is it cracked, broken, collapsing? Most of my career was spent guessing at the condition of water pipes, which have to be dug up to be inspected - until Alberta companies started inventing tools that could sneak into the water pipe network through the hydrants (they had to be built like a "string of pearls" to go around the 90 degree bends to slip in).
But sewer pipes are dead easy: a manhole at each end. Just drop in the "crawler", a rugged video camera, on a heavy steel tiny-tank. No need for light weight to spare the batteries, they just pulled their power cable, and outgoing video cable, after them and could ram their way through minor obstructions. So there are a couple of "video trucks" that do nothing all day but inspect old sewer pipes. My job was just to process the data and sum up a list of worst-cases for repair.
This trip down a (very gross) memory lane, to emphasize that your municipal government actually has very intimate access to data about your house, business, or campus: they can have crews standing by that, within any given business hour, could grab a sample of your wastewater outflow. (We wouldn't, unless some court ordered us to. We do sample outflow in the manhole, which sums up all the outflows on a block. We do this looking for fats, not disease or drugs; the culprit is generally obvious: the restaurant with the fatty foods. There was this KFC, and a Chinese Buffet, that were notorious. But that is another story.)
The pandemic news is that, after some successes in American university dorms, the city of Guelph is looking at testing sewage to get a heads-up on coronavirus outbreaks.
Well, about time. Your local sewer department has always been the greatest disease fighter in your town, not the hospitals. What Guelph is doing is the easiest way to use the technology: gather the outflow from one building at a time, the residences.
As mentioned, this follows a successful case in New Jersey.
It should, of course, be extended to public schools, offices, other places where the people infected can be tracked down and contacted. As we look to hyper-sophisticated technology to save us, we shouldn't neglect very simple things we can also be doing.
http://brander.ca/c19#sewer
The background to the rally there, is that there are around 60,000 confirmed cases for those 2 million people then, and as that blue chart shows, about 300 per day for the last couple of weeks, giving us 67,000 today. With 300 new ones per day, there are probably about 3000 infectious people on any given day that became cases, and up to 20,000 more that don't become cases: studies have routinely shown that prevalence is 8 or more times as much as is logged as "cases".
A generous, conservative, estimate then, would require assuming that nearly 1% of the population (20,000 out of 2 million) might be able to infect you on a given day - and one should be generous and conservative when estimating for a crowd of Republicans that glory in doing "open" activities, and doing them with no masks or distancing.
In blue, of course, the actual cases from the Johns Hopkins page above. This time, it's the opposite of Tulsa: there's a bulge in cases just at the time the normal symptom-display statistics would predict one, if the rally caused a bunch of infections. ("Hah! Got him this time!" his accusers chortle.)
Is the hump in cases actually the result of the rally. I think not. Maybe a fraction of it - at most, the fraction showing in the yellow line at bottom. The yellow line is the one you get if you multiply those percentages by a total of 200 cases caused by the rally. I really believe that to be conservative.
If the rally-goers really were way up there at 1% infected, that's still only about 50-60 people of the 5000 or so. While we have heard of these weddings, and the one infamous choir practice that included a meal together, where one person infected dozens, it would mostly be unusual for one person to infect more than three or four in a few hours, in a room with a high ceiling and good air circulation. Fifty times four is 200, and I really think that's an upper bound. So most of that bulge in new cases from September 20-25, about 700 people above the 120-150 a day they were at on September 19-20, cannot be from the rally. If the rally had infected an additional 700 people, we'd all have heard about it: one person in 8 who attended?
The complaint isn't about the exact number infected, though if they did cause even 100 cases, they also killed two people, as Clark county has been running at a 2% case-fatality rate throughout. The complaint is that the cases caused led to more cases, and more cases. The complaint is that they were sent home happily reinforced in their decisions to ignore masks and distances. And infected.
I like to run these numbers, because I'm interested in epidemiology, and how my very rudimentary statistical skills are nonetheless enough to follow along with the experts. But Biden's message, that it was "totally irresponsible", was spot-on. Tulsa gave me the feeling that rallies in very large arenas with a lot of open-air, are at least possible. But packing people together and disdaining masks, that's just crazy talk.
Of course.
http://brander.ca/c19#henderson
Then today's count came in at 105, and it seems more like we're hovering around that 100/day figure. That's actually pretty good news. The number is probably within the tracing capability, so we can be considered "Under control", as it were. It's just a number that could so quickly explode if people stop working at it.
Fingers crossed...
http://brander.ca/c19#BChovering
Further, I saw no point at looking at the statistics from poorly-governed regimes that lie constantly. That was a sore point back in January about economically-mighty China, and I haven't covered them, either, because I don't trust the data provided. No great knowledge of about 170 of the worlds 180+ nations, I pretty much stuck to North America, Western Europe, Asian democracies.
Staying within your limits is wise, but I missed how well Africa has been managing, on half a shoestring in most cases. Because they've been the subject of much journalism, I at least did backpat Vietnam and Cuba, tyrannies both, but with a reputation developed for honest reporting of public health issues.
That was almost two months ago, and I failed to think about how many other poor countries would actually be able to do well at pandemic protection, because distance, masks, and willingness to alter commerce patterns, don't require capital. The pandemic is crushingly expensive, but only in terms of lost production. The disease is expensive, all that hospital care - but only if it gets loose to start with.
My lead, buried in this fifth paragraph (the joys of blogging: screw you, Columbia School of Journalism), is an excellent article by Karen Attiah at the Washington Post, about how Africa "defied the covid-19 nightmare scenarios". Some nations' experience with Ebola can be credited for preparing them; with others, it was AIDS. Africa's been fighting various kinds of epidemics - malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, too - for a long time, while we grew stupider and more arrogant in our bubbles of protection.
In the early days of the pandemic, it was OK to dismiss great performance from small counties with less air traffic, because they hadn't been infected to start with; especially, as they didn't get surprised by the first spread. At this late date, however, every place on Earth has had a few exposures, and after that, it's all about your control of the spread. They've just done very well. If they hadn't, no government could keep a lid on the news. Remember the bodies stacked in the streets in Ecuador?
So, Africa knows how it's done. With no money. We should humbly ask them to send some development workers over and instruct us.
http://brander.ca/c19#africa
I understand if you don't want to click, so I'll just tell you that the offenses were indeed clear, egregious, and repeated, and so he was also fined $5,000 - then will have to do three years of probation after he gets out.
Canada has done everything better than the USA at the pandemic, but this is one area where we need to catch up. Let's jail somebody like this; they get people killed. Most people need only gentle correction and advice, Dr. Bonnie's strong suit. On rare occasions, however, we need to clarify how serious this is.
http://brander.ca/c19#jail
Then I'm stopped by an incongrous number.
We've lost just 75 Canadians between the ages of 20 and 49, a wider age-range.
The great bulk of Canada's losses, I keep repeating, were our care-home disaster in Ontario and Quebec. The United States has lost 2.6 times as many, by population, as Canada, but the ratio could have been over 10:1 - if Ontario and Quebec had protected their care-homes as well as BC did.
STILL! To get how many Americans, 25-44, would have died if they had lived in Canada, you can take the 75 and multiply by 8.76, the ratio of our two populations (These days, 331.5 million vs 37.8 million.) and get 658.
You got that right: overall, 2.6 times as many Americans have died of Covid-19, by population, as Canadians have, but by population of young adults, the disease is 5000/658 = 7.6 times as bad in the United States.
Young Americans could lower their chance of dying from coronavirus by 87% by crossing the border. OK, strictly speaking, they should have crossed it years ago. Much of this staggering difference may come down to the health-care systems, to medical conditions untreated for years.
5000 minus 658 is 4,342 "excess deaths", by Canadian standards. Assuming that trends continue, and eventually over 300,000 Americans die (see post 2 days ago), we can add 50% to that, and get 6,513 young Americans will die from this virus that did not have to, would not have done had they had Canadian health care and public services, were killed by their government. It'll be more than the whole "War on Terror", across its 20 years from 2002-2022, just in their 25-44 age group.
Oh, praise be, for being Canadian. Those poor, poor bastards; my pity for America grows every day.
http://brander.ca/c19#dyingyoung
Oops.
I forgot that many of those threatened officers had surely received "praise and adulation", as well; it just only takes the one, or six, death threats from the whole population to scare somebody out of their job.
Dr. Henry was just shrugging them off and not even complaining about them; just happened to mention it, now. There's a dramatic contrast for you.
If I can stretch a bit to offer BC a kind word, it's likely that the "death threats" she received were judged not serious. In the US, with its gun culture and so many mass shootings, a health officer would do well to take them much more seriously. Henry was able to brush them off and concentrate on working for us.
I'm glad that my June 25 post highlighted how all the most-threatened officers were women. Dr. Henry's news has, bravo, stimulated stories about how women in public positions suffer far more of this than male counterparts. All BC is shamed that it happened here.
http://brander.ca/c19#bhdeath
It's becoming at least possible (if foolish) to speculate about the ultimate butcher's bill. Foolish, because anybody can screw up and have a whole new wave, and there's plenty of time for a few of them before vaccines come to save us all (fingers crossed on that...)
But if Canada doesn't screw up too badly, we'll probably only continue losing 5-10 people per day for another 200 days, then a slow decline as the vaccination rate takes effect. At very best, we might clock in under 10,000 dead, though over 11,000 is very likely and 12,000 is certainly possible, even without any major waves. We'll never get back the 7,000 lives we lost to our gross failures in long-term care, but we won't repeat such mistakes, either.
If Ontario and Quebec had replicated the performance of BC with long-term care, Canada could have gotten away with under 5,000 dead, certainly, a number comparable to bad flu seasons. It kind of implies that a perfectly-run United States might have seen under 50,000, just by population proportion.
That was never likely, even if their Dr. Fauci had been elected President, instead; and their performance had been optimal for them...because of that awful health-care system of theirs. But still: other nations could have done that well, and unlike us, nations like Australia and Germany actually did.
America is becoming as sadly easy to guess at a number for as Canada: except in their case, it looks like they will have several hundred dead per day on average, rather than 5-10. Two hundred days times five hundred bodies is another 100,000 dead for a total over 300,000(!!)
It's possible that a new administration might bring the numbers down starting in February, but a lot of the damage is in people's minds, treating masks and distancing as offenses; that "damage" won't heal, maybe ever.
The number isn't shocking to news junkies: it's been predicted since early August, not for the whole pandemic, but by December first. That's currently hard to see, with 67 days to go, and well under 1,000 dying per day. But even by the time a new administration takes office, that's another 50 days later, and it's hard to believe it'll be under 300,000.
It could have been 50,000. American incompetence and political posturing will then have killed a over a quarter of a million Americans that would have lived in the best-case scenario. That's more than every American war, ever, combined, if you subtract their Civil War and WW2.
And that is why I do not understand how there are still any states considered "close" in their election.
http://brander.ca/c19#300000
A kind of Holy Grail that keeps people clicking on hype YouTube videos and news articles is a distinctly better battery. Industrial analysts have calculated that if batteries came down below $100/kWh of storage capacity (from their $160 at best, today - mostly $180-$200), then electric cars would be as cheap as the regular kind.
So yesterday's much-hyped "Tesla Battery Day" had hearts aflutter: a "solid state" battery that can't catch fire, keeps running if punctured? An engineering realization of lab experiments that hint at doubling, maybe quadrupling storage per kilogram? The needed drop below $100/kWh?
Alas, none of the above. Basically, it was a promise that they're sure they can realize significant improvements (no doublings, sorry) over the next three years. They've got it all worked out, just have to build the factories.
That really is good news. Everybody loves a "Eureka! Breakthrough", but nearly all technology improves like this, or slower.
What's my link to climate change, from the pandemic. Well, it's teaching us patience. I hate the term "climate emergency", because the climate-change project will go on for the next three generations. Greta Thunberg will die of old age during the project; so will her kids. "Emergency" denotes something you can just drop everything to fight, put life on hold while the fire is put out and the victims bandaged, then get back to it.
The climate fight, on the other hand, will just be our life. We spent a hundred years building up coal infrastructure, have let most of it decay away, unreplaced as we built up oil infrastrucuture, which will soon be built less and less, and carbon-free, methane-free engineering more and more. And when we're GHG-free...all the GHG will still be in the atmosphere, and we'll need generations of more patience before the climate recovers.
During which time, life must go on, as we've had to figure out ways for life to go on during pandemic protocols and limitations. At least with the pandemic, we only need a year or two of patience; it's a global, species-wide, "starter problem" to get us used to the idea. It's funny that the nations doing the best on the pandemic were also the ones already doing well on climate change. And vice-versa.
http://brander.ca/c19#patience
The worst part is that we like our MLA from his party, are reluctant to vote against him. But I, for one, just must. Alas, the guy got 60% in the last match, so even the justified anger over this outrage probably won't cost him his seat. Indeed, many think Horgan will be rewarded for his perfidy with a majority. Argh.
The upside is that I kind of have to vote Green. My MLA would get the biggest scare if votes went to his closest challenger last time, a Liberal. But the BC Liberal party is acting as our conservative party these days. We're still mad at them from their last time in power. So it's the Greens, which actually does double-duty of expressing climate-change concerns. After two weeks of smoke (that used to happen much less often), how could we not?
The Greens don't have a very workable industrial-change plan, but they're pushing very hard in the right direction. They have been needed as an influence on more "industry friendly" parties. (That is, green-industry-unfriendly, green-jobs-unfriendly parties.) If any election reminded me that voting can be about strategy, and the enemies-of-my-enemy, rather than idealism, this is the one.
Those were long sentences. But, I can think of a four-word one that ends in "John Horgan". I hope everybody votes that sentence next month.
http://brander.ca/c19#pandemelection
Scrolling the news to see if there was a story worth highlighting for time-short readers, and it was all increasing case-counts across Canada, outbreaks here and there, schools closing...in short, the same news for the last few weeks: all bad.
Then one from the London Free Press, about "Encouraging Signs" caught my eye, and it seems that London's thriving college party scene was pretty quiet last weekend, the places open were uncrowded, parties around campus were not heard.
Well, they are university students. For all the criticisms we make, they are pretty bright, and possibly they're starting to figure out, from their own bitter experience, the central mental block that everybody has about this danger. People think there are safe places, safe times, that we can make a place safe for some time, and then, it being "safe", you can behave how you want. It had led to folly every time, even in the super-safe places like Australia and New Zealand.
There are no safe times. There are no safe spaces. There are only safe behaviours.
http://brander.ca/c19#goodnews
http://brander.ca/c19#200000
...and I started saving it every day. It helps to have a Unix computer with with "wget" utility, so you can just tell the computer to snapshot the page at 5PM every day and forget about it. Eventually, I typed them all in.
They're the ultimate in "big picture" data, useless for anything else. Agglomerating vastly different health system issues, where the Maritimes have almost no cases, and Quebec had thousands. Then there's time: each day, the new count of positive tests has nothing to do with the count of new tests, because results can take days and more to come back; the positives are for tests from all last week.
So only the big picture over time and space is captured, and Canada, on the whole, as the months go by, had a rise in positivity, then a fall as we beat it down, and now it's steadily coming back and back:
Alas, it seems likely to get worse. Alberta is already reducing testing(!) to save up tests for the Fall surge. (Boy, will I be coming back to that!)
It's right in the article:
The low positivity rate shows this capacity could be better utilized, Hinshaw said.
Anything under 3% is still good news, but Canada is going back to school, and into flu season, in a deteriorating condition from the great place we were in a month back.
http://brander.ca/c19#testpositive
It's still similar to the brain-scraping swab test, it just gets the gunk out of the back of your throat with gargling instead.
What the announcement is NOT, is any greater availablility of testing. It's only at those 19 centres. It "can be done" without a health professional, but there's nothing to get it into the schools, school staff administering it. There's no indication the results come back any sooner.
It would be nice if this is a real step forward for safety in the schools; but that basically depends on more testing, proactive testing before symptoms, and quicker results, quick enough to get a kid home before they spread it. There's no sign of any of that in the announcement.
Still, any new test being approved at all is a big step forward, intellectually, for the health care bureaucracy that has been so resistant to new products.
Parents should cheer, but go right back to pressing for more tests, proactive tests, faster results. They still haven't got them.
http://brander.ca/c19#spittest
At this point, they're nearly a week ahead. JH is still down under 197,000, when worldometers is already past 201,000, with the death-rate down below 800/day, lately.
It was still well over 1000/day during the Democrats' convention a few weeks back, and people laughed at the grimmest political 'joke' in ages: that Michelle Obama was criticized by the president for obviously pre-recording a message that mentioned 150,000 dead, when it was already up to 170,000 - proving he understood there were 170,000 dead, if not that it was going up by nearly 10,000 per week at the time.
It's a dumb, data-collection issue to even remark upon, just that CCCC is out-of-sync on it's "another round number passed" postings with the rest of the media. The real point here is to keep marvelling, in a bad way, at the death-rate, let yourself remain shocked by it, by how it compares with our pearl-clutching when soldiers die in a helicopter crash, or many die in yet another crazed-shooter incident.
The five Canadians that died of it yesterday should be news, by those standards. Instead, we only note the even tens-of-thousands in the USA, now. In Canada, not even a note when we crossed the line to an even 9,000 (August 12 on Worldometers...)
We've become very numb to it. We've had to. We can't become numb to the ongoing risk.
http://brander.ca/c19#wovsjh
Of course, the companion function of "dying" indicates this bit of mathematical sculpture cost them 700 lives; they were one of the best in the world, at 102 dead back in June, then they let it get away, and now their total is well over 800.
Of course, they still have us beat all hollow. They have gone way up to the number that we would have had if we'd protected our care homes (down to 2000 from 9000) and also had closed up a week earlier, before Quebec and Ontario had spring break, so that we had just over a thousand lost. If we'd done all that perfectly, we could hold our heads up around Australia.
Canada's case-chart keeps increasing, but very slowly. Nothing exponential, at least not quite. The last few weeks are looking more like it, though, and we've got to get a grip on it.
http://brander.ca/c19#australia2
A Paul Krugman newsletter (recommended in its own right if you like super-easy explanations of economics) linked to this Twaddler (sp?) thread where Miguel Hernan, Harvard Prof, examines the two situations at left. Hernan specializes in information graphing, a subject I love too, and all in that field agree that the best graphics speak for themselves, as here. (The graphic is the link to his thread.)
So why did Madrid lose control and spike back up in cases? In four words, "too few contact tracers". Though unlocking too quickly was a big problem, too. Hernan writes:
I have relatives there, a newborn grandnephew, a toddler grandniece, a brother who recently turned 70. Who loves his favourite bars. So it's worrying. The idiots (RNC) talking like this is as good as over, really need to see this graph.
http://brander.ca/c19#nycmadrid
I notice the streets are pretty quiet, indeed, I think everybody is. And the smoke may be going on, all week. I reflected there's now two things locking me down - fear of virus particles and fear of smoke particles.
It's got me depressed enough that's all I'm going to post today: maybe we'll be able to detect a fall in transmissions in a week or so that comes from the smoke keeping us all in and grumpily watching TV.
http://brander.ca/c19#smoke
These experiments probably are "safe" by most definitions of the term. Vaccine safety has to work in the hundreds of millions. You probably couldn't inject saline solution into that many people without some bad reactions. So, they set the safety bar very high, because we all know how much trouble vaccines have with public suspicion. Insane, baseless public suspicion, so think what the nuts could do with an actual base for it.
The scientists injecting their experiments into 10 or 100 friends and family, probably have less than one chance in many thousands of causing a really bad reaction. On the other hand, even a vaccine that offered a pathetic 50% reduction in infection odds, worthless as a program, would be a big relief for an individual, compared to zero protection.
There was talk earlier on about massive strikes, "for our lives", etc, but I knew the meat plant workers would knuckle under, go back to work, take the risk. They are, of course, poor, many desperately so; nobody who's read Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation", or any other journalism about meat-packing, knows that nobody else will work there to start with. Poor workers, from time immemorial, have risked their lives to keep working. Ask any family with coal miners in their history, like mine. (Grandfather, dead in his 50s. Injuries from a cave-in.)
If you could assume there was a route to safety through PPE and workplace measures, you couldn't suggest the obvious: let the meat plant workers test the vaccines. There are other jobs taking infection risks right now, but the meat-plant workers are by far at the highest risk of it. Their need is greatest, but also they can really put it through the functionality test: far fewer testees would be needed to prove efficacy. As for the dangers of the vaccine itself, they're orders of magnitude lower than the dangers of no vaccine, already demonstrated with 200 coffins.
http://brander.ca/c19#meatball
I managed to dredge up one cheery thought: at least when case-loads go up these days, it's not those terrifying exponential curves that lead quickly to jammed ICU beds. Note at left, the red line that generally tracks the sad story of BC since the end of July: six weeks of steadily increasing cases every day. But that's a linear graph, not logarithmic.
This really does put a different complexion on the problem, and perhaps explains why the public-health people aren't panicking and ordering another lockdown, though I noted onAugust 22, "Time to at least Threaten Drastic Measures?" that we were already way above the case-counts we had when the first lockdown was ordered. The difference is that case-counts back then could be expected to increase exponentially, and now they cannot.
Behaviour has changed. I see it in the streets every day, people are hardly noticing as they maneuver away from each other as they pass, now. Our news may be filled with snaps of crowds, but that's because they're all news: the normal routine is spacing.
I'm sure that increases are still actually exponential - that's the way it has to work - but the exponent is far lower; low enough that whole weeks of increase are hard to tell apart from a straight line. Too, if people become more alarmed, less outgoing, and more distancing as numbers rise, and they react to that news - then the exponent would keep dropping and make it even closer to linear.
It would still be really good to see it decrease, though, for the sake of the schools. For BC in particular. It's pretty hard to hold my breath, though, as the news about the long weekend, and about schools, is still to come in.
http://brander.ca/c19#notexpo
A quarter of a million people will become infected today, but perhaps fewer than 5,000 will die of it. So, adding up the planet, if not just the USA, every day is still worse than that September 11, by a few thousand dead. (The USA alone is now falling below 800 deaths/day, so for them, every day is about a quarter of a 9/11.)
The case-fatality rate, of about 2%, is a fraction of what it was in April, no doubt because cases were not being counted well. But they were counted about as well a month ago as they are today, and the case-fatality rate has dropped since then. I lean to the same explanation I had for falling rates in America: we're protecting the old better, and they are protecting themselves. All around the world, older people who can stay in and limit contacts are doing so, and care facilities for the old (including homes) everywhere are mindfully protecting the elderly within.
This makes the average age of those who are "cases" younger, and of course with COVID-19, that means the fatality rate is much lower. Even a small increase in the proportion of young (here meaning "under 40") infectees would explain the drop so far. In the developed world, especially the USA that are contributing a quarter of the cases right now, there's also credit where due to the gradually improving treatments they're developing.
September 11 is an inherently solemn day, in Chile certainly, and the USA, too. It's nice to read some positive news.
http://brander.ca/c19#deathdecline
When the ambulance sirens were coming just minutes apart in Lombardy, in Brussels, did people take to the streets, mindlessly smashing things? Did anybody shoot anybody else to keep them from coming close, or nail up sufferers in their homes?
What "panic"?
They've been calling out the "COVID Panic" since early May, the panic that drove nations to prevent people from "looking for work", by "shutting down businesses". Which is to say, public health lockdowns - the crude, but only known way to fight a pandemic without testing everybody every day - are to them a "panic".
"Panic" generally means that people do the worst, dumbest things in crises - panic driving people to run straight into the line-of-fire in a battle; or rip out their air hose while diving. What's the dumb thing that COVID panic caused?
Defined this way, it's clear that the US administration indeed wanted to avoid "panic" - that is to say, avoid public health measures that shut down businesses for a few months. It's a funny kind of "panic", though, that is openly stated as the intended strategy, years in advance, with a whole Panic Plan in Panic Steps and Panic Phases according to Panic Criteria that are re-evaluated by epidemiologists (they would be "Panic Planners", I guess) every week.
What the Minds of Mises are not going to admit, I suspect, is that in the long-run analyses, the nations that succumbed to that particular kind of "panic" actually will have the best economic outcomes, as well. If they were honest (they're not), they'd look back and say, "We shouldn't have written that. We looked at the plummeting economic indicators and freaked out. We didn't see the 18-month long run; instead, we..."
http://brander.ca/c19#panic
Well, it's not another full lockdown, of course, but we finally have "re-opening" halted and reversed, at least to a small extent. Dr. Bonnie Henry finally lost her patience, when the last four days averaged over 100 cases/day (anybody remember when it was under 20? It was last month...) and closed some bars and banquet halls for large gatherings.
But the news link for the day is to "The Tyee", a West Coast journal, with an important article on those restaurant face-masks at right. I've already been served in restaurants where the waiters have this very minimal face shield that looks like it redirects exhalations upward. They likely do keep actual droplets from hitting you, but the article shows studies have found that much of what's exhaled still gets around in the air, and the wearer is little-protected.
Consider hitting restaurants with better protection.
http://brander.ca/c19#grounding
All the stories lack one helpful bit of information: when the heck is the flu shot coming? They don't even mention the topic.
Googling didn't help much, it took me to the Government of Canada Flu Page...which had information about last year's flu vaccine. It even shows a page modification date of 2019-August-9. What's thirteen months between friends?
Well, we have something for our readers: and Edmonton Journal article from last year, noting that in Alberta, clinics generally open about October 13, though last year they were delayed to October 21. Let's hope they instead start early this year. 2020 already has all the viruses it needs, thank you.
http://brander.ca/c19#flushot
But, the results are obviously in on the blog's prediction of 190,000 American dead by Labour Day.
A bit after I forecast that with rough calculations, the CDC came in with "180,000-200,000", not a very courageous prediction, being plus/minus 10,000. My call was dead in the middle, of course, so we're both right.
Worldometers, with it's reliance on calls to local news, has it at 193,500 just now, and Johns Hopkins, ever-further-behind by relying on the slower stats coming in through the medical systems, is still at 188,941 - though by tomorrow, when people currently off work send in numbers, it'll probably prove to be well over 189,000.
So, in short, dead on. Upcoming predictions are apparently actually for a resumption in death-rates, which have been declining for weeks; apparently, case-loads in the mid-west bring fears that it will soon enough start going back up again.
From a cruder standpoint, where you (foolishly) assume the future looks like the recent past, with the death-rate slooowly declining from 966/day two weeks back to about 870/day today, you'd assume an average of 800/day for another 10,000 dead in the next 12 days, and that round 200,000 number that will be the headline, due just before the first day of Fall, September 22.
Will it be round enough, big enough, to change American attitudes? No; it's not about the number you read in the news; it's about whether somebody you know has had a bad time with it. If the rural centre of the nation is finally in for a bad month, it might finally change the last skeptics. (I doubt it.)
http://brander.ca/c19#labourdayin
But today, conservative NYT columnist Ross Douthat finally asked the question "How Many Lives Would a More Normal President Have Saved?" by comparing to other countries. After admitting that Germany did well, he wants to point out that Spain and Italy and the UK did not, that America actually looks about "mediocre", rather than "uniquely catastrophic".
Naturally, having followed the whole issue of deaths-per-million as a metric for all this time, I put in an NYT comment that Mr. Douthat was doing the Right a favour by not comparing to Canada, probably the most-similar nation. Same continent, same level of travel, same federal system where the feds have to work through state/provincial health systems. Compared our 242/million (so far, and climbing at several per day) to their 582/million (so far, and climbing at several hundred per day), and computed that if they'd had Canada's pandemic, another 109,000 Americans would still be alive.
Most of the mistakes Canada made were the care homes, of course; without that terrible performance, we'd have lost less than a fifth as many people. In America, it was just 40%. So there's another rubber ruler to stretch up against the problem: if both nations had protected their care-homes well, and the only losses had been to previously basically healthy people, America would still have lost 111,000 to date, and Canada would have lost under 2,000.
Both nations failed their very old and vulnerable. But in America, if you were not under care, just living your life independently with reasonable health, your chances of dying in the last six months, were six times higher in America than Canada. And rising. That seems "catastrophic" from here.
Just saying.
http://brander.ca/c19#canadametric
By "backward", he means that once people have taken a risk, they act as if that were some barrier they'd broken through, that now admits them to a new space. If you go to a restaurant, well, you've taken the "restaurant risk", that's a done deal, might as well go to a restaurant every day.
This is precisely like playing a round of Russian Roulette, concluding that you're now a person who can just pull a trigger on yourself and get away with it, and keep playing more rounds. Exactly backward: each round of Russian Roulette is a new, separate risk, like a spin on any Roulette wheel. Having won once, the only winning move is still not to play.
Dr. Carroll counsels you to "counteract" risks you do take by being extra careful to reduce other risks. This doesn't make the risk you're taking any lower, of course, but it helps. Statistically, if everybody does it, we all benefit, too.
So, the kids going to school doesn't give you permission to also put them in team sports. Consider compensating for school by doing something extra-safe on weekends. Look for tradeoffs. You have to add some risks to get on with life, so look for ways to subtract risks, as well.
We have guests for a few days, so I'm going to avoid stores for a few weeks -and be extra-careful and mindful while getting groceries. It's something, at least.
http://brander.ca/c19#riskaddition
This applies to both Alberta and BC, which seem to have decided to become the Twin Provinces, as far as "trying to have a second wave" is concerned. Both have been struggling, for six weeks and more now, to hold down case-increases that stubbornly keep rising.
The reasons are various, and it's frustrating that the public health investigators don't talk more about them. They don't break down the reports by how many at restaurants, other stores, how many between business co-workers, and whether those are "office", "retail", or "industrial" environments.
A friend pointed out the other day that Alberta doesn't have so many cases, if you subtract the ones in meat plants that aren't an infection concern outside them. And this may be why they're hauling out the word "precipice".
Normally, I'd figure they were just engaging in fresh rhetoric, to keep people concerned, when vigilance normally flags. After all, epidemiology doesn't have "precipices", it has the same exponential function whether you have 20 cases or 20,000. Exponential functions can LOOK like they have a precipice, and definitely feel that way, when the numbers get frightening.
However, they're tracking the case-load in deep detail that we aren't hearing about. It's possible that they felt for some time that the situation was controllable, because most cases were in places with well-known lists of contacts, like, well, meat plants and businesses. They may be getting more concerned now, not just because of "89 cases a day", but because a much higher proportion of them are the kind of "community" cases where they can't contact-trace and contain.
So take this one seriously. All risk is additive. Society is adding in a lot of risk by going back to school right now. Soon, additional risks will be imposed by fall weather. We need to cut all the other risks, to compensate. Beware gatherings, meet with caution. We do not want another lockdown.
http://brander.ca/c19#precipice
We have guests right now, from Calgary. We compared a few notes as we looked at the "crowd" on the beach at English Bay, watching the sunset, last night. The "crowd" was a couple of hundred people, all in little pods of two to six, not just two metres apart, but more: everybody had taken as much space as they could. Our guests confirmed that this is standard behaviour in Calgary, these days, too.
I see it when I go out; people swing way to the side of trails as we pass in Stanley Park. If I actually step off a narrow trail into the brush to let somebody pass at more than arm's length, people smile, and thank me for it.
I watched the people in the picture at left meet to decide some outing, in the street below the house, just now. They assumed this spacing quite automatically, without any discussion, or anybody at first standing too close. It's become automatic.
There's a lot of reasons for hope. We should remember, as we rail at the school boards and the partiers, that most people are doing the right thing. Fears of exponential curves taking us back to packed ICUs are very unlikely.
If that doesn't cheer you up, read some American news, keeping mind that you don't live there.
http://brander.ca/c19#space
Notice one thing, of course: that very tall bar for "class sizes under 12", that being the rural schools, I assume. If they're very upset at the lack of remote-learning options out there because their Internet is slow, at least they have the option of a real-life class of ten, the lucky ducks. Everybody else gets as close to 30 as can be arranged.
But how the heck can this mentality survive the concerns about the virus? How can they not be rearranging the whole school, spreading out over rooms, corridors, tents, temporary classrooms like they love to drag into the courtyard when demographics hand the school too many students? Some schools had temporary trailer-classrooms in their yards for years.
My friend with the kids heading off to school, described the first day yesterday as a monumental screw-up, more proof to me that staff positions that could be teachers, are wasted on ever-more administration staff. They had the one job, organize the new return, months to do it, and it was the worst.
The parents were all directed to a "portal" for all information...and then the portal had none. Normally, teachers e-mail the parents about where to bring their kids, to meet their new teacher. No e-mails at all. It's not clear the teachers knew who was in their class: Moms got there to find that three grade-2 classes had been "dissolved" into two, and met the befuddled teacher who'd lost having a class at all (sent home? Reassigned to a new class, cross-town? Who knew?)
The insane incompetence of recombining new classes on the spot, like reassigning Canada to invade a different beach on D-Day, while the boats were crossing the channel, stopped me for a moment. Then it hit me, that rather that accept the gift of having some kids not show up, allowing three smaller classes, they'd made sure there would be just two extra-large classes.
It kind of drops your jaw.
I don't know; maybe the kids can save the adults on this one, by being really careful and good. But unless they grab at that straw for us, it's hard to predict anything but trouble. If so, I just hope the school board sees some consequences.
http://brander.ca/c19#school1
He's credited with Prasad's Law, though this hasn't made it to his Wikipedia page yet. In his podcast, he gave examples that summed up to a "law" for some:
The "unaffordable" interventions are things like more nurses, home visitors, and other policies that give small amounts of money to a large number of people to deliver health care.
The hospital will buy a three-million-dollar MRI machine that will save 30 lives at $100,000 each, but it will not hire 50 care-aides at $60,000 each, to save 30 lives. Same evidence, same price, different outcome.
I suspect that a lot of professionals can think of Prasad's Law in their careers. I found that vast sums would be expended on IT to help manage IT - expensive systems to automatically install software, manage licenses, complicated "ticket" systems to manage all help calls. Most of it was thousands of dollars per year per computer-user served, more expensive than just hiring one "computer guy" helper for every 40 or 50 users, to be their local Mr. Fixit. Worse, I saw the local Mr. Fixit hauled away to a pool of people answering "tickets", about 1995. Until then, users of these new "PC" thingies had personal help from a face they knew, knew their area and problems. Personal help was never to return.
Nobody ever checked whether the pool and the ticket-system saved a penny. The important thing was to automate, and reduce staff. Or appear to; when I added up the staff handling tickets, no jobs had actually been reduced. They had to have a new management bureaucracy to oversee the "pool", after all.
People who read about Prasad's Law promptly pointed out that this applies, perhaps even more, to education. Schools have loved buying expensive technology for fifty years. TV teaching, computer teaching with 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit generations of computers. They just kept buying and trying. Teachers who started out watching 8-bit Apple IIs fail at teaching in 1981, retired in 2011, watching iPads fail the same way. What they didn't try was smaller class sizes, absolutely proven to improve education outcomes. They would buy machines, but not hire people. Having to buy 30 kids 30 iPads for a year is, what, $30,000? So is a $25/hr classroom aide for 1200 hours. Ask any teacher which they'd prefer.
They were forced to hire some people to deal with special needs kids mainstreamed into regular classes. There's just no machinery that can care for kids. Those extra staff will be a blessing, now. They've had six months to look into hiring more, preferably young, help, at a time when a lot of young people are out of work. It might have been a special grace for tens of thousands out of work, to get a job that happened to last the pandemic, just watching over kids in spread-out classrooms and keeping them on-task, while the teacher shuttled back and forth. It would have been the simplest thing.
But no; it's like a managerial Deep Instinct, for generations now: hiring humans is anathema. Anything but that. The pandemic has shown the broad applications of Prasad's Law much more clearly, and I think it needs to be on his Wikipedia page. And the lips of every politician.
http://brander.ca/c19#prasad
Meanwhile, in Alberta, Dr. Deena Henshaw has a "solution" for that: remove the distancing rule.
I didn't need to blog-post this, it's hardly gone without notice; it's the top story on The Herald righ now.
About all I need to add is that this is what happens when a rock meets a very hard place. The rock is the public health bureaucracy that is tasked to fight the pandemic, but doesn't enjoy dictatorial power. The very hard place is the edcucation bureaucracy that simply won't be told to change. And they have one huge advantage that effectively does give them dictatorial power: they are the day-care system that parents need to get back to their jobs.
A friend with 3 kids assures me that she doesn't know a single parent not planning to send their kids back. They have trepidation about the virus, but their whole family needs them on the job.
When the pandemic was younger, there was this great atmosphere of creativity: we'll change society, we'll reform the economic system, we'll permanently go virtual with things. It turns out, that as we near the six-month mark, we can't even re-organize schooling to take advantage of empty buildings; use the gym and other rooms for larger schoolrooms; and so on. It'll be the same old classrooms, with the same old class, packed together. They couldn't even stretch their approach to look at longer hours, create more "space" by creating more classroom "slots".
I've devoted several posts now to castigating the public health bureaucracy for their lack of adaptability: they had a hard time accepting tests that have high false-result rates, in return for being enormously cheaper and faster, so we don't have those. Meanwhile, the other public bureaucracy couldn't envision classrooms spread out over multiple rooms and corridors, teachers assisted by aides and administrators; or just longer hours, or temporary staff...couldn't envision any changes that would have made distancing possible. So now, their charges get neither distance nor tests. In short, they'll get the virus; explain to me how they won't.
The utter failure of the school bureaucracy to adapt at all, save to dump everything on the teachers at the bottom, should really have us all looking at major turnover in the adminstrative ranks. Just save money by concentrating on teachers, teachers, teachers. The upper-crust of the school system might have earned their high-salary keep if they'd been wizard managers that came up with creative ways to organize and teach safely. They've done, basically, nothing.
And now they're arm-twisting public health doctors that know better, to legally let get away with it. Parents should not.
http://brander.ca/c19#schoolfail
And they can see the need for testing. It won't be daily, or even every other day, or anything. Indeed, all they say is that "eventually, all staff and students will be tested, which will be followed by periodic testing".
It's kind of exciting, in a way: with such a huge statistical base, any level at all of regular, pro-active testing is bound to tell us a lot about how risky different behaviours are, what situations it transmits in, and doesn't.
But the very large point here is that Los Angles is proving it can be done. All across Canada, I see nothing but fatalism (and despair) about school; what happens, happens. Fighting it with testing is just too big a job; we can only do a few thousand tests per day for millions kids.
It's still not clear just how many tests they will be doing. The budget so far is $300/student/year. For the current "PCR" tests, at $100 each, that's only 3 tests. But LAUSD is the first customer of "SummerBio" a company that claims "extremely low costs" compared to existing. Presumably that means a fraction, and the kids will get a dozen or more tests in a year. They're being cagey about it, certainly, and cautioning the news that they don't intend to catch every positive, that they are mostly "studying" the pandemic.
But, again, all of these caveats aside: they're doing something. Other school systems are not even trying. Should this bring LA success, when other school openings lead to embarrassing, long-predicted failure, there should be some consequences for the administrators who made the wrong choice, with so much at stake.
http://brander.ca/c19#lausd
Nobody wants to write that, even think that. But she had lost her cognitive abilities by then. It happened slowly, over a few years.
The physical and mental health went down apace with each other. The leukemia had come back, after 15 years survived, and soon enough every cold, and touch of flu, was a life-or-death crisis. After a few of them, the last dregs of her ability to consent were carefully probed by those medical ethics specialists, who concluded she was indeed able to sign a DNR for the next time.
Then the next time, bizarrely, did not come for over a year. She was finally moved to one of those care-homes, from the hospital. She sank slowly into a state where she barely knew where she was, or what day it was. She recognized family to the end, but just. When Influenza A of 2003 swept her away, we grieved, but the relief was there, too, unspoken.
Michael Crichton, Harvard Medical grad, wrote once about how colds and flus, that give the elderly terminal pneumonia, have been used for generations by doctors, nurses, and family to quietly provide an escape. They'd just..."leave the window open" for cold draughts. None of us could have done that, to Mom; she was in no pain, and nearly every visit brought some tiny flash, of who she'd been, to light; we'd have fought to give her another day.
I have to admit, though, because of Influenza A, Mom died painlessly before she'd reached...the worse condition of most of the other people in the care home.
The visits got me quite aquainted with the degrees of it. The ones who needed to be fed; the ones who just stared at the opposite wall, all day, would not acknowledge a friendly "hello", though I always tried.
People this far gone from the human community received professional care; all the care-aides do try to engage them, every day, however unrewarded. The place, by the way, was clean, well-run. Mom liked the food. When you hear about hellhole care-homes in Ontario or Quebec, at least be aware that the funds allocated do allow for better. (At least in Alberta...)
These people, however, are the truly forgotten, save by those paid to be attentive. For many, their families have given up, barely visit, forget. It's hardly surprising that the government took the same attitude. Nobody sat around in a Star Chamber, rubbing their hands with unholy glee, that the residents could finally be disposed of. When the pandemic hit, though, the care-homes were just...forgotten. That's the plight of the living dead, who breathe, but don't chat with visitors. They just get... forgotten.
If you gave Legault and Ford a warning back through time, that they could have saved 5000 lives with some masks and added staff (like Bonnie Henry did), they'd have done it. There was no malice; they just forgot. Oops.
Well, that's my story and my theory. My message today, though, is that everybody should listen to all of the Canadaland podcasts about the Pandemic. They tackle the care-home story head-on. They're all good, but if you must cut the time to the bone, above all, do not miss Episode #2, "When the Plague Came" and then take hope and inspiration from the incredible "happy ending" (sort of) in Episode #12 - The Most Dangerous Story. "Dangerous", only to the intolerable status quo.
It's the best thing Canadaland has done, and that's saying a great deal. I love Canadaland because I often disagree with their take, but I always respect it and want to hear it.
http://brander.ca/c19#carehomes
Two billion over five million is $400 a student, or eighty tests, around two tests per week, per student, for a whole school year.
But, hey, it's Mr. Trudeau that has all the parents that are "extremely worried". I'm just pointing out the very obvious: Combined with some at-home days, this alone is enough to test every kid every second at-school day. The provinces could easily raise enough more to make it every day, if that were needed.
Every day, while reassuring and affordable, might not prevent that many more infections that every other day. The University of Arizona just stopped an outbreak by testing the sewage outflow from dorms. A positive on the overall dorm got 311 residents tested, two quarantined - before anybody else caught it. Victory! It just needed some pro-active testing.
So does Canada. We need pro-active testing. Pro-active testing is affordable.
It doesn't even take long division to prove it.
http://brander.ca/c19#test5
The "GOP Effect" is to make barely competent government look good. If your government is in proximity to Americas, at all judged alongside them, your government probably shines by comparison!
Canada, on the whole, has done pretty well with the pandemic, but only pretty well. Dedicated CCCC readers know that while much of the country has done as well as South Korea and other pandemic stars, Ontario and Quebec (especially) have done nearly as badly as America. But right there, I used "America" as a standard for "bad"; everybody is...and we're right next door.
Comically, it's Doug Ford that really rubs it in for the American GOP. Ford, as noted two weeks ago on CCCC, is as similar to the American GOP as we have in Canada, perhaps as we've ever had: political neophyte who barely understands the machine he's operating, dismissive of government itself, a chaser of political shows, not political results. But, given the challenge, he didn't have to do that much, actually, except show humility and step aside in favour of the advice of public health experts. Once he started doing that, Ontario's response improved quickly, and his earliest opposition to lockdowns is already forgotten.
The GOP was probably headed for defeat this November without the pandemic, anyway, said the numbers. But, like Doug Ford, and Justin Trudeau, they could actually have had a boost from the pandemic, without heroics or genius breakthroughs: they just had to follow expert advice. They probably could have won the 2020 election on the strength of their response!
Instead, the defeat will be much larger. (I know, in American politics, that means they'll lose by 4% instead of 2%.) And Peter Navarro's arch-nemesis, the Liberal Party of Canada, will benefit from their folly.
They will blame the pandemic, obviously; that they would have won without the monstrous bad luck to have a huge natural disaster befall their country on their watch. Doug Ford, riding high, will be visible proof of where they might have been instead.
http://brander.ca/c19#gopeffect
This is again worldometers.info, which is compiled by volunteers from news reports around the world. Data from some corners of it trickles in, and there are places like Iran that occasionally emit news stories like "death toll actually three times higher than admitted", which nonetheless don't change the worldometers numbers, they aren't actual death reports. So it seemed wise to let a few weeks go by to be sure that new, sad, reports didn't come in, pushing the numbers back up again.
Well, adding up the whole planet, which again has nations just starting to have sharp increases, nations in a second wave, regions that are crushing the curve, or not...the grand sum total looks to be peaked and even declining slowly. The daily deaths curve has now followed it, (as they do, three weeks later).
It's not much - we're (knowingly, with records) losing 5600 humans per day this week, but it was nearly 5900 a few weeks ago. That's no big decrease, but the fact that it's going down rather than up, is huge.
Now, I'm just looking for good news about opening schools. For one thing, I'd like some news from recent news from Neustrelitz, that opened with testing, back in May.
http://brander.ca/c19#goodnews2
But, hang on a minute. The no-mourners funeral stories of April, have not yet ended. The Guardian did one
Further, in Britain, it continues to be a controversy that one official broke quarantine rules, then refused to resign over it. Public officials in democracies are not expected to openly break rules because of their high-status privilege; they're expected to model and exemplify the proper behaviour. That's a huge part of "Law and Order", demonstrating that the Laws and Regulations apply to the high and mighty - indeed, more so. Caesar's wife was expected not just to not have affairs, but to avoid even the appearance of having affairs.
It should be of the highest journalistic interest when a high official uses their status to dodge any societal expectations that apply to the rest of us. Instead, I find that all of the articles on the recent family funeral at the White House, simply mention: "The guest list was limited to about 150 people...Guests did not wear masks at the funeral, but they were given coronavirus tests beforehand".
Well, isn't that nice. How do the rest of us get to have 150-person funerals, and weddings, and barbeques, for that matter? How should the lady who wrote about the lonely funeral in The Guardian just yesterday get that? Maybe she should have run for office so that she could get around the restrictions on available testing, on good reasons for getting access to the scarce resource.
It's not like journalists have left the topic of special access to tests for gathering, entirely alone. Here's Fox News, of all the unlikely police of the plutocracy, with an article about parties in the Hamptons with rapid-testing for all. If you're of the set that says "It's only $500", then away you go with party season: testing in 30 minutes, in your car, then come on in. One of the many concierge doctors now making a fortune doing it, at least admits it's a little shame-worthy: "We've gone to these private, private, private events, where they have me sign a 'nothing you see in this house can be leaked' document," Rashid said. "This is still a party town."
So my post is not so much about that it happened, it's that there hasn't been a single article - unless Google is just not finding me the really rabid left-wing critics - noting that the White House simply ignored all the expectations and norms around this topic. Unlike the Hampton's partiers, they got off scot-free.
Somehow, I suspect that if a Democrat had done the same, they'd be all over it. And they'd demand to see all the emails.
http://brander.ca/c19#funeral
This kind of "masculinity" has been a liability in the modern world for generations now. It starts wars, prolongs wars, worsens wars. America was afraid to leave Vietnam, and later Iraq, for fear of "looking weak", and thousands died for nothing. Again, this year, thousands will die for nothing, because guys were afraid to look like they're afraid of catching a virus...or does this version of masculinity include being afraid to look like you care about other people catching it? "Not my problem, and it makes me look weak to look considerate"? Seriously? But I have a sinking feeling that's actually part of it.
We've had three seasons with the virus now: Winter, Spring, and Summer. The Fall is to be feared. If only we could leave this kind of masculine display behind in Season Three, like the Khalesi did.
http://brander.ca/c19#maskulinity
Just correcting a post from a week back, the American CDC actually agreed with the CCCC estimate of 190,000 deaths by Labour Day. The headlines the next day were a CDC prediction of 200,000. Headline writers take the top number if given a range: the CDC gave them "180,000 to 200,000", which is to say, agreed with me on 190,000.
Now that Labour Day is just 15 days away, the trends are leaning to just over 190,000 on worldomters, which is days ahead of the Johns Hopkins tracker. (Currently worldometers just cracked 180,000, whereas JH is still at 175,000 - about four days behind. Again, worldometers checks the news, JH awaits the public-health department reports to come in.) JH will be just under 190,000, I bet.
You won't get a single American Democratic Party member to say that it's a good thing for their campaign that dying in the hundreds per day, at least, will go on well into the fall. We just all know it's a truth. Any number that stops rising, stops being news, and they need it constantly in the news, because people want to forget it.
The United States is also bad at guerilla warfare. It's beaten them repeatedly now, when Vietnam should have caused their military to develop new strategies. The one generation Got It, but were all retired by the time they hit Iraq and got beaten by it again.
In the link above, historian Gwynne Dyer explains that the ancient principles were recently (1936) codified by Mao Tse Tung in his "Sixteen Character Formula", where a character is a word in Mandarin:
The Enemy advances, We retreat;
Metaphorically at least, fighting the virus is like fighting guerillas, or fighting mosquitos: you can kill any one, but the rest keep coming back, pressing you constantly like a gas. When you wear down - when you just have to go do something "normal", in this case - it catches you.
The Americans seem to be particularly susceptible, frustrated by conflict that isn't just out in the open, kick-em-in-the-teeth. I keep thinking of Bill Paxton's famous line in Aliens: "Is this gonna be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?". Americans want a "stand-up fight". That's why they're so unique in their mask-issues: they want to face it, literally, not run from it.
There's a whole masculinity issue going on there, but that will wait for tomorrow. On Tuesday, I have a funeral to complain about, so that I can await Wednesday for certainty that I can write about the overall global case-load. I should be able to avoid even thinking about care-homes until Thursday. Whew.
http://brander.ca/c19#guerilla
I know that health authorities are just feeling their way along, and trying not to become The Enemy Oppressor - as they have been since March, in much of the USA. However, there's an obvious dissonance between the previous problems that justified lockdown to keep the disease from skyrocketing, versus worse problems today - that only justify the same fine as you get for a minor level of speeding.
I have a P.R. angle to suggest for BC, at least, since the beloved Dr. Bonnie has been taking a little massively-deserved vacation. I would like to suggest that she come back to the podium next week and take the attitude of a Mom that "...left you kids alone for two lousy weeks and this is the house I come back to? What were you thinking? Do you want me to send you all back to your homes with no dessert? Don't make me come over there, house parties!"
Even if it didn't work, man, I could use the laugh.
http://brander.ca/c19#whynolockdown
In short, they figure on having as many as 400 teachers down with COVID-19 at any given time. Granted, "down with" can include "caring for a family member", but as most people get only cold symptoms (maybe a bad cold), the majority would actually be sick. That's "at any time" so the total they are planning to see catch COVID-19, and go on teaching anyway, is more; over a term, that rate could see a couple of 400-teacher cohorts go away for a month, maybe a thousand sick.
For one thing, statistically, if even 400 catch it, that's four dead. And a dozen-odd more with bodily injuries for life.
There are just the 14,000 total staff, for 125,000 students; subtracting for maintenance and cleaning, I think that means about 10,000 classroom teachers. (Rarely that many at any moment; after all, it would mean just 13 kids per class. Teachers get a certain amount of downtime periods, I guess.)
But the upshot is that they are preparing to see several percent of their staff get the virus, be at mortal risk. Currently, just 0.3% of Albertans have caught it, confirmed, though that means over 1% really have.
There's no other way to read this: they expect for teachers to take a risk several times as high as the rest of the Alberta population, to sacrifice themselves for the economic (mostly) and educational (somewhat) benefit of all.
The risk this implies for the students, and their families, in turn, is obvious.
The teachers and parents will either put up with this plan, or not. I would not.
Testing. It's possible, it would hugely mitigate the risk, I don't know what else to say.
http://brander.ca/c19#schoolfail
So far, dozens of schools had to close within hours of re-opening, and that's in South Korea(!) In Israel, school was a "disaster". CCCC already noted Etowah High School in Georgia. They did not even follow common sense, but I'm sure that South Korea and Israel were all masked and distanced.
Just in time, science has weighed in, via two studies in The Lancet, no less. Let me attempt actual journalism by claiming to have found the key sentence in that article. Writing about school attendance in NSW, Australia, where they found 27 cases in the school, and contact-traced the bejeezus out of them all, finding:
Barely 1% of the people that had come close enough to the infectees to catch it, actually did.
But the even-simpler upshot being reported by CTV and other media is that testing and contact tracing are it. The headline is that schools can re-open with just those two things. Masks and distance will cut down the testing and contact-tracing, of course, but I bet it's only by half, or so.
BC has over 600,000 students; that's 20,000 school rooms of 30 kids each. Just guessing from horseback, does less than 2000 contact-tracers, one per 300 kids, sound like enough? It would be best if there was one per school, at least. 20,000 schoolrooms sounds like the magnitude of the testing should be tens of thousands per day. In the "Testing, Testing" post, I wished for every kid tested every day, which would, I think, get all parents to trust the system and actually send in their kids, whereas right now, it's about 60% planning to. But even 5% of my wishes, for 60% of the kids, that's one test per classroom per day, 20,000 tests. BC tested 2,569 people yesterday. They need to up that game by ten-fold.
August 21 is officially the last third of the month, "Late August", and a month from the first day of Fall, and they've known of this need for months; technologies that can provide it have been coming out all that time. We need an answer for their testing plan.
http://brander.ca/c19#school
And here's my (less scientific) addition to that graph: most workers in "Leisure, Hospitality, and Retail", aren't the people who can afford homes to start with. Most of those are bad jobs, particuarly the jobs that were laid off. The hotel manager is still in his office. It's the maids who are all laid off, and they're renters, not buyers. Same with wait staff and counter clerks in stores. It's the restaurant managers and store owners that can afford homes, and they have paycheques, if the business is owned by a large corporation, as most are these days.
There are many warnings that worse economic times are to come. You have to rigidly separate your American and Canadian news at that point, of course, as they are the ones cutting benefits needed to hold up spending; cutting aid to tax-broke states and causing public-sector layoffs. Canada seems to be aiming higher.
Our economy is not that badly battered; if the vaccines do work, and hold down most of the damage to one year and a bit, it's not crazy to sign a mortgage.
The pent-up demand for housing is real confidence. If you didn't lose your job this year of all years, surely you feel safe! There's all those people working in (booming) high-tech world, or in construction for that matter: construction paused for a few weeks back in the spring, but I haven't seen an idle construction site in months.
As they say in money, there are strong fundamentals out there. Which also means: no government should be afraid of tapping we solvent citizens to pay for all this, as a recovery is navigated.
http://brander.ca/c19#employment
My diligence was not matched by anybody else; media dropped the story after its 15 minutes. They would have gone back, I'm sure, if Dr. Hebert's idea had been taken up by any provincial health authorities, but I was pretty sure none of them would. I'd had some experience with what happens when a guy from outside a bureaucracy, proposes something that, if it works, will have shown up their own approved methods. They smile and nod and promise to get back, and never do.
So, finally, last week, I just wrote Dr. Hebert, not expecting a reply. He replied promptly and courteously. He asked that his answer to my questions, about how his idea fared with the public health bureaucracies, be off the record. Suffice to say that the only news he had for me was that private interests were interested, and he gave me a link to this Op-Ed he co-wrote for a consulting firm's newsletter.
Which, to me, means that you would be wasting your breath to call your public health authority about testing: they have their own system they know, they are not about to embrace any newfangled ones, and if that means bad service, well, you've already had five months of really bad testing services, so they presume their jobs are safe with that service level.
I would instead counsel readers to call their local school board and ask if your child is safe without daily testing, which is possible and affordable. Ask why they haven't looked into commercial offerings that we're all hearing about.
Such as this one, that Dr. Hebert recommended I look at. The company is Ginkgo Bioworks. The link is to a longish article in The Atlantic, about a system where you literally just need a strip of paper and fifteen (15) minutes. The sacrifice is accuracy, the false-results (either positive or negative). The health bureaucracies are steeped in medical traditions, where false results are really terrible things, incompetent and unprofessional practice, intolerable. For testing every kid every day, with a followup test that's more accurate if positive, much higher falsity rates can be tolerated.
The health systems all have a physician/patient outlook; physicians owe their patients high degrees of certainty about their diagnoses, because "first, do no harm" requires being sure of what needs treatment. But a population fighting a pandemic needs a different outlook, where letting a few infections slip past you is certain, and a fair price to pay if you do catch several times as many. False positives, too, are acceptable, especially for kids that lose only a few days of school, while a live-virus test result comes in. Still: no high-volume but lower-accuracy solution has been approved by public health systems, in five months.
So forget them. Call your school board. Talk it over with the teacher and point out that their own health may depend on convincing the upper levels to call up one of these companies.
I just don't want school opening to be a disaster, as seems likely. Let's demand cheap, massive testing.
http://brander.ca/c19#schooltests
There's not much more to say about the United States, of such concern; it really seems to me that they've baked-in a terrible end to summer. There's exactly five weeks left of summer, today, and the cases they already have logged, the infection rate that they could hardly stop on a dime now, sentences them to the CDC's "200,000 by Labour Day", and ten or twenty thousand beyond that in September. Like the care-homes, the mind skitters away to any other topic.
Alberta and BC have both developed a system where they don't report on the weekends, and indeed, they wait well into Monday before just giving the figures for three days. So we find out Mondays if the case-count is going up fast or slow. Last Monday was 131 in BC, for three days, which was Not Good (for us). This weekend, we've been treated to more pictures of teens cavorting in the streets, though actually what I saw on TV didn't look all that bad; it was the house-parties that apparently preceeded it that have me figuring today will again be in the 3 figures, maybe over 150.
Alberta was twice as bad, as they generally have been, since it was 20-25/day for BC and 40-50/day for Alberta, back in those happy days of early July. They were 257 last Monday. So I'm just waiting to see if the two provinces are still getting worse every week, imperiling my own travel plans (and school!) or if we've turned it around by just putting warnings on TV. (There have been hardly any tickets or closures; we really do depend upon good attitudes.)
But then, sitting around waiting is the very core of the fight against a pandemic. You'd think I'd be more used to it by now.
I'm not.
http://brander.ca/c19#waiting
It's 30-plus years back, now, to the start of my own career, when Tom Peters' "In Search of Excellence" had a dozen more authors trying to become the fad management inspiration book. Most were about (a) employee "empowerment", of which there is no sign so far; and (b) communication, communication, communication. Which generally stressed that most communication is not even verbal.
Skype-type systems are actually pretty poor at passing along that non-verbal stuff, too; they don't show most of the body - and the body position is constrained by the act of using it, whereas people in real presence look around the room, move their chairs, stand up. You can hardly see what people's hands are doing. And besides, I'm told that nearly all meetings are microphone-only, we don't want to see your workout T-shirt.
But it's more than the communication itself; it's the chance encounters at coffee, or the stop by your desk on the way elsewhere, and the overheard conversation at the next desk that you have to join.
One of the early-90s management articles told a story about a workplace where only the women secretaries (the story dates earlier to the 80s) were up on all the news. Again and again, executives would tell of only hearing about some new development or problem from their secretary. The consultant investigated, and it turned out that the women got together to smoke (again, the story is dated) and gossip. It passed information through the silos, across divisions, across whole departmental lines. Their bosses did not.
This stuff was then used to help sell the "open plan" to us employees. What really sold the open plan, to the bosses, was that it reduced us from 10x10 with walls, to 8x8 without, halving the space costs per employee - just as real estate soared. We were told, of course, that the open plan would "facilitate" all those random encounters that would just magically make the workplace, umm, work better.
http://brander.ca/c19#droparound
I've been irritated for some weeks because I either changed some setting inadvertently, or, far more likely, Google just decided I would like to be asked, after every visit everywhere, if I'd like to give a review on the store, library, or even beach I just visited. A constant reminder that they're watching me, and storing everything. And selling it.
I could turn off the Google service that lets me find my phone if I lose it; or possibly find one that didn't take that also as permission to track and sell me; I should, but fact is, I have no secrets worth keeping, and doing it for the value of the "boycott", the #resistance, is entirely pointless. (Excellent article link by Zephyr Teachout.)
While it's weaker on search functions, for a nice map, I actually use OpenStreetMap.org most of the time. You can download maps for everywhere if you pay a couple of bucks, one time.
I recommend the fine podcast, Canadaland, OPPO on the subject. Host Sandy Garossino says flat out that she's more afraid of the private companies, and co-host Jen Gerson closely questions Christopher Parsons of The Citizenlab at the Munk School, U of T. Chris goes over the open-source application's verification, how little it collects on you, how it doesn't report; it just provides anybody with exposure the option to let everybody who's been near them for 15 minutes to be aware of it.
That's about it. It won't help much, but it sure won't hurt, and it might help you, specifically; with zero cost and risk. It hasn't become usable in BC yet, but Alberta will be, soon. It would work best if a lot of people use it, so please do.
http://brander.ca/c19#app
Florida, for instance, at left, has been coming down off a peak at over 10,000 cases/day 20 days back, seems to be not falling the last few days at 6500.
What I'm going to do is really rough, because it would be wrong to take each day's infection rate, multiply by the case-fatality rate, and claim that exactly 20 days later, that many will die. They don't die on the "average day", of course. All I'm going to do is take the "average of the 7-day averages" and attempt to get a total. Further, the way I'll average is just to look at it as a straight line down and pick the number 1700/day.
It gets worse: Texas had the highest case-fatality rate, at 2.3%. So 7500 X 0.023 gives us an average death-rate of 172/day for the next 20 days. It dropped, a week back from over 200 to about 180/day, so let's go with it.
So what does it all add up to? Texas, as mentioned, 172/day. California, above, is that 7000 X 1.4%, equals about 100/day. Florida, go with 8500 X 1.5% for 130/day, and Arizona, just 1500 X 2.2% is 33/day. Arizona has done so well that I'd find more trouble looking at Georgia, currently at 3500/day at 70+ deaths. Their case-count has hardly gone down in the whole three weeks, so we can just assign them 70 deaths/day for weeks to come.
It all adds up to the next 20 days clocking in at 500 deaths/day for just those five states, or 10,000 people. With the total official deaths just passing 170,000 today, we'll see it up to 180,000 Labour Day, just from these five states alone. The rest of the country is as much again, so I'm guessing for about 190,000 grand total. (That last sentence was quite the hand-wave; but my impression, looking at the next dozen states down the list from these five, is that only a few are really crushing that curve; and there are large states like Illinois that still have that second curve increasing. This is really why epidemiologists are giving quotes like "we're losing".)
When they'll hit the round number of 200,000 that will make for a lot of headlines, is hardly even guesswork; it all depends on whether these three weeks of continued deaths at 1000/day for their nation smarten anybody up; the death-rate could be plummeting by Labour Day.
This being America in 2020, Topic "A" in their news is of course the election; and the probability of the election not being about "over 200,000 dead", by late-October, is not in the cards. That number is all but guaranteed, given that Americans show no signs of sudden, dramatic behaviour flips; it's just a question of September vs some time in October. The very likely consequences of school-openings suggest September.
American Carnage, indeed.
http://brander.ca/c19#labourday
I've never been that outraged by the video of drum circles and parties; they're generally shot outdoors, where the video doesn't require permission. I've thought it just as likely that the "parties" causing transmissions were a dozen middle-aged people having a dinner party, in a too-small living room, and laughing too much over the wine.
Apparently, they aren't so wrong this time: Dr. Henry is saying the appalling red line at left is from "a majority of cases are linked to young people in the Lower Mainland, with exposure coming from events in the community."
My fears that the August long weekend would bring a jump in transmission, is fully justified. Alberta, meanwhile, "has the highest per capital cases in Canada", and the secondary reason for BC's woes is " a significant number of cases are also linked to travel from outside the province".
What a perfect situation for both provinces to decide to tell us we can't have guests from Alberta in two weeks, or for me to visit family there a few weeks later. I'm about to be screwed because people imagine they can party-hearty, and I object.
Everybody wants to party now and then, and normally, you're being an old, mean, curmudgeon jerk to call the cops on them. Nobody wants to be that guy. Please do it anyway, if you hear a party. If you can hear it, it's loud, and it's making people shout over it. That's the problem.
Do not throw a Molotov cocktail, even though would be much more effective, much more quickly. It is not legal. It's not worth the risk of hurting somebody. Just almost.
When I compare the last two weeks of statistics to those during the BLM protests, I have to recommend that all those restless "young people" burn off that party energy by going to a march instead. They're provably far safer!
http://brander.ca/c19#parties
If you take the "worldometers.info" dashboard, we hit the number yesterday, when I'd thought they could avoid it. I shouldn't have been so idealistic, thinking that the beating they took in April and May would have smartened them up. The trouble they had in Iraq, since about 2004, didn't smarten them up enough to leave, not even in ten more years.
American sheriffs are unique in law enforcement: separately elected, and each one a little empire-builder than runs his own jail system, not just cops. Our "wild west" got federal paramiltary law-enforcement before a whole dozen settlers had broken ground. In any event, you won't see any Canadian cops inventing their own public-health policies, based on their cable-TV news habits or anything else.
The news comes as Florida notched up its highest daily death toll ever. There are no words.
Georgia had 2,258 new cases that day, bringing the total of active cases to 158,403. BC and Alberta, with the same population as Georgia between them, have 1,400 active cases total. Our high-school kids would have 1% the infection risk, and yet we worry, and should. Etowah, obviously soon had 17 cases, and 300 in quarantine, an eighth of the school. It took less than a week! I'd like to see a new school photo of all the school board members in dunce caps.
I'd like to end by saying "at least we won't see all this plus WW1, another 116,000 dead". But I was wrong last time. Back to Canadian news tomorrow; American news is bad for my mental health. "Hell is the impossibility of reason."
http://brander.ca/c19#167013
We've heard lots at this point: every kid spitting into the same test tube, and any positive meaning the whole class got separate tests, that was one. Ever hear about it again? Your kid's school planning on it?
I haven't heard from any parent about any testing at all; the stories run the other way.
Hey, how about some "Canadian Testing Nostalgia"? Let's stroll down Memory Lane to the
Much better off, beating out Spartan for contracts, are the test kits from Precision Biomonitoring in Guelph
One guy has proposed a solution. He got one story in the national press, and even this blog has let his story lie for two months: Paul Hebert of the U. Guelph, Director of the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics. It's three months since his day in the news, and two months since I followed up, with a sigh, that he was unlikely to be tapped for the problem.
My very cynical belief, coming from years of it happening to me at work, is that he's coming from a different bioscience; he's a nature biologist, not a physician, and he strolls into their turf, says he has a better way, a system that will indeed handle literally millions of test results, automatically, for a buck a test. For a scientist, he's a hero. For a bureaucracy, he's a Barbarian at the Gate; I'm sure that every device of bureaucracy was employed to put him off, delay, question, raise "concerns", and, not to put too fine a point on it, deny him all resources and access to develop his idea. There are still zero further stories in the news.
In some ways, the fate of Spartan Bioscience is scandalous enough: why didn't the health care bureaucracy step in to ensure they had massive resources to get around their test-kit problem? Why leave a very small company twisting in the wind, drying up their own limited resources as they frantically try to solve it? This isn't business as usual: we need to open those schools, and it's looking like it. Will. Not. Work.
Without a lot of testing.
http://brander.ca/c19#nocantests
Well, this one will cheer you up, if you like schadenfreude (I just spelled that from memory, in an editor with no spell-check, and I'm going with it) and the traditional Canadian pastime of "how we're better than the US, at least".
They have a page up that lets you rate US states and Canadian provinces all on one metric, see who's #1 and who's number #64. (50 states, DC, 10 provinces, 3 territories).
I have previously written about how diverse Canada's results really are: Quebec terrible, Ontario poor, the rest of us close to South Korea. I did something quite similar to this with "If Provinces Were Countries" on July 8th, with Quebec making the overall USA look good, and Ontario about half as bad. Since then, the USA overall has gone from 405 dead/million to 500, but Quebec is still at 650. Canada's overall number of 238 dead/million is only half as bad as the USA, now.
For "current cases", unsurprisingly, the whole of Canada is not just down below the "bad" states, but nearly every state. For "current" cases, Alberta, the Worst Place in Canada for that just now, it is between America's Vermont, #50, and Maine, #51. It's only worse than one US state.
For "peak cases" we can finally highlight the failure and perfidy of Quebec and their execrable care-homes (so bad, they are slightly more execrable than all the other Canadian care-homes). Quebec clocks in for "peak cases" just below #38, Indiana, very slightly worse than Pennsylvania, Washington, Minnesota, Montana, significantly worse than 8 others. Indeed, Alberta now shares the shame of being worse than one US state for peak-cases (Maine again, the best American pandemic fighter. Of course, they lack Calgary's giant airport, which handles more paassengers every month than Bangor and Portland handle in a year.)
Or, in short, I'm dunking, here: the news about our increasing cases is depressing, and I'm engaging in the low practice of snarking at somebody else. Mostly, though, it's a powerful reminder than Things Can Always Get Worse. In the USA, they have gotten worse the whole time; the lull in cases and deaths for a month there was just the gathering of the next storm, and some think a third one is coming in their rural midwest. Let us in Canada look hard at that CTV page and count our blessings.
http://brander.ca/c19#ctv
I had been assuming that deaths would peak about three weeks after "cases" did... with "cases" in quotes because a Texas made clear, "case" is a social construct that is different in different states. (And provinces, and countries).
Well, there's little doubt left with another whole week of stats in: the fatality numbers in Florida, Arizona, and Texas have all peaked and begun to decline; California very likely so. And that's just over two weeks since cases did so.
The other number you can estimate when you see both peaks, is the case-fatality rate, mentioned on July 31. Which makes it time to confess that I sometimes don't have the greatest topic handy, despite an OCD need to post every day. As interviewer Axios interviewer Jonathan Swan instructed his subject the other day, the case-fatality rate is not that important compared to the actual deaths-per-million that is the relevant metric for this blog. "Case-fatality rates" just tell you how many of those social-constructs you're creating by testing and symptoms record-keeping.
The probably-pointless case-fatality rates probably say more about the states' medical systems, and probability that a patient will even come in to become a "case", than they do about anything else. California, by the way, with its largest-population and half the peak death rates of Florida and Texas, is way ahead in the Covid Cup ranking of deaths-per-million; it's barely worse than Canada as a whole, which is to say, way better than Ontario.
But the upshot is not the number-wrangling: the upshot is that America's (not really) "second wave" has just crested a week ago (you can only see it in the rear-view mirror, which is why I waited to today to be sure), and perhaps they, and we, can learn from it. If not, then it's going to be a hard Fall.
http://brander.ca/c19#peaked
For me, personally, the context is that my wife is about to come back from a visit to family in Alberta. There's no point in me going for a month now, to space out the visits; we have guests coming from Alberta right after Labour Day, so I'd figured mid-September or so. Right when the model says that they'll lock us all down again as they admit the curve is going exponential again.
Can we NOT do that? We can still pull these chestnuts from the fire, we can still turn it around. Let's let this rash of headlines be a warning to populace and police alike. We have to get serious.
http://brander.ca/c19#fail
But it's not about the dumbness of the kids and teachers, having no masks, or the already-over story about the student being suspended for publishing the photo (though that was funny).
It's about something much, much dumber than that.
They have this risk because they can't even stretch their tiny minds to the smallest change that costs zero money, zero infrastructure, nothing but making a few announcements:
Done, the hallways have been 83% emptied on any given five-minute period of changeover, and kids get five minutes of free reading time or something at the start or end of each class.
They couldn't even think of that. Man, that's limited bureaucratic thinking that really resists change, when you want your kids so very regimented that they all have to do the exact same thing at the exact same time, no matter what.
As for the no-masks, that's just good 'ol Georgia-grade Republican Insanity, expressed in the school system, as the Superintendent Brian Otott says:
I bet the schools of Georgia never took that attitude to any other item of student's clothing, ever. Certainly not to short skirts or revealing tank-tops. Certainly not to T-shirts with obscenities on them. If a kid isn't wearing to the school dress code, they get sent home, that was always the deal. Of course it would work here.
The superintendent is just afraid of backlash, loud crazy-talk backlash, and is taking a chicken's way out that will harm his charges.
But still, the dumbness of risking hundreds of infections because you can't move a schedule by five minutes is really sticking with me.
Wow.
http://brander.ca/c19#schooldazed
It's the parents everybody is actually more worried about. If the schools don't do their "side-effect" function of being day-cares, the parents can't work. Some creative people with good family and social networks will find solutions: if four friends have seven kids and three jobs between them, they can form one big four-family bubble, and hand the kids over to the one with no job every day. But I doubt even half the families will find such a happy arrangement.
What I don't see anybody admitting are two things:
Spreading out kids into classes of 15 and less means more people than we can drum up, even calling upon teachers who've left or retired, nearly-finished education students, and so forth. At some point, we'll be asking people without any kind of teaching license or qualifications to, if not teach the kids, keep them amused - and distant.
We can avoid calling them day-cares; the kids would get a mix of qualified teachers giving them useful instruction, and hastily-hired daycare workers that will show them educational video, and have them play games, and run around as much as possible, outdoors as much as possible. In some situations, the mix might only be 30% teacher.
That would still be better than the "distance learning" experiences I've seen had by the 7-, 9-, and 12-year-old I've been Skype-reading to for three months. For single-digit-aged kids, almost any adult in actual presence is going to get more teaching done than a qualified teacher Zooming you for an hour a day.
Alas, this post is hopeless. There's nothing difficult these ideas, but there is no work being done on it. The one link, to the word "theatres" above, is to what will be a failed offer of a very good idea: a movie theatre for 300 would allow 30 or more in class to stay 2m apart. And what a whiteboard! But, the article says, "no area schools have taken [him] up on the offer". They won't. It's too radical, it requires organization, initiative, sudden change - and large bureaucracies suck at that.
None of the other ideas, like malls and conference centres, are even being discussed; all the news is about the necessity, and impossibility, of re-opening schools, with nobody even thinking laterally.
Certainly, it would take a lot of organizing; you'd have to hire as many "teachers" again as we already have. With 5 million kids in school, Canada would need another 150,000 kid-supervisors to get the group-size per adult down to 15. Fortunately, we have millions out of work. Partial re-opening added nearly a million jobs back just in June; 150,000 is not actually that big a societal shift. But it's not even being discussed in the news.
That's just altering the location of schooling. Admitting that schooling is day-care, hiring to suit, is not going to happen from a modern school board. A shame; it's not an embarrassing admission. Schooling is genuinely valuable and a necessity for a modern citizen; it's just, also, day-care.
And it turns out that while schooling is an essential service for the child, in the long run, the day-care is the essential service for society. Next month.
http://brander.ca/c19#daycare
The way that American craziness sucks in their own news media was best lampooned by economist/professor/Nobelist Paul Krugman, who's basically had a second career as an economic-science-explainer, repeating the same basic facts for decades, as the American right wing gaslights away. He said that if the Republicans were to come out foursquare for the Flat Earth Theory, and Democrats stuck to the 3-dimensional globe, the New York Times headline would be "Parties Disagree on Shape of Earth".
The "dispute" only exists because the Republicans wanted to keep a leash on the population, a leash with a choke-chain. Renewing it shouldn't be needed at all, and so the renewal should be automatic. Our right-wing can see that, because, while they're not crazy like Americans; it's kind of that simple. If you had to pick a Canadian politician closest to the current American adminstration, you'd go straight to never-in-office-before, populist, anti-immigrant, hard-right-wing (for Canada) Doug Ford, of course. And here are your Doug Ford headlines today:
This, despite Doug Ford being the unquestioned Remedial Reading Class of Canadian Premiers. Doug Ford is a nitwit; a dummy; and a serious jerk who's done extraordinary damage to the Ontario economy, environment, and governance.
Still, even Doug Ford can understand that people need to eat, and pay rent, and that the economy currently can not employ everybody it normally does. Even he understands that the best thing to keep even more businesses from going broke, is to give the jobless enough money to spend in those businesses. He may have a friend who read a Paul Krugman column, or something. Or another who advised him how to not be lynched; because this is Canada, and we aren't crazy, and there are limits to how crazy we let our politicians be.
I read the American headlines, and I'm so proud to be Canadian.
http://brander.ca/c19#nothard
So while I bite my nails, which I will probably be biting for weeks yet, as we find out whether this very holiday has handed the enemy another win, I'm looking for some good news. I hardly dare look for it in the USA, though some of their stats hint that maybe their dying is already cresting, instead of increasing for another week. That's only relatively good news; the pile of cases they have active already means that even the best news would be that they won't lose another 30,000 people in August, just in the mid-twenties.
But I did just spot something that may be a reporting glitch, or a temporary pause, but I'll take it. As much discussed here, the world as a whole is still in a first wave. When one nation crushes a curve, two more have their first increases, like South Africa, covered two days ago, and the world count of cases continues up an exponential curve.
Maybe we're finally getting a grip on it, planet-wide. It would take a major research effort to really clarify that: so much bad reporting, when you get outside the world of advanced democracies. Iran's just been acknowledged to have three times the death toll it previously admitted. So how many cases, really?
But still, the whole worldometers graph has been done under those problems, and may be consistent relatively, if not absolutely. So, let's let some hope in, while we await the verdict on western Canada's August.
http://brander.ca/c19#goodnews
I wouldn't want to live in a nation where they can just march your whole family off at gunpoint. But when they march them off (with the guns only implicit, actually) to a hotel until they're sure they're all covid-negative, after any family member turns positive, we're forced to admit it seems to have worked.
The other is Vietnam, where again, the ability to lock down hamlets, with police, means they don't have to lock down whole provinces. But Vietnam is currently riding that tiger a bit askew, losing grip, in danger of falling off, and into one of those exponential curves.
Reminding us all again that world news sells poorly in American papers, the best coverage is in The Guardian. The Guardian, actually, deserves a real shout-out for all their overall virus coverage, it's been exemplary for both science-explainer stories, and world-news stories of the pandemic. It's got excellent coverage of the American political maunure-display, and indeed, catches the major stories from Canada. It's actually what we subscribe to, rather than either the Globe and Mail, or the National Post.
The Guardian reports that Vietnam, perhaps frustrated to have 15 local-transmission cases pop up after a victorious 100 days without any in the country, has hit the outbreak with a massive response. It happened in tourist-hotspot Danang, but they closed the city borders to tourists, evacuated 80,000 tourists that were already there, 14-day stay-home requirement. Foreign travelers have been banned, the few allowed in must quarantine.
Here's the thing about these draconian measures: they know the 15 cases are likely the tip of the iceberg. They don't know where the other 100+ are. So they are hitting the place they probably all are with a full-court press, and that may end it in 14 days flat. If it does, Vietnam will have successfully got back on top of the tiger, and can go back to what was an almost-normal lifestyle they had in mid-July.
Recall that this nation kicked the ass of the world's greatest military power, back when they were about 90% stoop-labour farmers. Now they have the capacity to promise testing for all the million people who live in Danang. Danang me, but that's impressive. My bet's on them.
http://brander.ca/c19#vietiger
Alas.
The price is shown at right: the streets of Victoria, totally empty as they go into total lockdown, don't leave your house. I hope this lets them get a grip on it again, back on the Tiger's back. They can do it, they already did; they just have to get back to the same attitudes and cautions that won it the first time.
South Africa had it under control for so long, hardly a case from February through early May - but when it started up the curve, they couldn't get it back down until it was 13,000 cases per day; the news articles are that they've hit a half-million cases: four times Canada's, though just double the population.
There's no moral fault to find with either country; staying on top of this tiger is just a very hard thing to do. It only fills me with caution and foreboding for Canada. I was depressed yesterday to learn that family who'd been thinking of coming out to see us in August are putting it off, as the rising case-counts in both Alberta and BC are worrying them. Despite how small our numbers are, the really depressing thing is that I find myself in agreement, after reading the news from the southern hemisphere this morning.
http://brander.ca/c19#tiger
Why am I on about this "first and second wave" topic? I think it means that we can learn. It's been a worry that the second wave in 1918 was much, much worse than the first. Multiple times as bad. Part of that was seasonal, more was errant stupidity: victory marches for the end of the war, aggressive re-openings.
The United States has been setting a real gold-standard for stupidity, the last quarter. (Brazil has been trying to be as bad, with great "success", but the US is held to a higher standard because of their education and higher technology.) If even they can learn from a first wave, and shorten, depress, and mitigate their second, then I have a lot of hope that we won't have a repeat of 1918. The risks will go way up in the fall; if even America can learn some caution and wisdom by then, it may not be such a bad fall.
It's a lovely, sunny day, here in Vancouver, but it's hard to appreciate it. I've spent too much time staring at dashboards, that say Texas hospitals have been filling a body bag every five minutes for the last 100 hours straight. I needed a cheery thought, and that's it for today.
http://brander.ca/c19#wave1grow
When the death-count crests, will tell us the new average time between case-confirmation and death-certificate, but it's probably still three weeks. Ish. If so, for Texas, the death-rate will still rise by another third over the next week, then crest itself...but crest over the course of more than a week of a death every few minutes. Because the deaths are spread out over many days - infect 1000 people in the same hour, and the ones that die, go between one week and over a month later. The centre of the widened curve will still likely be late next week. Ish. (For one thing, note that the case-rate turns upwards on June 15, the death-rate on July 5, three weeks later.)
But what fraction? At a guess, yesterday's 322 will climb past 400/day for many days.
That's about 4% of cases registered by the medical system, and making it into the stats, "proceeding to termination". (Now I know why doctors use phrases like that; for the emotional distance. This stuff is hard to even type.)
But, of course, "Case" is a social construct,
Likely, the social construct is pretty similar across the US, and many other advanced health-care systems, and it will give us some idea how bad the overall "second" wave in the USA is going to be.
At a bet, I don't see any hope of the USA missing 180,000 dead by the end of August, 200,000 by mid-fall. Nearly half of those are already baked-in, and for the rest, there are just too many people there that learn slowly and badly.
http://brander.ca/c19#texas
This may be where Canada has reached. With 67 million people, France's 500 cases per day would be 280/day in Canada. We had it down to that a few weeks back, and have been fighting back against a re-opening increase since then; some epidemiologists are blaming the whole crest on Canada Day parties.
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As the graph at left shows, it may, overall, have crested for Canada, and be on the way back down. Does it need to get down to that 280 again, same as France? It may need to go even lower, or it may be able to be higher, all depending on our testing/tracing capability. If ours were twice as good as France, we could track down twice as many cases-per-million per day; if worse, we can't afford even 280.
There may be some places in Canada reach a safe "steady state" situation, where they can re-open to whatever extent, and stay on top of the outbreaks that result. Other provinces may cycle up and down, continuing to "tweak", or even re-lockdown. Once there is a steady state, of any kind, economic efforts will prosper within its limits. Business abhors uncertainty; ordering supplies, making contracts: they all depend on being able to assume you won't be surprise locked-down next week. The more testing/tracing we can do, the higher level of steady-state we can support. The more carefully we re-open, with activities resumed, but great care exercised by everybody doing them, the more activity we can handle.
It's a great test of both individuals being responsible, and the nation's systems being good at their job. I have confidence we'll do well relative to others, but will it be good enough economically? I'm chewing fingernails.
http://brander.ca/c19#steadystate
More august journals, while they have referenced worldometers a few times, are now leaning to the Johns Hopkins project. This worthy is tracking cases and deaths through the medical system; worldometers volunteers are just reading the news, mostly - including local news that's quoting local medical sources. There's some lag in the (no doubt more carefully checked) Johns Hopkins figures, compared to worldometers:
Of course, anybody doing any reading at all about the subject knows that we really hit 150,000 many weeks ago, that the real death count will be known in a year or two, when those "excess deaths" are ascribed to the virus or not - statistically, at least, if not individually. Then we can have arguments about whether to include the people who died of other causes because they were afraid to get medical help this year. Depending on those efforts, the death count will more than double, most places.
CCCC, using worldometers, can pick today as another pointless number used only for dramatization: the long-predicted "153,032", which is the total American death toll for WW1 plus Korea. I got into adding up wars when the count first hit the death toll in Vietnam, to the tune of many headlines.
The worse-than-war headline that you might see - at the rate things are going, I'd say August 20 - is for 167,013: the total American losses in war, save for WW1, WW2 and the Civil War. In the meantime, here's an ugly little numbers game "victory" for you: my previous post, Number Games, was June 25, over a month back, and I predicted this "153,032" would be hit "in late July". Nailed that one, when the USA count was 126,726 on that day. It's not a good feeling, being able to predict 26,000 deaths in 34 days, with simple statistics.
http://brander.ca/c19#morenumbergame
On this scale, ten is a big number. Worst-performer Belgium peaked at 25/million/day, for a week, reaching worst-case-nation in less than a month of dying.
It really highlights how the USA is doing several times as badly as Canada and the EU, which are twice as bad as Germany alone. You can see the death rate come down for the USA, along with the rest of us, until mid-June, when it began to diverge, no longer falling, then in July start upwards again. A menu at left allows you to turn on and off any nations you're interested in.
And that's it for today, in late with just the one link to recommend. I'm awaiting the days news - both from the US, where it seems certain that the death rate will stay up, if not keep going further upwards; and from Canada. I'm crossing fingers and toes that I'll see that Alberta and BC have gotten a hold of their recent outbreaks; and hauled the case-count back down again. I have friends wanting to come out in a month, and don't want to call it off. So everybody get on it!
http://brander.ca/c19#data-explorer
Those wanting to dismiss the virus as a minor threat were handed two large gifts by its small mercies. The most serious threats fell upon the oldest and sickest, the most-easily-dismissed as "unworthy victims" (going soon anyway); and almost no threat fell upon those guaranteed to rend hearts as they die: children.
Even those in their twenties do some dying, on the roads, and of unusual diseases; but when the age drops below twenty, much less ten, every death is a news story.
It struck me as darkly, bitterly hilarious to see Fox news this morning agonizing over 3 weekend deaths in Chicago...while giving much less prominence to virus stories, certainly none noting that about two thousand Americans are dying of it every weekend these days. More than three in Chicago alone. Violence in Chicago is a story, a tragedy: disease deaths in Chicago, just statistics.
There are now over 300 children in hospital, just in Florida, increase of a third over last week.
Some of those are going to die, too, and more will be arriving at the hospital, and the morgues, for a month to come - even if the American Southerners do manage to change their attitudes and behaviour in this upcoming awful week.
The newspapers should not look away, should indeed use these little faces to gather those clicks. America needs shock treatment at this point, I don't know what else to recommend. At least, with their deaths, they might be heard - where learned scientists are not.
http://brander.ca/c19#largenumbers
I've been crying alarm for a week on this blog, deeply worried at the rising case-counts in both provinces...just as I send family off to travel between them.
But the response to the infections, in both provinces, has been...tweaks. No arm-waving about everybody wearing masks everywhere, no party-shaming and calls for officers to ticket, no bars closed down.
Dr. Henry issued the order: to limit the number of guests in vacation rentals and houseboats (exact number worked out with industry by her staff). Those infections in social gatherings? Dr. B's jackbooted thugs will now crack down on your bar, if... you let patrons move around the bar while drinking, or have self-service, or open the dance floor. She also said strongly that we should wear masks on public transit...but still didn't make it a legally-binding public health order.
This is, needless to say, nothing like a return to lockdown. Lockdown is for places that don't know what the problem is. You don't know where the virus is, so you have to shut down everything. What these tweaks tell us is that our recent spikes of infection have all been contact-traced, they have confidence they know why they happened, and they're closing the loopholes that let them through.
There's signs of the numbers already going down, though the weekend is the wrong time to say that; if they're still down next week, then my admiration will be vindicated. We can all go on vacation and go out, confident that a competent army of doctors and contact-tracers have got this, and stand on guard for us all.
http://brander.ca/c19#tweaks
My sense of alarm, of course, came from nothing I saw around me; no bodies in the street, nobody coughing; only in the newspapers, indeed only in specific stories you had to look for, was the looming danger apparent. It just felt real, from all my focus on it.
Today, CBC News has an excellent situation summary article consisting of interviews with several public health officers - every one female, by the way. Dr. Deena Henshaw of Alberta crystallized something for me when she said :
"I am concerned that people are perhaps relying too much on their own personal observations in their daily lives and feeling that this is something to not be too concerned about."
It reminds me of the jump that pilots make from VFR to IFR, from "Visual Flight Rules" to "Instrument Flight Rules".
VFR just means flying the plane based on what you see. IFR means it's actually a mistake to look out the window. You have to, have to trust your instruments.
And that's us...only our instruments are Deena Henshaw and Bonnie Henry. If they say we're flying into a mountain, then, dammit, we have to turn. Both provinces need a sense of alarm. Today is already late for it.
http://brander.ca/c19#ifr
They create such a contrast to tortured America, because they have opposite governments - perhaps Canada's most-conservative (if less nutty than Doug Ford) in Alberta, whereas left-wingery about environment and social-justice issues rules BC,the only province with elected Greens. But their moves on the pandemic have been so similar, and similarly effective.
So the smart public health officers of both provinces are given full support, by left and right alike, and both provinces have been making the same moves. They now face the real hard test of governance: can they get people to tighten up and push down their "re-opened" behaviour patterns to turn it back around, reduce case-rates again?
I'll get into that tomorrow. Today, it's really time for left-wingers to begrudge that Jason Kenney, and even Doug Ford (choke) are simply not idiots of the American conservative variety; they're only idiots in Canada, where we have much higher standards.
They're idiots about societal strategy: both cut education and health-care budgets. Ontario and Alberta would be better off this year if they hadn't; but at societal tactics, their responses have been good.
It hurt to write that, but it's true. American idiots have shown us that it really can always get worse. Relatively speaking, a Canadian idiot is a proud thing to be.
http://brander.ca/c19#turnaround
Everybody's seen those "highway roadside memorials", where a fatal crash has occurred. It would be even better if there were some lesser markers just indicating a crash, even if non-fatal. As it is, even fatal crashes can add up over time, and the group of markers becomes an automatic warning that this is a dangerous stretch of road, or a risky intersection.
So here's the new rule: if pandemic cases are traced back to your bar or store, you have to put up markers on the door, or front window, for a year; one per infection. (No special marker like a cross, either, should it later prove fatal; it's the infection that is of public interest.)
A friend noted that people who'd crowd into a bar right now will probably walk in past a cluster of infection-markers, too. But it's certainly worth a try. It just makes people think about it. My hope is that these superspreader events are happening because people are not thinking about it.
It's gentler than shutting the bar down, which is my first angry response. The calm, cautious, kind Dr. Henry doesn't want to do that, as "it just drives activity underground"; but surely the public has a right to know? The conduct of the establishment and its staff has a direct bearing on the risk of the customers.
Ask yourself, before stepping into any building, if you'd like to know whether anybody else was infected there. Wouldn't you?
http://brander.ca/c19#deathmarkers
It was 2009 before the guy in charge of it, Tom Ridge, flatly admitted he was pressured to raise the alert when votes were coming up. The whole thing was the Republican strategy of getting votes by inspiring fear in the populace: "Be afraid, be very afraid, and flock to us as your protectors". Of course, Ridge's admission was superfluous: It was already obvious from the timing of the alerts and the 2004 and 2006 elections.
And the old terror-alert system, intended not to help Americans, but to put them in a permanent state of caution, an occasional state of alarm and even fear, is exactly the thing we need for pandemics. For this threat, it's the perfect thing: a pandemic is precisely when you need everybody drawing back from nearly everybody else, with caution and concern for their wellbeing, and for the whole of society. Terrorist plots are best found by well-resourced professionals, but pandemics can be fought by everybody, and indeed must be fought by everybody. The terror-alert colours have finally found their job.
If the populace could just pull back a bit this week, avoid all those superspreading locations, put on masks in every enclosed space, just keep an extra half-pace of distance, for a week or so, the fire might start to die back down, get that Rt back down below one.
I feel like literally printing off copies of this joke and posting them around my neighbourhood. Editorial advice on the details is requested! More humour? Less? More actual fear? We need it to catch on, but also not to be laughed off; it's one of those jokes that also serious. Deadly serious.
http://brander.ca/c19#alertcolours
I've got a dental visit coming up in a few days; it's taken over 20 months for me to replace a dental implant that just...got loose and fell into the back of my throat one night, in my sleep. (I woke up and spat it out. Yikes.)
It'll be a relief, but I had a lot of sympathy for my dental team at the first visit to get a mold of the teeth around it; they could have done a spacewalk and not lost pressure, I think.
So, there's no way I'd subject myself to more of that just for cleaning and scaling. It'll wait. There will be lots of cleaning for them in 2021.
That's why I'm looking forward to the dentist's memoir of the pandemic, which, of course, will be called:
http://brander.ca/c19#plaque
I noticed a week back that the "daily new cases" chart, for most of the states being blamed for America's "Second Wave" of COVID-19 cases, are not, themselves, in their second wave. They are the states that missed the first wave entirely, back in April; it's just that their time has finally come, and they're seeing case-load increases like New York did back then.
I got tired of clicking my way two levels into the worldometers.info "USA" section, scrolling down, making a note, repeat 50 times, getting only three lists. It's good to compare just how U-shaped some states are, which are barely starting their second wave, like Illinois. So, skipping all detail, I was able to automate it and pull out just those graphs.
So, this is just a summarization service for worldometers.info, just as the whole CCCC blog is more-or-less an ad for them. (He said, hoping to avoid piracy complaints.)
The grid contains screen-snaps of the graphs, but if you click on the image, it opens the graph itself, with worldometers javascript code that lets you browse all the data.
The charts are in a grid that takes up the whole width of a widescreen monitor, so please, flip your browser to full-screen before you click on the chart image at upper left. You can also click on this link to a grid with all 50 US states in alphabetical order. Clicking on those images opens up chart after chart in separate browser tabs, so you can build a comparison group of several states you might be interested in.
So, the upshot is that, for July 17:
Late First Wave: 70% of deaths
It's all the same mistake, of course, in a way. The states now getting a "first wave" at last, made the same mistake as the actual second-wave states: they "re-opened" too far. They assumed, more easily than the second-wavers, that it was all a bad dream that's over now, and they could just head to the bar.
At least, it's a small minority of the deaths are coming from those who made the mistake after actually crushing a curve first; it makes the USA look less dumb that way. I thought I'd say something nice about them for a change.
They're in for a very bad next few weeks. How bad? This post used the sentence "Just 149 deaths that day", and it's going to get much worse.
http://brander.ca/c19#waves
But there are 51 states and district, it's a bunch of data, I'm still working on it today. But I can do a quick little post about that "death rate versus cases" question that continues to be an American administration claim that "all is well", making their spokesmen look like Kevin Bacon at the end of Animal House.
While I totally agree that the death-rate will now finally be rising because of the flood of new cases some weeks ago, I do disagree a bit with the aforementioned the Alexis Madrigal article in the Atlantic that argued the whole problem has merely been the long delay between "case" and "death". As mentioned before, I'm sure the actual gross mortality rate has dropped, likely because care-homes and retired seniors that can just stay home, are protecting themselves, lowering the age and vulnerability of the average infectee.
I'll be using huge amounts of data from worldometers in the USA analysis, and on my many trips there this week, it finally hit me that you can't imagine the death-rate hasn't dropped when you just look at the whole-planet gross figures for "cases" and deaths at left.
If the mortality rate were a constant, the two charts would have the same general shape. The deaths would be 1% the number of the cases (ish), and would trail the cases by 2 or more weeks, even over a month, but when the cases went up and down, the deaths would follow suit. They don't.
The case chart is just one upswinging curve. The curve up to the start of April seems crazy fast, because the first cases weren't even seen until testing got going in April; but then it's just the familiar exponential increase. The deaths, on the other hand, shoot way up, then decline, and only gently increase the last week or so, with the case-rate over twice what it was in the weeks when the death-rate peaked.
Over much of the world, the care-homes are being protected, and societies of every kind are keeping older people who can afford to stay home, home. We've known since Wuhan that the gross average mortality is around 1%, but when you compare verified "cases" to later deaths, it appears to be 2% and more...because we're missing half or more of the real cases. As we find more and more of them, and as we improve on Wuhan by protecting the old, it'll drop from that apparent 2% to the real 1%, and on down to a half-percent if the average age can drop even ten years.
That's nice, but it doesn't mean we're out the woods. The US, of course, is deeper in the woods than Hansel and Gretl, and some states are still heading deeper in.
http://brander.ca/c19#grosscompare
The metric is the "positivity rate", the number of tests that come back positve for virus. The WHO calculates that if you keep it below 5%, you're actually on top of all the outbreaks, moving fast enough around them that nearly everybody you test hasn't caught it yet, and the odds of virus escaping the contact-trace net are low.
American states have rates over 10%, some over 20%. Only Canada's worst-case scenario, Montreal, has jumped up to 3%, and merits more action. But my fears about Alberta/BC are quelled by our rates holding at 0.8%.
I have known enough about positivity to shut up for a month now about never seeing more than 35,000-40,000 tests per day on the canada.ca page; they've stayed at 0.7%-0.8% as a national average, for the whole time. They haven't been doing those 60,000 tests a day, that were claimed needed in May, because they'd be pointless, over 99.5% negative.
That doesn't mean the right thing to do, is anything but remain cautious, and perform your caution for others to see. I continue to think the greatest value of a mask is that performance, that declaration, that reminder to others, to be cautious of every other human body around them. I bought two masks in two days, both showy souvenirs of Grouse Mountain and the Aquarium, because they're a costume, a show, more than anything. I'm broadcasting my caution about catching a bad disease, and reminding others it's after them, too, when some would rather not think about it.
Two issues are settled in Canada, and controversial in the US: our universal health-insurance system, and masks. No surprise: masks are the new front-line of our health-care system. It's our attitudes that are protecting us. Keep up the good work.
http://brander.ca/c19#keymetric
Alas, there is a snake in our paradise, and it's not just that cliche' metaphor: it's still the virus, and it's growing...
A shout-out for my favourite source on Canadian pandemic stats, the CTV website. I've been watching there for the local summary, and it's been a disquieting couple of weeks. Just to zoom in on BC at left, we held it down to 10 cases/day for over a month, now it has doubled in 10 days. Alberta is worse, much worse, see below at right.
In short, both provinces are on an exponential curve that doubles every week. That's not as bad as the virus at its worst, when it was doubling twice a week, but it's still terrible.
Second waves happen because people think that low case-rates mean that all-is-well. They don't. Low growth-rates mean that. If you have a high growth-rate, the only difference between Alberta and Florida is time. Four doublings a month; in five weeks, Alberta could have 2720 new cases per day. For Alberta's population, that's Florida's case-rate today. Five Weeks!
Ground that is lost exponentially, has to be gained back arithmetically. It's far worse than breaking a diet to have an 800-calorie piece of cake and reflecting that you've just sentenced yourself to two days of 400-calories-per-day starvation just to get back to before the one piece of cake.
The theory went, that we now had testing and contact-tracing capability to stop new growth as re-opening caused cases to pop up. It hasn't been working to shrink cases for the last month in BC, and it needs to get a grip on this new growth quickly. Alberta is far more concerning still.
If testing and tracing cannot stop this, the time to lock back down is immediately, while it can still be brief. With rates still this low, a mere two-week lockdown would probably put a finger in the dike before the hole grows. Exponentially. (Not apologizing for that cliche' either.)
A short lockdown would also give everybody a smack in the face, remind them they can't change behaviour that much, and that the masks, alas, should not be treated as optionally as I see them on Vancouver's streets - and even buses.
The trick to fighting a pandemic is to panic very early. So the CCCC blog is officially panicking. Tell your neighbours.
http://brander.ca/c19#justasbad
I have a few quibbles, and they arise from defense of my post about the death rate last week. My points were that just protecting the care homes, and just having most retired people avoid outside contacts, thus making the average age of a case younger, would bring the fatality-rate down sharply.
Madrigal never mentions care-homes, and he dismisses the younger age a bit cavalierly with "the virus is already spreading to older people"...except the smart ones that are staying inside now, like it was April again. This may be a minority, but I can't help but expect the average age will stay down by several years, which is a big effect.
But let's not quibble over the fatality-rate hopefully being halved or even more; it's appeared for a few weeks as if it had dropped by over an order of magnitude, and that's about to be over with, as the death-rate for the USA is now clearly on an upswing again, a sharp one. It hit a thousand yesterday, and will probably stay there, or higher for weeks before any new behaviour changes can turn it around.
Madrigal shows how it has just been a very delayed effect that everybody should know about by now, and predict, and plan upon, as the epidemiologists have been; he points out that none of them are surprised it has finally begun to rise again, nor by the delay.
The rest of July, and likely well into August, are going to be very bad months across the American South; as today's death-rate was baked-in a few weeks ago, that's baked-in already. Swift action now can turn it back in August, but not sooner. And the idiot Governor of Georgia just forbade cities in Georgia from mandating masks. Arrgh.
http://brander.ca/c19#wave2
Two things annoyed me about the article, both of them explaining away Canada's superior work with factors that don't just apply to Canada.
Second, "Canada had nearly two decades to prepare for a pandemic. In 2003, the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, killed 44 people in Toronto - the most deaths outside Asia." Sorry, the United States did not have the same time to prepare, because SARS happened in another country, so "it can't happen here?" British Columbia, 3000 km away, was able to profit from the SARS warning, and New York, right next door, was not?
That sounds crazy when you say it aloud, but it's clearly how the unconscious minds of whole nations work. Nobody has ever believed this pandemic is coming to them, until it's down the street. The WHO called it a "global pandemic" in January, but nobody believed that down in their guts. Six months later, even the mighty Washington Post is still letting copy out the door, that carries the implicit assumption that it was quite reasonable for the USA to take no warning from SARS.
http://brander.ca/c19#provincialplague
So I will turn to the Nobel Memorial Prize winner (there is actually no Nobel Prize for Economics) Paul Krugman, and just quote him in the whole:
Canada doesn't have to say things like that. This empowers us to use all our wealth and tools to fight this problem: including the wealth inherent in investors trusting Canada's long-term productivity and profitability, their certainty that our dollar is well-managed, our credit sound.
Across World War 1 and World War 2, the United States spent five years in a state of war, with all the expenses that implies.
Canada spent ten, not being late to either war.
We are very strong indeed. We are stronger than this crisis, including financially stronger. Don't listen to the voices of weakness.
http://brander.ca/c19#money
Hey, remember when this question came up back in February, from not just a presidential claim, but the hopes of many?
Remember how April came and went and they were still asking the question in May?
We've had the super-high infection rate in the one American state that dips into the tropics for weeks, of course. The terrible twin headlines yesterday simply put a dispositive period on the whole question.
I'm not all nose-in-the-air, here; I had some hopes for it, too. But it was always a thin hope, and warmer countries put it to rest months ago.
http://brander.ca/c19#heatwave
I was just reading the Post article (linked from photo) about Bolsonaro not doing any distance protocols in the two weeks before, or week after, his diagnosis. I realized that Brazil was getting the USA response, only worse. Further, Brazil has one of the worst income inequality numbers on the planet. That link is way back to April 10th, when many commentators on the pandemic were already remarking that just as income inequality is associated with bad societal performance on nearly every metric of happiness, health, prosperity and success, it'll be associated with bad pandemic performance.
("Associated with", not necessarily "to blame for", of course: correlation, causation, blah blah blah...)
If it is another symptom and not a cause, the cause is surely feudalism, though we say "authoritarianism", these days: either way, it means a very few people are at the top, and stay there by holding everybody else's life cheaply. That's Brazil.
But this is combined with an economy that's been growing a lot, a coming Latin America regional superpower; Brazil is not like India, where very few people make it to old age to start with: 30 million of her 220 million people are over the age of 60.
If the pandemic simply rages through the whole society, unchecked, perhaps 100 million people will catch it, and a million die, in very round numbers. It could be the worst case scenario.
We can prepare for the next pandemic with medicines, equipment, plans, practices. But, really, our best preparation is probably to get our income inequality down. If not a cause by itself, the things that bring the GINI number down are the same things that reduce the vulnerability to plague.
http://brander.ca/c19#brazil
The problem with this thing is two-fold: the metric is "cumulative confirmed cases", which is why New York and area are still all-red; it's the whole past experience. Italy and Spain would look even worse, though they are down to very low case-counts and pretty safe to visit, these days. Secondly, the American data is at county level, whereas Canada only gets one big dot for Quebec, another for Ontario. The larger dots mean hundreds of times as many cases as the little dots on most American counties, but the amount of red is not proportional: so splitting America to the county level makes it look much worse.
Then there's the red colour, the red dots remind the unconscious of "pox", diseased skin. Let's try this again, only this time with "incidence rate", the new cases per million, a good measure of your actual risk today; and also with both Canadian and American statistics gathered only to the state/province level.
Most of the US states have two sizes larger again, nearly the largest dot the map system has available. Only a few US states have risk levels as low as Quebec. Only West Virginia, for some reason, has as low an incidence as Ontario. At the very top left of the map, you can see the tiny dot for Manitoba, the smallest size the system has available, and even that exaggerates your risk in Manitoba, whic is at the bottom range of that dot.
Frankly, your risk at a typical store checkout line, or restaurant, is comparable only between the heart of Toronto and Montreal, to most stores in Pittsburgh or Tulsa.
Yes, Tulsa, cast your eyes over to the dot for Oklahoma: it's one of the smallest on the map. That's one of the reasons the hype about a jump in cases there irked me. By the way, sure enough, if you click on the link from "Tulsa", you'll go back to the live-track of cases in Tulsa county, which are back down to 120-130/day from that brief "Monday Spike" up to 260/day on Monday, July 6...oddly enough after the July 4 weekend backlogged reports for a few days. Sorry. Just thought I'd mention it.
Read correctly, this map, too, is frightening, and absolutely justifies not even discussing re-opening the border.
Of course, I'm just having fun with GIS maps, here. Canadians need none of this, save to dramatize the feelings they already have, from watching the news. They don't need these maps to agree, along with 81% of Canadians that the border must remain closed.
http://brander.ca/c19#wall
I have never seen a single press release that looked like this, say:
Such tracing and publication could help inform us of what activities had been proven to be risky...or not.
With my Tulsa-rally questions, they should be already resolved by contact-tracers: those increased cases either attended the rally, or they did not. If very few cases told their doctors and contact-tracers they were there, we should know.
One story in Salon noted "a spokeswoman for the health department told The New York Times that it will not publicly identify any individual or facility at risk of exposure, or where transmission occurred."
I understand the ethic of medical confidentiality: if you got the virus from your mistress, only confidentiality will let you confess that. But there should be publication of the statistics. Making sure that stats can't be used to identify individuals is old-hat to census takers; it's a discipline that can be applied to all press releases. They aren't even saying the percentage of their current infections that came from "large gatherings that were not advised", which wouldn't even pin down the rally versus the outdoor protests.
For lack of this, the partisans get to just shout at each other, that the-rally, or the-protests, are clearly the real culprit. The virus cops likely know the real perp, at least statistically.
They could be telling us more. They should.
http://brander.ca/c19#tracing
There's some stretching going on, and they're willfully looking away from the stats, because the stories at left are more exciting than "Tulsa rally minor part of cases in the area". Well, maybe not "willfully", but then "neglectfully".
The stories, when you click on them, don't actually support those headlines very well. Still less well, the even-briefer mention on last night's National News, where the announcer casually tossed out that the rally had caused "up to 500" cases, and moved on, fact stated. Now I see the same couple of words in headlines from about nine sources, including the big national American dailies.
I've been cautioned that this is not media malpractice. My ire is really just about those headlines, and even briefer summaries ("up to 500 cases"). The stories themselves are careful enough to moderate the claim, and connect it to an official quote.
Take ABC news at random:
"In the past few days, we've seen almost 500 new cases, and we had several large events just over two weeks ago, so I guess we just connect the dots," Dart said at a press conference...
Dart, who said prior to the rally he'd recommended it be postponed over health concerns, added on Wednesday that "significant events in the past few weeks" had "more than likely contributed" to Tulsa County's surge in cases.
Tulsa County reported 261 new cases on Tuesday, a new record high.
The number 500 is what will stick with people, joined solely to "arena rally". What's bothering me about all this, I guess, is my contention in previous examinations of Tulsa data that the probability the rally caused few infections, is good news to be celebrated, not buried. It is burying the good news to give the rally special blame for a general increase that started weeks earlier. It would mean we can do more gathering than we thought.
In those two previous posts, I was working from just the "average incubation time" of "5-6 days", and it was enough. However, it's a straightforward exercise to actually apply a 14-day incubation probability model to Tulsa. Without it, media have implicitly taken the "2-14 days incubation period" to mean that "14 days" could be everybody. It can't. It's about 1% of cases. If you'll believe me on that, you can skip to my conclusion well below. For the math nerds, here we go:
My source for data was an article on incubation period in Popular Science. I can see that if I'm going to pick a fight with most of the news media, in defense of our modern version of Nuremberg Rallies, no less, I'm going to have to go to their source, The Annals of Internal Medicine, 5 May 2020 on the incubation period. From 181 publicly reported cases, they published this graph:
This graph can also be described in words, and that is:
Whew. Fortunately for me, I took a single statistics-summarized-for-engineers course 42 years ago...and even that is enough for any schnook to develop a reasonable model for the probability of showing symptoms 1,2,3...14 days after your exposure, particularly assisted by their cumulative-incubated-patients graph at right.
The non-cumulative version is below, with the X-axis changed from "days after exposure" to "Days after June 20", where "full day" means "evening", and it should be noted that it would probably become a case the next day, or the day after that - you have to get to a doctor, and be logged as a case either by test or description of symptoms. So feel free to add a day or two to the dates on the X-axis when comparing to a chart of the "cases" logged by public health.
The nice thing about the Tulsa rally is that it was such a discrete event; any exposure must have happened between late afternoon and mid-evening of June 20.
Yes, some people (about 70) camped outside, not crowded, and some of the organizers and security were also infected that week, which I covered on July 2.
A half-dozen-odd hours is very different from exposures at the George Floyd marches, spread out over days. With the rally, the date-axis is not a rough estimate, but pretty exact. The only problem is whether the patient took one or a few days to turn "symptoms" in to a "logged case", and we'll deal with that.
Having satisfied all those criteria with my estimate, we can go on to estimating when the appearance of cases from a hypothetical exposure of 200 rally attendees would most likely show up. I use "200" because I had to get down to half-percents to make my estimates work, so I can just double the percents to get a whole number of people.
Adding two days to the dates on the graph, and doubling the percentages, we get 200 fans rally-goers becoming cases as per the graph at left. At right, the actual case-counts from the Tulsa County Health Department, marked up in reference to the model.
It doesn't add up. I can't make those numbers work.
The analysis with the average should have been enough. I really didn't expect to have to be explaining all this over a week later. I figured the "Blame Tulsa" theory was already done with the Post blaming the June 23-24 jump on the rally.
That's right, according to the Washington Post, (if you add up different stories) the rally caused a jump in case-counts just two days later, the cases went away for two weeks, then roared back to cause another jump on days 14-16. The news media clearly didn't do this analysis, and should have.
They're the ones saying "we've got to follow the science" in every other editorial. So I did. And it says they're wrong.
http://brander.ca/c19#tulsamath
That would be obviously crazy: how very different the two countries of the Iberian Peninsula are, Portugal a quarter as bad as Spain; Greece not even a tenth as bad as Italy next door!
It's a similar situation in both America and Canada. We've been pretty nice to Quebec, frankly, including it in an aggregate that has all the American news sources describe us as superior.
The far-left bar just lumps together the Canadian champions at COVID-dodging: Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Maritimes save for Nova Scotia, and all the North. They add up to a respectable 4 million people, and a better performance than South Korea! This is a little unfair, as they benefited from a lack of international traffic and more warning. South Korea had to do much more for their win.
BC and Alberta had the exact same number, 36, so were obvious to lump together. They'd be at the top of the European League, as a country, better than Denmark. I had to separate out Nova Scotia, a million people with 63 deaths, other provinces were way higher or lower; but they'd still be high up in the standings.
Ontario clocks in at less than half as bad as the USA, while Quebec is up in the horrors of UK territory, raising the aggregate Canadian average to be worse than any other province except themselves. Bluntly, if this really were some kind of athletic sports series, they'd be really, really, letting down the side.
Once again, this is all about the care homes. Isaac Asimov, comparing the masses of the planets, said "The solar system consists of Jupiter and some debris". The Canadian pandemic failures consist of the care-home story, and some minor mistakes. You can't do better to be informed on that than to visit CANADALAND, and listen to their special podcasts about the pandemic.
http://brander.ca/c19#provinces
I keep reading "but" sentences, where doctors solemnly note that deaths follow along after cases by a couple of weeks. The death rate will certainly tick up soon, but there's no question it is really lower.
At left, the simple story of the whole American experience with the pandemic. The soaring twin curves, for cases, top, and deaths, bottom, are only about 10-12 days apart, back in March and April. I drew two red lines, through the peak of the infection curve, April 11, and the peak of the death curve, April 21. The curves are less than two weeks apart, but the recent uptick is now over 25 days old...with deaths still falling (if not for much longer).
Notice how much more quickly the death-rate fell than the case-rate, over the next two months to the green line, the minimum of cases/day. The death-rate has been dropping for two months. More than you could explain by higher levels of testing turning more mild, unknown cases into known-cases.
The two, much larger changes are:
Nearly my first post in CCCC offered Lancet data on age-related mortality rates. They drop by a factor of three per decade: 50-somethings are 3X more likely to die than 40-somethings, and 60-somethings ten times more likely to die than 40-somethings.
Doctors are saying that cases are getting younger. That article link quotes Dr. Fauci claiming that "The death rate always lags several weeks behind the infection rate", which the above graphs would argue with. But what the good doctor is arguing is that "They get infected first, then they come home, and then they infect the older people." I can see that in multi-generation households, again associated with lower income, but mostly, not. I will now comically over-use "mostly" to cannily avoid all guessing at the numbers:
The old folks are going to batten down the hatches, mostly; the pandemic will mostly hit those under 60, the care-homes will mostly avoid it, and the death rate will be a fraction, this time. You'll have to see that feared 100,000 cases a day to get back up to 2000 dead per day. That, of course, is all too likely if the current, somewhat frantic, efforts to re-lockdown are unsuccessful.
http://brander.ca/c19#deathdown
Today may be the lamest , Rex-Murphy-reads-the-news-and-rants, post of all, as revealed by the nature of the subject: a sweeping condemnation of a whole type of thinking, like op-ed writers that capitalize in order to turn their various opponents into one strawman: "The Left are the real racists", etc.
But a Grand Notion did just hit me this morning, wearily going into skim-mode at another news story about "how did we politicize wearing a mask, are surgeons all liberals now?". It struck me that if you have no humility, you can't fight this virus the only way this enemy can be fought: running away.
You can't attack the virus and defeat it in single combat. It doesn't matter how tough you are, or even how many F15 fighters you command: if it contacts you, it will win. You can only run away and hide from this enemy.
At the most cartoonish, hard-to-believe extreme, the height of arrogance is to imagine that you can just declare the pandemic about over, or not really a problem, that you can control reality itself with a pompous speech.
It's now acknowledged that it was Karl Rove, lionized Bush campaign expert, and serial character assassin (John McCain's Black baby, John Kerry's swiftboating) gave the following incredible quote to a reporter:
But the virus is an uncontrollable reality for people like Karl Rove, and moves at a speed faster than they can spin the news about it. The only semblance of control can be gained by running away in all humility, and they have none. They might have gained some control over the politics of the Middle East by stepping away, too...but they just couldn't "cut and run", that would have been too...humiliating.
To this mentality, locking down, or even wearing a mask, feels like that "cut and run"; "backing down"; not "standing your ground"; "no stomach"; being a "quitter"...do I have to go on? We have a dozen more insults for it, and some people's whole political persona is grounded in endlessly hitting opponents with such insults - exactly those phrases - and any behaviour that smacks of it, even symbolically, is torture to them.
I've written of COVID-19 as The Christian Virus, and the term has another resonance: humility is a Christian virtue, and the virus is teaching it. Some are requiring painful lessons.
http://brander.ca/c19#gut
He was also a union man, served as president of the local chapter of the UMWA, my mother told me. The unions fought for wages, but above all, for their very lives, for workplace protections and standards. Also for compensation for injuries and deaths, both helping the workers and their families, and adding a financial incentive to make work safer. He died in 1934; a generation later, coal mining was a relatively good job.
Owners hate paying workers, or spending money on them; whatever their human feelings (perhaps that's hypothetical), their economics always push towards worker lives not mattering. Their best strategy, since granddad and millions of colleagues organized the local workers, has been to bring in poorer people who will accept lower pay and standards.
With food, Canadian producers are in a particularly tight corner: trade agreements would let Americans undercut them with their own cheap labour if Canadians really had to pay first-world wages. Canadian apples wouldn't just be more expensive: they'd be nonexistent.
All that said, there's not even a question about which side to be on with the latest protests by Canada's migrant workers. A nice summary on Global is linked from the screen-shot, above. Everything they're asking for is reasonable, under our laws and customs; it's all about accepted Canadian standards applying to them as well. The cost is more than reasonable, it's almost nothing. This is not about getting the pay that Canadians would ask to do this back-breaking work; it's not about raising food prices into uncompetitive heights. It's about cheap, modest steps to save their very lives.
After the Exxon Valdez disaster, they re-examined what it would do to the price of oil, if every oil tanker went to the expense of a double-hull. The Titanic disaster had mandated double-hulls only for liners, not cargo ships. (They were only cargo work-units.) It turned out to be a few bucks a barrel: a nickel per tank of gasoline.
Similar math applies to most workplace protection, which is why those battles were won handily enough, and businesses now actively look for ways to improve safety: it barely touches the bottom line. My granddad died to save somebody a percent or two. His family were left destitute to save another percent.
You'll never notice the change in the price of food that decent, moral treatment of our migrant workers would cost. Support them unreservedly.
http://brander.ca/c19#migrantworkers
I struggle with that paper. I can't bear to subscribe to the National Post or the allegedly-more-liberal Globe and Mail. Even the latter, I noted in an email to Linda Solomon Wood, the Observer's founder, has a front section for "Business" and another for "Investing", but none for "People Who Work For a Living"; their outlook kind of ignores 90% of the population. She hadn't noticed that, herself, and passed my email around the office.
The Observer isn't just more lefty; it hardly takes its editorial eye away from First Nations and Climate issues, to the point where it is hardly general news at all. And on climate, it manages to be more-extreme than me all the time, which takes some doing. (Briefly, I'm all for new, carbon-free industries, but see no point in treating the fossil fuel industry like planetary-enemy Bond villains, with every pipeline project a Vimy Ridge to die upon.)
I wanted to give a little background, because today, I visited the Observer to find they're just barely touching the pandemic at all. If you just want a good hate-fest on Conservatives, there's the article on how Stephen Harper, still a big internal force, is "destroying the Conservative party". There's the Meng diplomatic problem, there's Canadian racism is nearly as bad as America's, there's Ontario tenant laws.
There's ONE front-page article that mentions COVID,but relax: the title is "David Suzuki on COVID-19's lessons to climate change". Whew. Still climate change.
So, it's a place you can go to NOT read pandemic news; de-stress that one stress just for once. It's also a nice day here in Vancouver, after what seems like a week of cold and rain. My pandemic response last week was to buy a cheap bike, and today's is to get out on it.
http://brander.ca/c19#observer
For a guy who started off blogging with a screed about not agonizing over America's troubles any more because they're hopeless, I can't seem to quit them. This blog then started with the prediction America would be the worst-in-league at pandemic response. So continuing to pay attention to them is like being a Leafs fan...voluntarily. Madness. Especially this week, or for the next month.
So I was reading Canadian news, and found out that on the sane side of the 49th parallel:
We're doing better than much of Europe, save Germany; that's a tribute to the reasonably smart things we did with the warning they gave us.
The sharper comparison is to our neighbour to the south, of course, and there's so much news about them that...'nuff said.
The downward trend, however slight, means that we can open up to an extent, travel some, vacation...and still keep that dreaded R-nought below one. It's about zero point nine-nine...but that's below one. That's a proud achievement in public comity, communication, and willingness to sacrifice a bit for others.
Proud. We have our troubles, our failures, our dead; but let's just take a breath to be proud, too. I'm proud of the Prairies, and Maritimers, that continued following their advisories, despite near-zero cases. I'm proud of the First Nations that closed borders, protected their people, and kept their rate near zero. Even our two screwup provinces at least reversed course when their errors were clear.
To push my patriotic-rhetoric pedal to the metal, the measures taken to "combat" the coronavirus are not like fighting at all, not dramatic. The mental attitude, needed across the whole population, not just the leaders, is more like calm care, watchfulness, vigilance, preparation, self-sacrifice.
Or in short, we have responded successfully and well, because we really feel it, believe it, show it in action:
http://brander.ca/c19#ocanada
In service of that zinger, I'm afraid the Washington Post reporters Josh Dawsey and Carol D. Leonning, resorted to some real cherry-picking of data in their July 1 story about the "fallout" of the rally.
Most of the story is about the postive tests of staff, the leak of same, etc. As to the aftermath, they write:
In all, the county charted 902 new cases of the virus in the week after the rally, an increase of 15 percent over the week that led up the president's visit. This week, new cases have fallen slightly, with an average of 93 positive cases per day so far.
Really, isn't the trend-line from Tulsa County's own web site (linked from the graphic) much more clarifying than those four numbers? (200,250,902,15%) It shows the spike 2.5 days after the rally, on June 23. Yes, 2.5 days, because after being exposed between about 6:30 and 10:30 PM on June 20, the rally victims would have just 60-some hours to develop symptoms, so they could get to a doctor, get tested, get results back immediately (from the blood test, maybe, I don't think those nose-swabs come back within hours), and be entered as a case, to appear as part of that "250" on June 23.
That could happen, but probably not, according to this article in Popular Science:
In short, the "spike" is too soon for even implied blame; and it's so short that the 14-day trend line right through the rally is actually downward...when a cases caused by a high number of infections on June 20 should be spread out over a week from June 24-July 2.
Which ends my interest in the matter. Events like this are, of course, a risk, and I wouldn't go, would try to talk anybody out of going. The Republican campaign was foolish to do it. All the criticism being leveled in Washington against Washingtonians is justified. I wasn't addressing that.
The single data point we get from Tulsa is that going to an indoor sports arena may be too high a risk to take just to watch a game or hear a speech; but it's not all that great a risk if there were a good reason. I'd spend three hours in one (in a mask) to get an air-conditioned, well-spaced, lineup to vote, for instance.
I'd like an expert opinion, of course. I'd like to see journalists who quoted expert Dr. Corey Hebert calling it a "superspreader event" on June 21, before this data was in, showing him that graph and asking if our concerns have been to cautious.
Oh, and I definitely wouldn't volunteer to organize such an event; that is clearly a massive risk.
http://brander.ca/c19#tulsagain
It looks like, at left, that cases were already on their way down, even outside the blue "uncertain" area, where all the tests aren't back yet, and the figures are lower than they will be. But the "firm" figures for March 11-13 showed a fall in cases. Yay! Already crushing the curve! Should be over by mid-April, we can have Thanksgiving!
But, on Canada Day, let's quote that great Canadian, Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers), with "DENIED!" on the right, where the same period of days (red box) showed nothing but steady, indeed steep, increase, and then much, much worse. And on the right, you'll also notice that they have widened the "uncertain data" shading to fourteen days from seven.
A month later, we did flatten that curve! But as I cheer mighty victory, the care homes were, of course, our utter humiliation. We all learned there was simply no excuse, either; the care-homes were neglected, waiting rooms for the graveyard, before the virus hit, years before, said report after report. It was always cheaper to call for another report than spend the money the last one called for.
Eighty percent of our dead. If Quebec and Ontario had swiftly moved to address the care-homes as BC did, we might at least have cut our death-rate in half, and be in the company of Germany, Greece, and Denmark, if not up in the superhero stratosphere with South Korea, New Zealand, and Taiwan.
But we are out of the bottom league, well above the USA (of course), and certainly the UK, Spain, France, Belgium, Italy, and poor deluded Sweden. Because our bar is a big jump down from Ireland/Netherlands at right, I stretched a point to include us with Germany in the next league up. (A tribute to our non-central provinces, which would be in the top league, if separated out.)
We didn't do badly. We just didn't do all that well, and it was all about the Quebec and Ontario care-homes. We need to fix them. It'll cost me in taxes. Fine. They can bill me.
Because The Christian Virus has judged us as Christ judged us, by how we treat the least among us. We have been judged... and found wanting. We have to fix ourselves.
http://brander.ca/c19#q1
It's more certain than ever that the large, open-air demonstrations didn't cause a spike in infections. It's possible that the more-closed, more-packed, unmasked rally in Tulsa caused a hundred extra infections or so, but not likely.
As noted by worried commentators at the time, cases in Tulsa had been going steadily up for two weeks, shown at left, from about 25 cases/day on June 6, to 150/day on June 20, the day of the rally. The dip the next day is easily explained by "Sunday, some records not reported until Monday", but the big jump to 250 cases is on Tuesday, three days after the rally - which would be quite early for symptoms to show. The average is five days, and by June 25, it's back down to 150 cases/day - and keeps going down for some days.
CCCC may be the sole "news"(??) organ (outside Tulsa) to actually give a crap about Tulsa, as opposed to criticizing the Republicans. I haven't seen anybody else follow up on Tulsa's pandemic, though today marks ten days since the rally, and any resultant spike should be visible by now. If even a dozen infectees had spread it to several people each, the minimum you could call a "superspread", it would show up against Tulsa's mere 150/day. The 250/day three days later would actually fit the bill, but it is literally a one-day report, surrounded by dips that make it look more like a natural statistical variation; random numbers do bounce up and down - in pandemic reporting, particularly around the weekend.
Further, there could be reports by now of specific infections traced back to rally-goers; they'd be bound to mention it to their doctor. And there's been nothing. I made a good-faith effort with google news, restricted to the last week, and it either didn't matter to The News whether Tulsa really had a bunch of people infected, or they watched for a spike, and it simply wasn't news that their fears were wrong.
The Tulsa World notes that the rally drew attendance from 44 counties across 12 states, not just the one shown at left; and that COVID-19 is "on the rise in 33 of them". That's not exactly the description of a "spike", and it definitely isn't about how actual known rally-goers themselves have been new reported cases.
I would still bet that a good half of the attendees were from Tulsa county itself; there should still be some sort of signal in the noise at left. While the hope that rallies aren't that unsafe is very tentative, I think it's not overoptimistic.
To be clear, I hope those rallygoer's political beliefs are all cast down into the ash-heap of history, regarded the way that Salem Witch Trials and Mao's Cultural Revolution are regarded today, with contempt and befuddlement that anybody ever believed any of it. I wish all political sorrow and suffering upon their near-empty, racist, cruelty-loving heads. But I don't wish them to get sick, and I really, really don't want their parents to get sick and die.
So, I'm happy to see this; I'm happy to see it even if it sinks in to other, wider-audience places than CCCC, and that in turn causes rallies to come back and be a part of the American campaign. Yes, there would be more lies, insults, threats, and fearmongering filling our TV screens. The helplessly mesmerized media covering them instead of policy discussions...again. The only thing I wouldn't be happy to see is the rallies becoming bigger, and more-packed, until they do bring about a superspread.
I'm happy to see it because all that is less-important than the deaths that won't happen from things like that rally. If the rally is indeed indicative, it means that the superspreading events are from even more-unsafe behaviour. If we can avoid doing things worse than the rally, and only get as close and exposed as the Tulsa Test Subjects, we may be able to get a lot of work (and fun) done this year without dying for it.
I don't know whether the rally-goers actually hoped that BLM demonstrators got infected for their activism. Nobody who has read recent years' most-important essay "The Cruelty is the Point" would doubt it, I'm afraid. Even if so, their opponents should not wish the reverse, or be in any way disappointed by this. Along with the lack of a spike from protests, let's all put politics aside and call it a win.
http://brander.ca/c19#tulsaok
The harbourfront seawall wasn't just active; it was busy. The parks were busy. Groups were well-distanced, but additional parties must have had trouble finding another spot. Canadian Tire was navigable without actually bumping into people and there were a fair number of masks, but I was glad to get out.
In short, people are acting almost as if it's over, save for lining up 2m apart at the till. And the seven o'clock applause has been dying out for some time. I've taken for over a month to banging a watering can instead of just clapping, to add some volume at our end of the street.
We've been thinking of keeping it up two more days, making lots of noise on Canada Day, and stopping. Every day for two months now, I reflect that this is about expressing neighbourhood solidarity with our voluntary activity restrictions, not really for medical staff that have been back to normal hours for a while.
The care-home staff are still in extraordinary protocols, of course. But I'm not sure if we're that appreciative of the care-home staff; no wage increases have been mentioned...and as Robert Heinlein said, "Real applause is green, and folds".
http://brander.ca/c19#applause
I'm just sayin', this is what other deaths get:
(perhaps not deeply enough that the City recorded their names...)
It's not just the low pay, low unionization, and the criminal neglect of their personal protective equipment that got me. It's that four of the dead on that memoriam page don't even have names. I'm sure the Nurse's Union hated that and did some extra phoning, but just couldn't get anybody on the line who had time to dig up the file.
Seeing those missing names took me back five years to the photographs I took at left.
I'm not surprised by it, of course. The police and fire services have a military culture, complete with military ranks; and military culture includes a strong component of reward-by-glory, with medals for bravery, and solemn ceremony surrounding death on the job. When a police officer dies, others for many towns far away are given paid time and transport to attend, and the funeral becomes a uniformed parade of thousands. I don't have a problem with any of that, it's just credit where due.
But it's not an ethic that informs other high-risk professions. I had a Dad survive WW2, his Dad before him survived WW1. The one who died was Mom's Dad, the coal miner. He's my hero; he died bringing home one more paycheque, one more paycheque, one last paycheque. He was 49. The highest-risk professions are fisherman and lumberjack. Heavy construction workers are also up there, higher than police and fire as well. I took the pictures at left just before I retired, of the fine tributes to police and fire staff that adorn the great plaza in front of Calgary City Hall, statues, and photographs of their greatest battles and losses etched into metal plaques for the ages.
Behind the building, there's also a small, sheltered little park hardly noticed by the public, it's mostly used by city staff for smoke breaks out of the wind. It has a triangle of metal about a metre across and two high, with the last plaque at left, to all those who died in trench cave-ins, and equipment failures, and other industrial accidents. Their funerals were attended by family and friends, their whole work-crew and a few others. Their loss is not deeply felt by all, as my note below that line indicates. It's not that I think the police deserve less, just that these folks deserved more.
The medical heroes who have been writing their wills before the ICU heats up, deserve more again. The respirologists and unionized nurses are at least getting decent pay for it. The mostly foreign-born, mostly-female, mostly ill-paid care workers are getting very little indeed. Two of those sixteen were in their thirties; three more in their forties. (Maybe more, the ones with no names have no ages, either.)
The BC Nurses Union also notes that nearly one per day is injured on the job; if that's typical for Canada, then they have a comparable injury rate to police, as well. In spite of the similar risk, they are not allowed to protect themselves with guns. They go to work anyway.
The ethnic component of the worst-paid, and WORST-PROTECTED care workers, who died for our sin, of not equipping them, brings me back around to the whole issue that lives-of-colour don't matter, not enough. Not in police contacts, and not in the settings of industrial risks on the job, that come with no medals or statues. Workers of colour are handed not just the lowest pay, but the highest risks, and the worst neglects of their risks, that could have been cheaply mitigated. The picture below links to a great Toronto Star article on their challenges.
These Blacks wear Blue; can we at least start acting like all the Blue Lives Matter?
http://brander.ca/c19#nurses
There are numerous stories piling up about threats, dire physical threats made, to public health officers in America. That, and of course frustration with being undermined by their own governor, is behind twenty of them resigning in recent months.
I can't imagine any need for further comment. The Post story link above is a great summary. The Officers' pictures below, are links to the story where the picture appears, about the threats and resignations. I grabbed the most-noted stories from the Post and from CNN. I'm sure it's merely a coincidence that so many are women. No, I'm not, though I did skip Dr. Chris Farnitano of Contra Costa County, who is also hanging in there after a demonstration outside his home and family.
To repeat, twenty have resigned; the number receiving some kind of threat is much higher, probably in the hundreds. Lots of doctors of all genders and colours. These are just the ones I had time for this morning.
The contrast to our own praise and adulation for Dr. Bonnie Henry and Dr. Deena Hinshaw in BC and Alberta, respectively, could hardly be more dramatic.
It's the most incredibly over-the-top metaphor for the rejection of science that sowed the wind - and those states will start reaping the whirlwind when the uptick in "cases" becomes and uptick in "bodies" about a week from now.
http://brander.ca/c19#officers
The province is of course fortunate in already being one of the best places in the world to have a summer vacation. Which is why much of the province has come down with the Kelowna Virus.
Kelowna Virus symptoms include profound restlessness, an irresistable urge to hit the beaches of Lake Okanagan, and lost-time moments where sufferers regain consciousness to find themselves already packing the trunk. Physicians recommend rest on a warm, sandy surface, and to treat the Kelowna Virus by pounding a few brews.
Get out there. We've all earned a little time away from home.
In addition to being legal, Kelowna/Penticton vacations have the advantage of being more affordable than foreign climes, in current straitened circumstances.
http://brander.ca/c19#kelownavirus
They're headed for the next number I put together, WW1+Korea, (153K) by late July.
http://brander.ca/c19#numbergame
There's been no news about our fragile toilet-paper supply chain and how you can't turn commercial-grade into consumer-grade overnight. It recovered on its own, without any micromanagement. I never heard of anybody going down to the use of newspaper, which my grandparents would have described as "Wednesday".
On a similar note, shelves everwhere overflow with hand sanitizer this month, and stories about all the distilleries and other production plants that switched to making it, are gone. They'll be switching back now, with no stories, as the factories that regularly make it catch up at lower prices.
For that matter, I haven't seen any news lately about the perfidy of China, and their general responsibility for the whole pandemic. This one is interesting, because there's a large, well-funded political party in the States that would love for that to be the topic, 24x7.
They just can't get traction with it, I suppose, because the global effects are totally different in different countries: China has done very little damage to some local competitors, like South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, all of which have suffered less than China itself. As conspiratorial sneak-attacks go, it's a pathetic one that depends on your opponent badly failing simple public health measures, for it to succeed. I think the conspiracy theorist are just finding this one a hard sell.
And of course, I've noted repeatedly that chloroquine vanished from the news as soon as certain politicians dropped it as a magic cure - not just for patients, but clearly they figured the entire pandemic could just vanish like a bad dream at dawn. There was a brief flurry of news, not about its effectiveness, but about whether The Lancet should have published a paper about it actually being dangerous. This provided conspiracy lovers a few days of thinking The Lancet is part of the Great Global Conspiracy to, umm...use the pandemic to impoverish a billion people just to defeat a couple of politicians? But even they dropped it. Chloroquine's great sin isn't to be actually harmful, or even to not help with COVID-19; it had to disappear the whole pandemic to be interesting to them. Notice that when an actually effective treatment was announced, all peer-reviewed and straight into use, they were silent. A drug that reduces mortality somewhat was politically worthless, and politics were their only real interest.
http://brander.ca/c19#overwith
But society as a whole has a different fatality rate altogether, and it depends almost entirely on the protection given to care homes. They are 80% of Canada's dead; 30% of America's. They're a whole blog in their own right, much less an article, so I'll just stop there.
Care homes passed around the disease so that most of the patients and staff are infected; and the patients, at least, have a fatality rate dozens of times that of the general population. For most of us, the odds of dying are under 1% - but Canada has logged just over 100,000 cases and 8,000 dead: 8% for the overall society. America is 5%. With most care homes mostly protected, the overall society fatality rate will now plummet, whatever the number of cases. If most retirees, who can stay home, protect themselves, it might fall below 1%.
The graph at left is the same one as yesterday's, below, that highlighted how caseloads went back up in Sweden, and never went down at all, in the USA, are now at levels several times that of Canada and most of Europe...except today's is a graph of deaths, not cases. I have placed it as low as possible in the article to allow same-screen comparison.
As you can see, it's harder to tell the American death rate from the others. It is higher - nearly double Canada's at present - but it is't as dramatic, and more importantly the American death rate is still going down, as the last of the care-home victims are buried. By comparison to April, America looks good on paper.
If their virus population were a black box that accepted "cases" at the input and produces 1% as many dead people a few weeks later, one could imagine a steady state where 50,000 new cases are reported every day, and 500 new deaths from the 50,000 of a few weeks earlier. Disproportionately old, poor, Black, and previously-ill, of course. I'm afraid I can imagine something over double the losses from cars and violence together, to those people, just becoming background noise in the news. Mass-deaths by suicide bombing in Iraq became page-2 stories for years, after dominating the headlines at first.
Care homes were our wake-up call; those piles of bodies outside, the waiting trucks, shocked us bolt-upright. I fear that America wants to hit the snooze button and go back to sleep.
http://brander.ca/c19#lessdying
No kidding. They look awful. Pathetic.
I hope the CTV graph at left adds a little more context. The EU is doing well despite Sweden, which failed to lockdown with eyes open, as a decision. A bad one, that did not help their economy. Canada is doing well because Quebec finally got a grip on their transmissions. Canada did much more poorly than Germany, which was much worse two months ago, but improved quickly. Germany, with the highest EU population, really improves the average shown in the Post's graph.
American liberals, of course, have been acutely aware of their inferiority in many areas, for nearly a century. They were being told to "Love it or leave it" for their criticisms (mostly, of the same stuff they're criticizing now) fifty years ago. The complaint was turned into a tightly-written, statistically devastating rant by Aaron Sorkin and Jeff Daniels in the opening scene of "The Newsroom" eight years ago.
The Post article is a great example of both-sides-ism, afraid to more than hint that "one party in particular" (unnamed) can't admit to American problems, before going back to saying "Americans" instead of "conservatives". (I can see they hate to seem to be touting one party, but they don't have to: half of America's Democrats would count as "conservatives" anywhere else. They could just say "conservatives", and coyly let their audience interpret the term.)
Can information like the graphs above convince more of America to stop thinking they're #1 all the way, and admit to need for major changes? I'm thinking, not. The Iraq War didn't do it; Vietnam caused only a half-decade pause in their militarism until it came roaring back with Reagan. The "Newsroom Rant" would still kill the career of most American politicians, eight years later. (In the TV show, the rant caused Daniel's character to take a vacation, came back to find most of his staff had quit. Journalists, quitting because he recited indisputable statistics? Sorkin thought it believable.)
I think the USA will get a significant shift in attitude and behaviour out of this, but nothing revolutionary, and only half of it long-lasting. They've been putting up with the military and the gun deaths and everything else for a long time; they'll put up with this, too.
Pity.
http://brander.ca/c19#pity
My family is awaiting an OK for interprovincial travel to Alberta, but in fact I know a few people who've already made the trip, on their own opinion that it was "necessary". (Death of a family member, say.)
Frankly, it seems to be working. This is not a natural attitude for governments and regulatory bodies; assuming that people will just Do The Right Thing doesn't work with any other law! But most laws exist to keep you from taking advantage of other people; these advisories are for your own good. The remarkable thing is that people seem to be trusting it.
The difference is probably spotted by this
Business in Vancouver article that distills it down to :
“One of the main reasons why we got such universal buy-in was because the government deferred to science”
http://brander.ca/c19#suggestion
The number is now in: the Tulsa Fire Marshals pegged the crowd at 6,100, or about one-third of the arena.
So. We can now separate the supporters into three groups:
Many have remarked that politics in the US now resemble sports, where you stick with your team for life, loyal whatever their faults. You may keep cheering your team - but will you bet on it? Serious money? That's different.
I hoped yesterday for low case-counts arising from the maskless, indoor rally. We will still get data on that, courtesy of the group-3 True Believers that packed together without masks for three hours anyway. I hope only for good news, but if there's an outbreak traced to that segment of the crowd, it really will ruin all indoor rallies (and sports tickets, and theatres) for many months to come.
I write, "turning point", because this has been true all along; nothing has happened in the last week to make GOP members change their minds about COVID-19 concerns. They were listening to the pooh-poohing all along, cheering it reflexively, but they weren't willing to bet serious money (or two weeks in bed) on that "sports team". The turning point is that now they can all see that most of their fellows don't really believe. The cat's out of the bag: now they all have permission to start admitting what they actually believe.
It might even become possible to be an American Republican who supports dramatic and expensive responses to the pandemic. And have the courage to say so.
One can only hope.
http://brander.ca/c19#tulsa
Neither the speakers nor anybody around me at any point struck me as angry. If one's sense of "the atmosphere", gathered from expressions, body language, voice tones means anything, I'd say the crowd was almost celebratory: we're together, we're a large number, we're having some impact, successes are in the offing.
When the speakers gave way to a singer of remarkable talent and voice, (upper left photo), my main problem was that supper was on, and I had to get home.
But, oh, yeah, my topic is the pandemic. I shot a number of photos to record just how packed the gathering was. There are some on the news, of the original march, which probably took less time than the rally at the park. The march, like most, was fairly spaced out. Opinions that spacing, and "movement", help prevent transmission, by keeping the virus from building up in the air, run into the problem that marches end somewhere, with the most-eager participants crowding up close to the stage.
So I grabbed the opportunity, and the rest of this post will be more like my photoblog, with big pictures and a few comments. The back of the crowd, maybe a quarter of the attendance, was very well spaced indeed:
In the more-popular area just behind the sound/camera stand and a secondary bank of speakers (a main bank at the stage; this is about 50 metres away), there was less spacing, and I noticed a slight tendency for people to line up a bit, so that one's closest neighbours were to the side, not front/back of each other.
Then, forward of that camera stand to the stage, it got increasingly dense, well into the packing that would cause transmission concerns. I've got to say, not only is Sunset Park a terrific gathering place with close access to services, the usual breathtaking view: the hill means it's not only a natural amphitheatre, but by standing on it, you have semi-aerial photography for free.
But, very important note: as we look back from there are the lighter crowd around the camera/speaker stand:
And, even more so, the crowd right up front, packed in tight:
...that mask usage is near-universal. Over 90%.
Being up on the hill, with both horizontal and vertical distance separating people from neighbours, seemed to give courage to have masks be "only" about 75%, and the widely-spaced people way at back might have been less again.
To sum up: everybody was very aware this was a risk. Almost nobody wanted to make some point about being "brave", or disrespecting the science.
So I think there can be high hopes that this rally will have caused almost zero transmissions. I awoke this morning to a story from Kitchener-Waterloo which held a rally on June 3; and after two weeks, was prepared to say that one (1) case appeared to trace back to infection at that rally. One. Whew. Be it noted, that rally was also an exemplar of COVID-19 wokeness: Hand-washing stations were provided, and masks were mandatory. Their foresight has been rewarded.
The value to BLM is two-fold; nobody should fear going out to their rallies, which are well-run, peaceful, safe...and have great music. Secondly, they look like just about the most-sensible, responsible people in the discussion, a diametric contrast to those who crap upon their politics... while also causing risk to others.
One can only hope, for Tulsa, that the indoor, undoubtedly mask-free, rally tonight turns out to also surprise us with low case-counts. They are certainly starting off with a statistical handicap. Tulsa County and Vancouver have very similar populations, about 650,000. The county had 125 new cases Friday, in contrast to Vancouver, which had seven. (And that's from assigning all 7 cases in BC to Vancouver, alas, not all that conservative.) The Waterloo area had 73 active cases on May 31. Dividing by 14, that's just five new cases per day, so they were in Vancouver-risk territory when they had only one transmission on June 3.
If the inherent risk in Tulsa (i.e. the probability that a random guy-beside-you is shedding virus) is over an order of magnitude larger, then one might guess a dozen transmissions. Actually, make it a few dozen, because if they fill the 19,000 seat arena, that's a few times as large as Vancouver's rally yesterday. If the actual results are way higher than that, then we'll have some tentative data on how much it increases risk to be indoors - even in the most-capacious "indoor" space - and to avoid masks.
It would be great news if it were as safe as the outdoor rallies have turned out to be; it would mean a lot of good activities could perhaps re-start. To those running this experiment, I can only ask: please stay the hell away from your parents, and other elders, for a week or two. Their risk is many times yours.
http://brander.ca/c19#ourprotest
We appear to have dodged the bullet, worldwide.
The reasons are all speculative, but both articles note how many protest photographs show at least some distancing wherever possible, and a lot of mask usage. Other theories are that not only is it good to be outdoors, not only is it good to have hot, sunny, humid weather, but it is good to be moving rather than sitting in one place.
The images are from the Philadelphia Inquirer, above, and The Guardian, below. They may not actually reflect the way the march looked for all but a fraction of an hour, for a small minority of particpants. Newspaper photographers try to make crowds look as large and as dense as possible, for dramatic effect. I noted in previous posts that most aerial photographs showed more spacing.
I hope to return to a larger topic of which this one is a part, later on: that America, in particular, excels at "natural experiments" in sociology and economics, so much so that the 50 states were called "The Laboratories of Democracy" by one judge. No epidemiologist would dare call for some test subjects to do what the marchers did, to see if the coronavirus spread well or poorly in that kind of gathering.
But volunteers ran the experiment dozens of times, with various degrees of movement and spacing, with different crowd sizes, different weather. I wrote on June 8, "Demonstrations as Data" how later, we could contact-trace people who caught it at demonstrations to nail down how close they'd been to their infector, how long, and get a far better idea how infection proceeds. It's happy, not sad, of course, to have little such data, because so few were infected. Instead of finding the spacing and duration at which spread and superspread occur, we've found the whole thing was below the "superspreading is probable" level. Hooray!
Saturday, America will run another experiment where people gather in a sports arena, most probably without masks, and not moving. I honestly hope that, too, will result in few cases. I'd far rather have the terrific news that we can do things like that in relative safety, than the ugly "satisfaction" of seeing the participants infected - whatever our other disagreements.
http://brander.ca/c19#nospike
It would be easy to continue in that vein, during the pandemic: they could have kept on all staff, at a loss. But, no, the way they got rich was by high prices and low wages, and I'm sure the thought never occurred. (Link to story about Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison cutting wages to front-line grocery staff the other day.)
Billions allow massive brute-force solutions to problems, too. We could have been talking heavy-metal, industrial-grade charity, this spring. Lord, lord, what can you do with a billion dollars, when people are hurting for the lack of a few hundred? They could have bought all that restaurant food, and had it delivered to shelters; they could have rented out entire hotels and closed the shelters.
They could have done that thing they're always ranting on about: been fast and nimble where government is slow and ponderous; they could have started cutting checks in March, had handed out a few thousand in food and shelter to each of, say, 10 million people, saved restaurants and hotels. Spread among a few dozen billionaires, it would have been only several percent of their wealth apiece, money they'd never miss. It wouldn't have been much compared to the government's trillions, of course, but a few tens of billions would have made them admired and beloved, and made Giridharadas look the fool.
Nothing. Except for making Anand Giridharadas look brilliant.
Sorry, that's unfair. The Bloomberg charities have a "COVID-19 Response"; it has a $40 million "Initiative", focused on Africa. Mike's answer to America's problems, of course, was to drop $500M in a month flat on the glorification of Mike Bloomberg, and his elevation to president. Man, that was quick and nimble. (So was his utter cessation of spending on criticism of the administration, when it was clear he wouldn't benefit.)
It may work out to "less than nothing", since the rich are enjoying many government pandemic supports. The link is to a story about private, schools that benefit both as schools, and as businesses. Better the money come from us than more from the "billionaire benefactor". In total, American billionaires have gained $565 billion more just during the pandemic.
In Canada, is was that slow, ponderous government that was nimble: the government web site to get you your CERB money was up in a week, took only a few clicks. Compare to the Windows 10 upgrade that has people willing to abandon Microsoft.
Speaking of Bill Gates, he's been held up as a hero for warning of pandemic. What did he do that dozens of $100K/year health officials did not? Nothing. He only got attention for those warnings because he's a billionaire and they're not.
Bill's been lionized for years for giving billions to a fund that in turn does good in the third world. But he's still worth tens of billions. He's known the US government was going to have a useless pandemic response since before the pandemic; Bill could not only have responded quickly, he could have dropped a lousy billion on preparation in 2019; added another when December made it clear the pandemic was probably getting loose; and a couple of billion a month since, if he really wanted to help.
The Gates foundation could have been sitting on 100 million masks, bought for under a buck apiece when nobody but Mr. Smartypants saw it coming.
It may be a necessity of the way our economy works at present that some people pile up billions. (It's not a necessity for much of it to not be taxed back away, but, for another time.) But the notion that this concentration of wealth has a social utility, by giving power to the smart and good, who then use it better than the public could ever vote to do, has been disproved for years, just reported on by Giridharadas. It's now proven again by their squandered opportunity, a crisis they let go to waste. They had an incredible, Hollywood-movie-script-grade of disaster to show their value, and they were useless.
http://brander.ca/c19#billionaires
I pretty much avoided even clicking on this stuff. Much of it has the crucial problem of mistaking "our current politics and economics" with "capitalism", which it surely isn't. Government has been too involved to call it that since the 19th century, and monopolies and oligopolies have more recently taken over, what, a third of the economy? We techies thought the Internet would be this New Deal of its own, creating zillions of new little companies and hot competition, eliminating the old monopolies like IBM, the oligopolies like the TV networks. It devolved down into MAGAF (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook) faster than the many airlines of the 1950s were consolidated to a few.
It was our economy, and not "pure" capitalism, that Matthew Rosza really meant, with the article The coronavirus' next victim? Capitalism, in Salon.com, a week back.
I clicked on this one, because Rosza, finishing his history PhD, just does a lot of well-researched journalism. It caught me at once, because he pointed out that our "economic status quo...is fatally flawed", with examples that have been striking me as dead right for all three months now.
Hunter-gatherer tribes, we must note, do not have this problem. They just rally around the sick, injured, old, and "take care of their own". The notion of a "safety net" was not invented by Karl Marx, but by cavemen. Champions like to assume that capitalism is the economic equivalent of "nature", of competition by species in a forest, something that just has to be. But communism (within the tribe, all is shared in times of need) was actually the natural state of most of primitive humanity. We've lost that. (Except, of course, in families, which are all communes. From parents according to abilities, to grandma and kids according to their needs. "Family values" are Marxist.)
Rosza further pulled me in by pointing out how much of current business depends on lies. Lies about the costs of economic production: ecological costs, health costs, social costs of stress. Those in the debate rarely come out and say "yeah, we're hurting people and nature, but it's worth it", they dismiss the problem as nonexistent, damn the studies. (The "we have to kill grandma" crowd of the pandemic are actually kind of refreshingly honest.)
Recently, this has involved more and more denigration of scientists who are clearly just pursuing truth. Paul Krugman has been railing for decades at the compromises made in academic economics to keep up "debate" about tax cuts paying for themselves - or health care, not doing so. We don't have to get me started on climatology, because, now epidemiology has offered far better examples of dismissing scientists, and truth itself, because it might cost some profits.
If the pandemic doesn't kill that part of our system, something else has to.
Lastly, even Rosza doesn't get into the "highest" achievement of our system: a globalized economy of maximized efficiency. Every solution, but the cheapest, is driven to bankruptcy...and that cheapest depends on no blockages to travel and supply chains. The whole thing derails like a train hitting a loose track when any part of it glitches. But that precarity and brittleness were the inevitable outcome of the free market drive to efficiency above all. It cannot, by itself, ever prioritize resilience and safety, because they are expensive. Just as it can never prioritize the environment, physical health, or mental health. Government can regulate it to do so, but when it does, it's not really capitalism any more.
One of the greatest "capitalist" successes of recent years was addicting millions of Americans to opioids; the profits were massive. This wasn't an aberration of the system, but an entirely natural outcome of its rules.
We need to change those rules - by any means necessary.
I would prefer something non-violent, like politics. I've made jokes about the "radicalism" of recent protests, with pearl-clutching at the mere suggestion to "defund" (partially) the police. When I was a kid, protesters chanted "Off The Pigs". Even that is but light radicalism compared to beheading 30,000 French aristocrats; that's generally what you have to do to really change a political/economic status quo.
Do we need to start supporting more "radical" politics? Well, the safe ones have led us into grave societal weakness, destruction of our world, and now, mass death. The pandemic has merely slapped our faces with a long-established truth.
http://brander.ca/c19#capitalism
In other words, everybody else has caught up with CCCC of a week ago. Back then, I went further, to combining the Maritimes and Prairies and BC, waving aside the difference between "10 cases a day" and "10 cases a week", because Ontario and Quebec were orders of magnitude higher again.
It strikes me as so obvious that we need to start with inter-provincial "travel bubbles", that I'd be willing to pass on my own agenda for a while. Can't they discuss a Saskatchewan/Manitoba "bubble"? They're both better off than BC or Alberta. Really, a good metric is "active cases per million", which should be proportional to your risk of infection, hitting the street or the store:
The log scale also explains back to me why BC and especially Alberta shouldn't be in the same bubble as Saskatchewan/Manitoba. All are very low compared to central Canada, but Alberta needs to halve its case-load again before it's in BCs' league, by ten-fold to be the same risk as Saskatchewan.
So, fine, we'll have to wait. Can we get started by proposing a bubble for SK/MB? It's something.
http://brander.ca/c19#localbubbles
But, for the record, the worldometers reading on the US death toll finished yesterday just a few hundred short, no doubt already added as I write, of the total US death toll for World War One. (116,500 ish).
Like the COVID-19 losses; they happened in a short period, in contrast to the Vietnam war that was spread out over several years. Most of the American dying in WW1 happened after the start of 1918, in the spring and summer.
Very, very, like the COVID-19 losses, nearly half of them; 45,000 of those died of the 1918 pandemic. Of them, 30,000 died before reaching the war in France, they got sick and died in transit.
Interesting, isn't it, that pandemic-disease deaths of serving soldiers, thrown into close quarters by the requirements of their job, are recorded as "war deaths"...but the deaths of meat-plant workers, who got sick because of their job conditions, are going to be their problem, not their employers? What's the difference?
On the "round numbers" front: Canada just did its two-millionth COVID test yesterday. It was 39,241 more tests than the day before, so we are slooowly making progress at reaching that "60,000/day" number that's still the last word I have on "the number needed to re-open safely".
You know, we should "trust the experts" to give good advice. Just don't expect a bureaucracy, however many experts it has, to give good service on short notice.
http://brander.ca/c19#milestones
But the June 2020 issue of "Alberta Views" had a review of "Bad Law", by John Reilly. I've stretched a definition of "pandemic topic" a bit to include the recent protests, but today, I got nothin'. This is just not about the pandemic. I tried looking for some Indigenous/pandemic "hooks" to relate the two, but all I can do is remark in passing that most of the Nations have locked down well, kept outsiders out so as to be COVID-19 free. There are ongoing concerns with how well Canada's health system works for those communities, which the pandemic has exacerbated. But other than that, I guess I'm changing topics for one day. Back to the pandemic tomorrow.
Reilly just has really valuable perspectives on Canada's law-enforcement relationship, having spent 33 years putting Nakoda (Stoney) people in jail. He slowly twigged to the pointlessness of it, the complete ineffectiveness.
Reilly won his point, keeping his seat at Canmore, with jurisdiction over the Stoney Nakoda, where he knew the community and had made strong links, retiring a dozen years back. It's his books, however, that brought his experiences with the futility of our justice approach out to affect more than the one community of 4000-some.
This does not let the rest-of-Canada off at all; right-wing talking points that imply that bad lives on 'The Rez' are the residents' own fault, miss two points. First, that every human society has had exactly the same tendency to slip into feudal-style governance (including some giant superpowers I could name). Especially, though, that the favourite tactic of the British, French, and Spanish colonial empires was to bribe and then support the worst elements of the subject population. As you look across what we now call "the third world", the whole thing is all (former) colonial subjects, the awful, feudal, governments devised by empires to control and exploit.
With people talking about completely re-writing our policing and legal strategies, Reilly's insights are the result of a lifetime of learning and changing, come from a deeply humane man. We've given our police the dual job: of being police, and keeping the underclass under control. We need deeply humane people to inform the new system.
PS: Oh, and read any novel by the late Richard Wagamese, former Herald columnist. His death was a great loss for Canada.
http://brander.ca/c19#reilly
When I typed in my "canada testing plan" google, I literally got the same result; the top link was one I'd clicked on two weeks ago, "COVID-19 testing shortfall spurs quest for radical approaches" at the Globe. That link led to my post about Paul Hebert, with his radical approach indeed.
I know from embittering personal experience what happens when a guy with a radical new idea, one that would totally show up the accomplishments of the old system, approaches a bureaucracy. Nothing. Smiles, nods, a few words of thanks, but the phone doesn't ring. Dr. Hebert's great idea is likely in File 13, unless politicians, or newsies, follow up and push. In any event, there hasn't been another news story in the four weeks since he called them. Tick-tock, 2,500 people died during that period, and provinces continue with re-opening plans that need those tests.
That's just the one point; Dr. Hebert's idea might not have worked, anyway, and it would be fine if the regular system had been able to scale up and produce that 60,000 number, with contact-tracers to suit. It's incredibly important, should be a push comparable to a military campaign. There should be stories about the training and hiring of testers, stories about the changes in labs, stories about the shifting of people from regular jobs to testing jobs.
Nothing.
I tried "canada testing labs changes scale-up" as a google, and got Trudeau offering help to scale-up(May 21), and experts calling for the scale-up in The Star (May 11). I couldn't even find any news with that google if I restricted it to the last week. The top link was to antibody therapies. I don't know what else to google. I'm pretty sure there's just no news on a 60,000-tests-per-day in the offing.
I'll leave it there for today. What there is journalism about is the prospect of continued re-opening in places with increasing case-loads. The lack of testing is going to have a heavy price.
http://brander.ca/c19#sigh
I had wondered, despite trying to follow all the news, why BC had such sane policies about distancing. There were many cautions about going out in parks, and they did close up playground equipment . But they didn't close up my utterly necessary mental health equipment (Stanley Park). My relatives in Madrid were confined to the house. In France, they backed that up with a form you had to fill to be allowed out for groceries.
"That's the only way as a community we can get through this without traumatizing people," she said.
She's a doctor that treats the "whole patient", body and soul; those are the best. One who can recognize that the whole society consists of souls, not just bodies, souls that need certain nourishment, too, for the body to be well.
I wish we could put her in charge of more of the government, frankly. This week, "the cops" come to mind.
The article notes how well the public took it when she teared up on camera over the losses in care homes, a contrast to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney clearly shrugging at them as occurring at advanced age, from "an influenza".
Another quote concerned her handling the SARS problem in Toronto, and a case where both parents got it, and there was nobody to take care of the children. They wound up doing four weeks in children's hospital, the only public system that would take them in. As she relates the incident to her interviewer, again there were tears. Seventeen years later. Everybody can see she really cares, really. It's kind of staggering after you get used enough to politicians.
She's a Dear, and she is, for the moment, our unquestioned Leader; Premier John Horgan is not stupid enough to do anything but rubber-stamp her best-in-the-world advice. Her team's program has gotten us through the first wave, at least, with one of the least-lethal outcomes on the planet, despite a comparatively restrained lockdown.
I'm trying to think of any place on the planet that did not screw up the care home situation; even with the pandemic known to be coming, the first outbreaks in them were nonetheless a surprise. But BC, at least set the standard for quick response.
Economically, the trust she has earned means that the re-opening process will be trusted, too; some politicians paint the populace as straining at the leash to get back to mingling, but polls indicate people are wary. Most want the re-opening staged and paced by a caring medic, not businessmen or pawns thereof. (By the way, Slate has a great article up today about high and low risk activities, from a cautious ER doctor who also really gets the need to get out and enjoy life.)
It's true, BC had its share of luck, which Henry herself gives all the credit to. Unlike Quebec and Ontario, we didn't have an early spring break. But the best make their own luck, and our good luck was to have her.
http://brander.ca/c19#bonnie
We've had a lot of "advice" from infectious disease experts that only reveals what they don't know. Passing a runner with a mask off? Cyclists in each other's slipstreams? If not two metres, how exposed are you at 1.5? Their answers reveal only that they know what elevates and reduces risk - but not by how much.
Hundreds of thousands on the march provide enough data for a lot of statistics and some real hard numbers. Later contact tracing may indicate that a marcher had no other infected contacts, just the march. At that point, the only stats we'll have are that some marches caused 100 infections, and some 1000. Will that just turn into useless number soup, that going to "a march" provides you with a "probability of infection between 0.01% and 1%", almost worthless, across two orders of magnitude.
If we knew more about outdoors transmission in under-two-metre proximity, we could have confidence to space restaurant tables, re-start outdoor construction work and resource work. We'd all have a better idea whether we need masks on the street, or can take them off when we leave the grocery.
Yes, the press are all over the demonstrations; but they're looking for drama and appeal. That's completely different from scientific data-gathering, which would be more about taking picture after picture from the same location, and covering the least-packed as well as most-packed parts of the crowd. Asking an infectee later how long he stood where, combined with such photos, indicate whether you can actually get infected at three metres - or not be, at 1.5.
We keep repeating that the marchers are taking a risk with their lives, because of the need for social change. They are also risking the lives of people not there, and we may not get the social change. (Remember the Parkland gun-control marches? Enough said...) So we should at least get, from the disease spread, some information that could save many other lives.
We shouldn't let a demonstration go to waste.
http://brander.ca/c19#tracking
Texas has its own whole article in the Times, which has detailed case statistics on a separate page. The article makes no mention at all of protests; it's all about how re-opening is a political statement there, and good conservatives are shrugging off pandemic risks. So Texas is a puzzler.
And then we come to Florida and Arizona. Worldometers doesn't yet consider either Florida or Arizona worthy of their own pages for time-series, so I had to type in the daily-cases numbers from May 25 to June 6 myself (I archive every day's site, with the awesome power of Unix "wget" and "crontab" facilities. How I pity Windows victims.)
That graph reassured that Virgina is not headed upwards, but told a bad story about Arizona. The graph links to the spreadsheet, if you want it.
Florida, how did I miss it: there are numerous stories, days old, about consecutive days of spiking cases. The journalism about both states is not blaming the protests, though noting the risk, as does every good story about them. Attempting to relate the case-rates, and the protests, through gross case-counts, as here, is of course perilous. If contact-tracing finds few links back to protest attendance, then these "spikes" have other reasons. That, too, should fall out of good contact-tracing: are they related to re-opened business owners and employees? To shopping? Everybody trying to guess what's happening, feels like screaming that great Sherlock Holmes line: "Data, data, data, I cannot make bricks without clay."
http://brander.ca/c19#az
America has a problem with the infections not falling in much of the country; but so far, no spike. Frankly, one hopes the protests fade away after this weekend; if they haven't made their point now, protests aren't going to do it. And to repeat from the other day, daily protests mean, not steady, but exponential spread, which absolutely creates a spike after a while.
http://brander.ca/c19#protestspike
So my only excuse is that I thought up a joke, and hell, this is pandemic, and a social crisis, and surely we all need a joke. It's not even a joke, really, American politics has become so extremist that the "joke" is actually possible.
In an environment of "constitutional hardball", where the power to schedule a supreme court appointment is used to hold it up for a year, to deny a president a right; where the power to throw out voter registrations is used to win the next election, every level of government can use their powers to the maximum for purely political ends.
But they do have the "power" to paint lines on streets. Nobody thought of that as a real power before, at least not recently; I can't think of another example of this. Muriel Bowser, Mayor of Washington, DC, gets my vote for both political genius-level creativity, and also for political courage. The main reason, I suspect, that this looks new, is that a municipal government is normally crazy to have any conflict with higher levels that control so much budget. (Which has already been threatened.)
Mayor Bowser has the power to paint almost anything on those streets. So, she is being very gentle and kind to only have painted the streets she controls to show the message above from the air.
I don't see that she lacks any power whatsoever to just "go for it", and haul out more yellow paint to just send this message, at right, instead. Foriegn leaders, coming in to DC by air, could all consider the level of support enjoyed by the federal government while contemplating it.
In a perhaps-lame attempt to wrest the topic back to COVID-19, what more powers might a municipality haul out? Vancouver police at our demonstrations were polite, professional, and wore masks. But lets "go for it": What if we'd ordered them to carry signs saying "Grandpa's Life Matters, Wear a Mask Today", and given them each a shoulder bag of masks to hand out? "Have a good event, today, here's your mask, sir. Have a good event today, here's your mask, ma'am. Have a good event today..."
Too often, cities shuffle off that kind of stuff to full-time social workers that are, of course, cheaper, and probably better at it. But the cost is that in doing so, they blow the opportunity to show the police as benign, friendly people on the street, with charity to all and malice toward none. Now is a literally perfect time to tell the police to take extra time and effort to be seen as caring and helpful, not just fierce and powerful. The pandemic demands extra measures be taken to protect and serve, this year. And the moment is one where the police can improve their image.
Pandemic politics are the most local of all. Two metres.
http://brander.ca/c19#dc
Canada still just has 11 zones, every provincial health system is a separate fishtank. This caught me by surprise, yesterday, when my wife carefully checked the provincial web sites to confirm it. I'd been automatically assuming that BC's talk of mid-June restorations of travel and tourism applied to Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba. Somehow, I'd assumed our epidemiologists thought like Spanish epidemiologists, since they're all epidemiologists, and it's just the one science.
It wasn't worth widening the graph for the smaller-population provinces in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Maritimes, and the whole North (SK+MB+M+N), to have their own bars; their cases were either zero or barely worth counting, so I lumped them all into a 4.8-million "rest of Canada" (the same size as BC) with 0.8 cases per million per day.
You could make a case, if you were a nervous Maritimer, for not allowing travel from BC and Alberta, with 3 and 4 times their case-load; but, really, that's moot, because you have to either get on an aircraft to do it, or travel for two or three days of driving across our "Zone 1" which is an order of magnitude worse.
My complaint is nothing compared to the Manitoba/Saskatchewan border: imagine being told that you can't travel from a place with 1.3 new cases per day to a place with 0.6! Quebec has a similar internal problem: all their cases are around Montreal, and the Rest of Quebec is chafing at the restrictions.
Canada's internal borders are currently defined by bureaucracy: what area of land is under the jurisdiction of a given provincial authority. For the summer, we need to re-define the borders by the different jurisdictions of the virus, not the jurisdictions of the humans.
http://brander.ca/c19#2solitudes
I gather these "blackout Tuesday" posts have now been criticized, as they were meant to all link to information about the issue, and most are not. CCCC is two days late on the whole thing, mainly because it sticks to the coronavirus topic, where safe demonstrations were advocated, particularly safety for older relatives back at home.
But safety for demonstrators themselves, including virus-safety, I have some great links:
To my fellow white folks, I have a word of caution, second-hand, from Matt Taibbi, author of "I Can't Breathe" about the Garner killing. Matt didn't do careful stats, but his feeling, after reading thousands of arrest stories, was that white people are not actually much safer from the police than Blacks. Only a quarter as many are killed by them, proportionately, because they are stopped much less often to start with. Once you have been stopped, the statistics of bad outcomes are not that much better for whites.
http://brander.ca/c19#blackspot
As you can see, they're pretty tightly packed in the crowd, the better to see. This also happens in demonstrations, where people are in one place trying to hear a speaker, not so much on marches, where people space out a bit. Every foot of distance helps. It's well-known, now, that 2 metres isn't really enough for 100% safety; it's a compromise that provides a high percentage of safety. But even one metre is undoubtedly far, far better than one foot.
I came across the Vancouver picture while googling for aerial shots of crowds, because any picture in the news media that's at ground level is almost certainly shot with a telephoto lens that exaggerates the appearance of crowding.
Photography site "petapixel.com" has a nice explanatory article about the problem. Crowds are news, and their news value is in proportion to their size, as the "controversy" over the American Inaugural crowds highlighted. News photographers have every incentive to point their lens at the tightest spot in a larger crowd, and use heavy telephoto compression to make it look like a cattle stampede.
Overhead shots, like here for Vancouver, are far more truthful. Overhead shots of the George Floyd demonstrations are hard to come by, but there are a few.
So, we will have a mixed bag of results in a few weeks. Much may depend on whether the protests continue; speaking of "exponential", protests that last long enough for those infected on Day 1 to become asymptomatic spreaders a few days later (the last few days) mean the exponential function will begin to do its multiplications: a quarter percent of the crowd spreading 8 days ago was a half percent 5 days ago, a full percent two days ago, two percent tomorrow. I hope that was an exaggeration.
Other than that, I can only repeat: the people in these crowds need to isolate, every way they can, from their families, especially older family members. Every outbreak can be stopped with the original victims - if they do the right thing.
http://brander.ca/c19#outdoorspread
Tremendous news is probably not getting the attention it deserves today, but at least it is in the New York Times: "Just Stop the Superspreading" by epidemiologists Dillion Adam and Benjamin Cowling.
News junkies have all been aware of "superspreader" events like the one choir practice that infected 52 from one person, and of course the religious meeting that spread one case to 5000, in South Korea -- linked from the photo above.
What the new study found was that these are crucial! Wait for it: 70% of victims infect nobody. Another 10% infected one or two others. Were it not for the last 20%, the R0 would be way under one. But the last 20% account for 80% of infections, a perfect example of The Pareto Principle.
Everybody has wanted to find the "game changer", because we really hate this game, where our only winning move is to lose at everything else we do. The game-changer, as the researchers say in their headline, is that we only have to stop the superspreaders. As we learn more about how it transmits, the importance of ventilation and airflow, we may be able to re-open offices, some restaurants, a long list of businesses where contact can be controlled.
Up for tomorrow: are the American demonstrations likely to superspread?
http://brander.ca/c19#superspreader
At least we have a really good, large-scale example of the term, "triggered".
Up here in Canada, where the protests have been mostly peaceful, and the politicians sympathetic, we can continue to pay some attention to saving the world. As it were. For today, I now have a collection of people standing around talking in the streets near my home. Let's look at their body positions over two months.
The Starbucks Morning Gang has been showing up there every day, mostly keeping some distance, if not two metres, for ten weeks now. It just seems to me the last few days that they've closed in another half-metre; they may not even realize it themselves.
I'm seeing more people passing closely on Denman Street, as well - and not that many masks, not much more than half of those indoors at Safeway wearing them.
There will be no sudden costs for this (that's the problem, we aren't good with long-delayed, diffuse punishments or rewards). BC is down to a few hundred active cases (known), so guess at 400 infectious people walking around unknowing, out of 4 million - only one person in 10,000 can infect you. Even multiplying by ten for "they're mostly in big cities", you could pass close to a dozen people a day, with hardly 1% odds on one being infectious. I suspect that people have kind of internalized that sense of safety.
Whether we push our R-nought back up above 1.0 is of course the question. At present, I'd guess no. But these behaviour changes tend to continue.
http://brander.ca/c19#coffeecloser
Canada has all these problems, but I like to imagine we have them dialled down a few notches. If our justice system hadn't properly nailed the killer of Sammy Yatim, we'd be in a worse place. At least our PM came out and said good things yesterday, including the admission that we have all these problems.
(I just passed the
Good Fight Test
by remembering the name "Sammy Yatim", unprompted. Yay me. Maybe not a good person, but not a terrible one, either.)
It all makes for a good reason to scan the American headlines, but read your Canadian news. It's about solving problems, not screaming that nobody is even trying to. I've only got so much bandwidth for stupid, needless, self-caused problems this spring.
http://brander.ca/c19#canadanews
It's generous to say those are only a week apart, as one is from morning, the other late afternoon. So it's conservative to give our testing rate as:
(82,764 - 76,054 ) / 7 = 959 positive tests/day.
Our positives rate, then is 959 / 27,829 = 3.4%
..which is a good number, actually. Lower is better. America's, to get back to pitying them, is nearly triple that. South Korea's is 1.3%, and they're the gold standard, of course; we'd quickly get down to that if only we could triple testing, as long promised.
Besides America, you've got to pity the dull life of a registered Canadian contact tester, however. Canada has 27,000 registered contact testers.
So our last simple arithmetic for the day, is that we have a contact tester ready to go for every test made every day. With under 4% positive, we have over 25 people eager to descend upon each hapless disease case. If they aren't all bored, one imagines the Zoom Meeting From Hell, where 25 contact testers in a Brady Bunch Grid batter upon the coughing, feverish victim, demanding the name of every contact, no matter how remote, so that they can each call at least one person, and get some work.
Alberta's just announcing testing for anybody, symptomatic or not; just what I was asking BC for six days back. Let's get that going everywhere, do that tripling of tests, get that ratio down below 2%. It's the road home.
http://brander.ca/c19#boredtesters
Which, if things work out as usual, now be revealed as a fad and panic reaction that's now over, sticking Safeway with all these large-format bags of flour.
Happily, the other belated respose that has finally arrived, is a testing plan, at least for Ontario, which needs one the second-worst in Canada. That's after Quebec, which will probably have so bad a year that the rest of us can't bear to look, unless they start pounding pots together and hanging their PM in effigy. A google on "quebec testing" yields a bunch of four-week-old stories about hitting 14,000 tests per day, a three-week-old story about coming up way short of that, and a two-week-old story about only being up to 9,000. No other announcements. I can't find a stat on their current tests/day anywhere.
In short, Canada has still only averaged 27,000 tests/day for the last five days, up from 25,000 weeks ago. Epidemiologists assured us we need to be testing about three times that many people to "re-open". Canada is lumbering into our response with a ponderous sluggishness that makes Safeway's flour-supply-chain look like lightning reflexes.
I don't know their problems; I'm sure everybody means well, and is working hard. Still, we all have to note that South Korea managed this on-the-fly, with no warning, three months ago now.
Pick it up, somehow, guys. You're embarrassing us. Oh, and killing us.
http://brander.ca/c19#testsatlast
The cartoon at left is just over 30 years old, from late 1989; about the death of a regular character from AIDS. We've largely forgotten how it was ignored for years, treated as a disease that was not merely confined to the gay community, but was just inherently so, unable to infect everybody else.
Efforts are being made now to make COVID seem like an "old disease" as AIDS was "the gay disease"...something that happens to other people and can be ignored.
The effort it takes to look away can be considerable, and involve people who are perfectly aware of the real problem, to manufacture acceptable stories about how things are not that bad, how they are progressing on their own, improvement is coming, it will turn around, no need to look here, everybody move along.
Even more frequent is temporization: it's a problem and we are studying it. We are aware, thanks for your concern, we'll have a policy soon.
We may feel triumphal, in Canada, that we didn't actually ignore the pandemic itself, didn't call it a "hoax", didn't pretend it was all going to go away like magic. That is nice, but what a low bar.
We could hold our heads up higher if our nation had been the one to think of protecting care homes when they were still untouched. We could really hold our heads up high if we'd spotted that people were dying in them at higher rates than they could, years ago. Decades. Instead, we now have
"Lawyers Wonder Why COVID Long-Term Care Warnings Have Been Ignored"
Seems we'd been ignoring the deaths from other causes for a long time, which right there were all the warning needed that COVID would have the same effect as a bad flu year...times ten...on a care home. But ALL deaths in care homes rested quietly in the giant blind-spot we'd constructed around them.
We ask "What will change permanently?" about this. I only wish it were our magical ability to blind ourselves.
http://brander.ca/c19#lookaway
It's confirmed today that the low reported-death statistics on the weekend suffered from reporting delays; today's number on worldometers is already as high as the previous two days combined, and there's hours of reporting to go.
That means my notional 102,636 number will be hit (on worldometers, at least) early tomorrow. I suspect it will pass unnoticed; they can't put two "we've just passed a noteworthy number" stories so close together. Possibly in a week, the 116K for WW1 will get a story.
Since they have too few stories of a good response happening, they probably see their job as to keep printing alarming stories in hopes of stimulating one at last.
Canada, incidentally, can't do these stories. We lost too few in other wars (516 in Korea) to be a shocking number to compare to, and far too many in WW1 (68K) and WW2 (48K) to ever reach those in this pandemic. Thankfully. Even more thankfully, we don't require "scary numbers" to get our governments to act with political courage.
http://brander.ca/c19#100katlast
COVID-19 deaths in countries that didn't protect their care homes - and I believe that is all of them - have a "long tail". The dying fight for their lives on ventilators for a month before succumbing. So the wave, in terms of infections, is over weeks before the dying stops.
The deaths in care homes are something like 80% of all of them in Canada. In BC, perhaps even more so: apparently the average age at death of a BC victim is 86.
The problem with fighting a virus is that people need to be respectful of it - scared of it, frankly - when there's no deaths in the news to keep reminding you of the ridiculous-sounding fact of an invisible threat.
It's almost a test of imagination; you have to be able to continue to imagine your neighbours a concern, when they don't look scary. Well, the test has now begun in earnest.
http://brander.ca/c19#nodeaths
12:04 PM PDT: Worldometers.info: 99,636. News: still just yesterday's stories with the "as the US approaches" construction.
13:55 PM PDT: Worldometers.info: 99,739. News: unchanged
15:04 PM PDT: Worldometers.info: 99,754. News: unchanged
16:37 PM PDT: Worldometers.info: 99,804. News: unchanged.
09:19 AM PDT: Worldometers.info 99,987. News: changed but not claiming 100K.
09:27 AM PDT: Worldometers.info 99,997. News: unchanged from 9:19.
09:31 AM PDT: Worldometers.info 100,021. News: unchanged from 5 minutes ago.
10:20 AM PDT: Worldometers.info 100,041. News: CTV just published a new article still using "as US closes in on..." in the headline. CTV, at least, does not use Worldometers, or, at least, wasn't waiting for the exact moment. And nobody has yet published a "100,000 hit" story. My faith is starting to be restored.
10:52 AM PDT: Worldometers.info 100,090. News: Salon just published the first post-100,000 headline...but it's just a new headline on an existing story about Memorial Day.
Anyway, I'm calling off the "watch", with relief.
http://brander.ca/c19#100000
Which is getting very close to something I want, and I suspect a few million want, but hate to bring it up: a test just to quiet my fears. It's not fear of the disease, but of giving it. I'd badly like to go visit my mother-in-law; my wife, even more so, obviously. But, Dora is 88, and it wouldn't do to take the smallest chance. We'd been thinking of putting in a week or more of even-more-serious isolation, just stock up on groceries and avoid everybody in the parks and streets by four metres, whatever. Combined with an ever-lower probability of infection as our local case-count drops, it would probably be duly-diligent enough by some point in June.
Most news stories lean on how people are eager to do their own "re-open" activity; not enough, perhaps, on how many are eager...but afraid.
PS: I want extra credit for not starting the headline with "Dude".
http://brander.ca/c19#mytest
There are now a rash of articles calling this a right-wing drug. It's not just in America; that's Jair Bolsonaro's own description, from South America's new fascist government (in all but name). The Guardian calls it "The Triumph of Right-Wing Quackery", and The Independent goes further to say that "The Far Right Depends on Snake Oil". And everybody is noting that HCQ (my own abbreviation) is basically a conspiracy theory, with conspiracy theories being constant on the right lately, so it's a "right-wing thing" because they love a good conspiracy to suppress a "cure".
I've read exactly one article that made sense to me in this regard. The theory hasn't come up from another writer, so I'm pleased to recommend "Behind the right's obsession with a miracle cure" by Amanda Marcotte of Salon, seven weeks back. The sub-head summarizes it as a "deep rooted hostility to public health".
Or, more fully:
Conservative ideology simply doesn't allow for the possibility that anything, including pandemic management, is best managed with a "we're all in this together" mentality. Instead they're drawn to this fantasy that there's a Platinum Member COVID-19 status that can be purchased, which will allow them to opt out of the suffering of the plebeian class that has to quarantine or risk sickness and death.
It's kind of like Obama being President of the United States; it's just an intolerable thought that must be escaped, if only with a fantasy about Kenya; the notion that we have to take care of the least among us, because the survival of ultra-right octogenarians like Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, and Sheldon Adelson suddenly depends on homeless people and illegal-immigrant meatpackers not being infected... is also intolerable. There has to be a dodge, a way out.
The drug may be cheap, democratic, you'd think. Except that no drug could be cheap if billions needed many doses in a matter of months. It would become exclusive and expensive very quickly. So, even a cheap drug does fit Marcotte's theory: they're so desperate to believe they can get special treatment, they're fantasizing it.
It does move one from contempt to pity. For a moment.
http://brander.ca/c19#whyhcq
Boris Johnson,
The pandemic is a real news story in that the news just shows up by surprise, can't be controlled easily, is always big enough to grab attention. (Unlike wage theft.) It's like an enemy in war; our plans don't survive contact with it, causing surprise events that just come by themselves. It provides an automatic news cycle, stories showing up unforced. It's when our leaders are surprised that we can see how good they are at their real jobs. They would prefer the job of being actors on a stage, their own script, and the script of their opponent, already known. When surprised, they tend to go into hiding, like my cat.
http://brander.ca/c19#autonews
As when I predicted an outpouring of journalistic hooks on the Vietnam War casualty number, and found numerous articles where they hit the "publish" button all in the same hour, there's a spate of articles that will be written today for a quick one-button publish on the weekend. Likely Sunday, unless there's delays in reporting, the five zeros will roll up, as the USA hits 100,000 dead. The timing should be perfect for the Sunday Evening News.
I added up all the numbers since WW2, starting with 51 lost in the Chinese Civil War, 1945-1950, ending with the war in Afghanistan (2,216 and counting) and the "Raid on Yemen" in 2017, one death. It came to 102,636. Mostly, that's Vietnam (58K), plus Korea (36K), plus the War On Terror (7K).
There's another coming up a week or two after that: "more than" 116,516 lost in World War One, that's a good headline.
Or, possibly, there will be stories at 125,325 - the total casualties between the Civil War and the start of WW2. With luck, the USA will not reach 167,013 - the total US War casualties if you just subtract the Civil War, WW1 and WW2. But reporters will be able to play puzzle games with the spreadsheet, if they need headlines like "Worse than WW1 plus Korea" (at 153,032).
It all depends on what kind of statement a journalist thinks will make a good hook, as they watch the numbers roll by. It's hard to make a story out of a number, unless it's round, or has a familiar historical reference. The problem with all this, of course, is that they're reporting numbers. Lives turned into statistics.
There's no chance of them not making it, at least, to the WW1 number of 116,516. Let's hope it doesn't become a whole Korea worse than that.
http://brander.ca/c19#102636
http://brander.ca/c19#namechange
A check of the federal site indicated progress from 1,203,512 tests to 1,377,196 over a week: not even 25,000 per day, that is, not half enough.
With BC, I checked the Sun and Province, and the only mention of "testing" at all provides a hint for where to complain: "Canada Offers To Lend Provinces Aid in Boosting Testing" in The Province, reminding that the Provincial health systems have to actually do this, the feds "just" hand them money and tools.
A specific google on "Alberta Testing Plan" found bold claims to double testing back on May 6, but no new announcements.
What's bothering me about the journalism is the lack of stories even trying to explain this. We could understand better if there were stories about how hard it is to train contact-tracers, or how the test kits are coming but the labs are still setting up assembly lines to greatly increase throughput, or whatever. There's be zero follow-up on Paul Hebert, the insect biologist with the idea for automating testing. I suppose that one week is too little for progress there, but an announcment that a provincial system was going to move on his suggestion would have been very welcome.
I believe we are now in week three of Doug Ford being "shocked". There's two problems here, for Doug Ford:
Of course, Ontario may not look bad, compared to Quebec. There's no sign of news from Quebec at all. Probably for the best. I expect only bad news from Quebec this spring.
http://brander.ca/c19#testupdate1
She was also admitted to hospital and died. Again, there were no ventilators.
My Mom and Dad had some kid-scaring stories about deprivation - as a coal-miner's kid in the Depression, of wartime rationing. But our worst days, 80 years back, did not include the inability to afford soap. World War One caused great domestic hardship and poverty, too, but the 1918 pandemic was not made worse by the unaffordability of soap.
So spare a thought of charity for the Congo & surrounding areas, but also for people in New York who cannot afford soap. Or, at least, the people keeping them in jail cannot afford soap. Which is odd, because they can afford a jail, and nightsticks and tasers and jailer stuff.
They're apparently being issued those little, one-ounce bars of soap you get in motels, and I'm sure it's not the luxury brands. The cheapest I could find worked out to 8 cents per bar, for 0.8 ounces, or ten cents an ounce. We're talking about less than a buck a month.
It's possible that this is just massive incompetence and indifference, including indifference to the lives of the guards, not just the inmates; but you have to wonder if it's again the best essay of recent years coming true: The Cruelty is the Point.
http://brander.ca/c19#soap
What will change permanently, are things that were already headed that way anyway. We were probably headed for more work-from-home as the technology improved and as people got used to it, and as old people uncomfortable with it, die off.
(Actually, everything that kills older people, who are still running things, is helpful for change; but in the "still running things" years under 70-ish, it won't kill enough of us to make much difference. Sorry.)
So we'll head back to the office, mostly, but there will be a permanent residual; the transition to more, if not all, telework, was happening very slowly; it's five years since I did those months of it, and it had progressed but little in my workplace. The transition will skip ahead ten years.
Read this
article from The Onion, just post-9/11 about "A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Bullshit Again", how we could never again give a crap about Britney Spears or other celebrity "dramas" after real drama had traumatized us. We invented the Kardashians to care about a few years later, which upped both the "stupid" and the "bullshit" of "stupid bullshit" to staggering levels. (At least Britney can sing and dance.)
Everything will snap back that wasn't changing anyway; some things may take years. The American reputation isn't irreparably harmed, because it wasn't by Iraq and torture, including torture of allied citizens (like ours). You can feel in every word from world leaders that they want to get back to good relations with the US again and dismiss recent upsets to the fog of history.
This is not a whole new world. It's still the old one, always changing, and this year a little faster. Yes, every crisis is an opportunity, and changes can be pushed along, a few can be started that wouldn't have for years. I hope we can push some good ones. It would be foolish, however, to expect your dreams, Green and New they may be, to come true.
http://brander.ca/c19#stasis
Everybody should read that link, but Weigel actually never gets into an admittedly minor gripe I have about the term: they aren't talking about politics. Politics is a process for deciding what laws and regulations should be enforced by the powers-that-be, the ones with guns on their hips. It is just one part of "culture", which is everything we do, every attitude we hold. What is called "politically" incorrect is almost always not a political issue: there's no law against saying the N-word; it's just become very offensive. It's a cultural shift, not political.
Certainly, some activists that push new terms are trying to change the culture: they're trying to make people uncomfortable with being offensive to those in a weak societal position, who can't fight back. (And they can't: Black people tried once to make "whitey" an insult, but it never caught on.)
Today, however, we have some actual, provable, scientific truths that cannot be responded to without actions that are politically very difficult. People must be harmed; vast amounts of money lost; public, rather than private, actions and spending must be done. It's almost intolerable for some politicians. It shouldn't be: culturally, sacrificing to protect the old, sick, and weak is one of our strongest values, our highest heroism. It's very much the politics of public spending, and public regulation of business, that finds the idea, shall we say, offensive. These truths need to be found incorrect, or those people's politics... are not the politics we need right now.
So, accepting the pandemic and the painfully expensive measures to fight it is not scientifically incorrect, and not culturally incorrect, but it actually is, literally, politically incorrect.
http://brander.ca/c19#pc
Like a lot of libertarian ideas, these intrigued science fiction fans, but never seem to come up as real-world solutions. The neareast thing we have to "castpoints" are still just, well, polls.
The truly radical idea wasn't drones in 1999, though, it was a contention one character offers at the start of the book: scientists should decide when politicians are allowed to decide a public issue. His point is superficially very attractive, it goes like this:
There are three broad classes of decision-making: science, politics, and force. You can call a decision "scientific" when it has a clearly-provable correct answer. Should we buy or lease, which is cheapest? Will the cancer respond better to chemotherapy or radiation? Should I rotate my tires? We ask an accountant, a doctor, or a car mechanic, and get an answer they can show is best.
If there is no way to be sure which solution is best overall - nearly always the case in really complex, multi-variable decisions affecting very different people - when experts shrug and say that there are various answers with their own merits, none clearly best - then "politics", is where we go. That's with "politics" very broadly, meaning whichever solution gets the most agreement from the most people affected, keeps conflict to a minimum.
When "politics" - as that broadly defined, fails to find an answer, humans may fall to fighting each other, and whomever beats the other into halting protests, gets it their way.
As long as Stiegler keeps the three categories very broadly, I can't find a logical fault in that. He goes on to point out that it is widely agreed that a huge step forward in human culture happened when we made it possible for the politicians to decide when to use force, rather than the warriors (renamed as "kings" after their win), who naturally prefer force if it will work, deciding whether they'll use negotiation.
A Stiegler character therefore opined that the world would be that much better again, after achieving the use of force being a political decision, would happen if the use of politics were to be a scientific decision. The experts relevant to a question must throw up their hands and admit it's too complicated for one clear answer, before the politicians are even brought into the room.
Wouldn't that have been nice in this pandemic? The best-achieving nations have been the ones that effectively did that by their politicians turning to public health officers and following their advice strictly. The worst are the polities where every word from the scientists has been filtered though a screen of political needs.
I am not joining Stiegler's proposal, which he never takes past the "use of politics should be a scientific decision" concept. Putting any "Council of Scientists"... or whatever ... in charge of any public money or power would instantly politicize who got on the Council. Never happen.
People should start asking this question of politicians when they run. This time, their disrespect for science cost many lives. Lives were saved in proportion to how much respect they started to show when the going got tough.
Coming up at our next election: "Sir, is it one of your campaign promises that if a public health officer, or environmental officer, recommends actions that will hurt you politically, you'll follow them anyway?"
Wouldn't it be nice, if they actually did?
http://brander.ca/c19#stiegler
Not just finding it, and being sure of it, but a hundred million doses into our arms by Christmas? A tall order indeed. We all know the gap between announcement of any product and a hundred million copies in stores. It's not measured in weeks.
So I have TWO excellent reasons for believing the experts on this "controversy":
Alas, the world is well-supplied with idiots who would actually bet on their political idol over a professional. I propose that we smarter people take their money.
Betting is one sport that can continue right now, most of it has already moved online. I already had the execrable taste to propose a notional "Covid Cup" for those with the lowest deaths per capita; why not go whole hawg and propose betting on Pandemic Performance?
I'll lay down a grand on Georgia hitting 2000 dead before Independence Day; two grand on America making it to the 100,000 mark by June 1. Bets like that. Others even more offensive. (Shock is the goal.)
It would be great if the betting process got more people to take experts seriously. Some people just can't evaluate risks to their own lives rationally, which is why you have to make workers obey safety rules; and lots of people hold other people's very lives cheaply. But even they hate to lose bad bets.
If that doesn't work, of course, hey: at least we get to take their money.
http://brander.ca/c19#bet
Having finally jumped on Canada's testing issue yesterday, I may camp upon it here until some improvement occurs. (Power brokers tremble: a teeny blog is On Your Case. Now you'll be sorry.) Actually, I'm just drawing clicks to a fine and fascinating Globe and Mail story by Ivan Semeniuk about one doctor's radical suggestion.
I'm going to repeat yesterday's google search every day "canada testing plan", and today, it finally came up with a new link, a few below the ones weeks-old, claiming 60,000 tests by last week. The story admits we're hardly doing 25,000, coming up very short in Ontario and Quebec. Further, that it's not enough testing to safely "re-open".
Both explanation and possible solution are offered by Paul Hebert at U.Guelph. He explains the gene-reading equipment that processes the current "qPCR" test just don't scale up very well. But his equipment does. He uses it to process a million DNA tests a year, just counting species of insects he catches in traps. He's proposed a way to modify it to handle up to 50,000 COVID-19 tests per day, for a buck a test. So we get our test numbers up, along with about a 98% bargain on the cost.
I'll leave the rest of the story to the Globe - there are questions about making this work in practice, but it's certainly heartening - both as a solution to our current problem, and a triumph of Canadian ingenuity that I would suspect we could turn around and give (or sell) to the rest of the world. Wouldn't it be nice.
But still - other countries got their testing numbers up to what they needed without a Hollywood-plot-twist-grade of scientific miracle pulled off. I'd still like to know why we've done so poorly - even if Dr. Hebert saves their Canadian Bacon with his wizardry.
http://brander.ca/c19#hebert
You'd think that three weeks would have brought more news. Or at least, more tests. For a couple of months, I've been saving the page you can find at The Government of Canada Public Health page for the outbreak updates. I just pulled down the last three week's worth, specifically this part of their report:
Then I just put all those numbers for each date into a spreadsheet, giving these graphs for total tests, and by subtraction between days, the daily tests:
Do you see 60,000 on the right graph anywhere? I don't even see 50,000. Or 45,000, though we came close one day. I see no sign of any increase over time.
Are they hoarding test kits, for lack of ideas about whom to test? Lacking contact tracers? It's seven days since we did get a follow-up claim, in the Toronto Star: Canada's Labs Can Now Test 60,000 COVID-19 Cases per day. But do we need to?
Well, duh, yes. I need a test. I need a test, because I'd like to go visit my Mother-In-Law. But did I get the bug just the other day, and am still asymptotic? Testing heavily in workplaces, like barbershops, would allow workplaces to re-open. If we had infinite availability of tests, we could probably do a million a day before people derived no more incremental value from it. We only need to do as few tests as we are, as long as we're locked down.
I'm not even seeing a strategy for that. The news this morning, which kicked off this blog post, is that "anybody with symptoms" can get a test. For a disease where most transmissions may be asymptotic, that strikes me as weak. How about those "essential" workers that are making low wages for high risks? A weekly testing regime would let them know we care.
Those 37 dead NYPD weigh on my mind; weekly (or more) testing for all cops would be good for them, as well. I trust that this has long applied to paramedics.
Public health officers keep saying that you only know the curve has crested and fallen, when looking backwards, after it has happened. Well, that's when we have too much testing: we'll know later, after we conclude we did too many. Let's get there with some stupid levels of over-testing, just to be sure. We're due.
http://brander.ca/c19#tests
A great fun thing about YouTube is that you can open up a transcript window and copy/paste, and so, today's literary experiment.
Senator Rand Paul, a true Libertarian and therefore more interesting than most conservatives. They have the consistency of opposing all government action, not turning into socialists the moment military spending comes up. Paul is also a physician, and numerate. His directed reasoning, however, is pretty plain. The trick is not to lie about numbers, but to emphasize the ones that "sound" better.
That's with a small fraction of the city infected; with 50% infected, you'd have another couple of hundred dead cops. Please be plain if you're saying that's OK.
"Cops" is a reference to an earlier post. Obviously, many thousands of New Yorkers under 70 would also die. I just think "cops" is an easy shorthand for "victims you can't even imply are near-death, or socially useless".
That's easy math: (343-254) X 330 million = 30,000 extra dead people.
The trouble with these kinds of projection-based decisions is that there's no alternative-universe machine to tell us whom the 30,000 would be. We could ask them how unacceptable Sweden's result for the USA would be.
You're saying: "The problem is SO hard that people with ten years of intensive study, plus 30 more years of daily experience, can only offer a range of predictions that depend on what some known-unknowns are."
And your logic is then: "Therefore, I'm justified in listening to people that have been studying it for ten weeks, and have money reasons for believing the most-positive spins".
I don't believe the Senator suggested that anybody knows more, would be less likely to make those "wrong predictions".
http://brander.ca/c19#transcript
Our response to the pandemic does point the way to dealing with China's authoritarian ability to just control trade, to inflict brief internal economic suffering as a strategy to bully other nations. Today, that news is about China not buying Australian beef and barley because Australia wants their COVID-19 response investigated.
The usual script is that China lashes out with trade restrictions that hurt their country, which they can accept, being authoritarians who can just order it. A number of some western country's wealthiest have their business kneecapped, however, and they scream at our politicians, who put on some face-saving measures, but quietly cave.
China's threats are often almost toothless; they can only inflict so much internal economic pain, even with the army to back them up; they depend on picking our most-vulnerable pain points. We can harden up ourselves against such pressures with the same heavy government hand that even our conservatives have now accepted for the pandemic.
If government was able to support business through such trade attacks, we could respond to them with all our economic power, rather than leaving, say, our pork producers to bear the brunt alone.
The second part, however, is that no one trade partner with China, not even the US, can really threaten them with much, alone. The whole world that believes in fair trade and human rights needs to present them a united front.
It's funny how that attitude to both China and Russia used to be conservative gospel in our politics. Now it's our conservative side that has gone all weak in the knees, because China has found their soft underbelly: their greed.
As free nations, we can democratically agree to set aside our greed, take a few economic hits in defense of fair trade and human rights now and then, and show a little more courage and self-sacrifice than that - by sharing the burden.
http://brander.ca/c19#china2heel
So the people not-producing now, are about the same number as through most of the Depression AND WW2, over a dozen years of low civilian productivity. When (civilian) unemployment of Depression levels was necessary to "save the country", we took that medicine with good cheer.
I can't say whether we will have decades of good economy afterwards, like we did after the war - paying for the massive government debt to finance it with 90% taxes on high incomes - but I can say that our civilization can do this. We can afford it; the rest is just internal accounting. I'd much rather see a post-WW2 approach to balancing the books over a return to feudalism, but that's going to be a long fight, a mere extension of one already going on.
It's funny that arguments for Universal Basic Income just recently worried that there would not be enough jobs for everybody. The book Bullshit Jobs argued that still more jobs exist, but are not needed, even in the opinion of those doing them.
So, don't be afraid for "the economy". We are "the economy"; and we've been through worse and come out just fine. "The Economy" exists to serve our needs, be they making war or making waffles. If we don't need waffles (or, at least, open waffle houses) right now for our needs, then "the economy" (still just us) doesn't need them. "The Economy" didn't need any more Sherman Tanks after 1945, because it's all about our needs. Focus on the distribution problem, not the production problem. We're a very rich society, and we've got this.
http://brander.ca/c19#upside
One thing we could pay attention to is the article up at Mother.ly, that We can't re-open without childcare, so every re-opener in places where the schools are still closed does need to be asked about their plan for that.
In a very similar vein, one might read at NBC news that most of the business that Georgia plans to "re-open" (salons, restaurants, gyms, bowling) have majority female staff of child-raising years: mostly mothers, in other words. Without the childcare, they'll be between a rock and a hard place; even with it, they have to take risks - for their whole family. NBC is calling it A Slap in the Face to Mothers.
One wild comment. Doesn't everybody associate illness and fears of same with Mom? Mom bringing you the soup and tea and being sympathetic? Wouldn't a motherly figure, on news media, be more likely to get people to take good care of themselves and get better? So, I'm just asking: there's been article after article about how women are proving better leaders in a pandemic. Not to diminish for a second the accomplishments of Angela Merkel (perhaps Germany's most-successful leader in my lifetime, before the pandemic) or the amazing Jacinda Ardern, but what if it was mostly because people react to feminine advice, about illness and self-care, with less resentment?
I would not argue that in a peer-reviewed journal. But I'd argue it over a beer. Which I mention because, damn, I'd like to go out for a beer. But Dr. Bonnie Henry told me to stay home, so I kind of have to. It's Dr. Bonnie.
http://brander.ca/c19#mothersday
It was Canadian comedian Mike Myers who stressed this in his excellent book "Canada". Partly memoir, partly homage to his beloved home country. But much of it is about how he spent most of his career in the US, and he was firm about their reactions to Canada: they don't follow Canadian news. At all. They know little about us, and from complete lack of interest.
When you think about it, though, Canada is not being singled out for a snub. American presidential candidates struggled to recall the name of the President of Mexico.
Far more importantly, "world opinion" never formed any significant part of their decisions about the wars in Vietnam or Iraq. The notion that bad feelings might have some actual effect on America for torture never entered their discussions about it. It never crossed the minds of Bush or Obama that leaving the innocent Maher Arar on a terrorist watch list for a decade, after he was decisively shown to be innocent, would affect relations with their largest trading partner. They were right: it equally, never crossed any Canadians' minds either, to stop selling them oil, or stop using Amazon.
I don't believe that Timothy Egan, or any other NY Times columnist, ever wrote a column about Canada's opinions of America, or any other nation's, for that matter. They don't say they don't care, because it's not even a subject they think about.
America has the same relationship to the rest of the world that America's rich have to America's poor. It doesn't bother Jeff Bezos in the slightest that warehouse workers think ill of him.
America's rich are immune to public opinion, unless they have products that can be boycotted. (Which fewer and fewer can, any more; too little competition. I haven't even heard of an Amazon or Facebook boycott called for.) America is just as immune to the anger of the world, and acts like it.
Egan says the world takes pity on them. We'd be better off paying no attention at all; it's easier on us, like shrugging off a loud domestic fight next door as "not our problem". Just turn up the TV.
http://brander.ca/c19#dontcare
Ferguson resigned, not because he'd really caused a significant risk of transmission, since he went through the symptoms and is now presumptively immune. (Those who say that immunity is not certain mean well, but, crap, we've all had colds and flus, and know that immunity is very, very likely indeed.) No, Ferguson resigned because he knows that he is looked to as a leader, and "by example" is really the only kind of leadership that means anything. So he was setting a bad example, and feels that should cost him his leadership job.
But, wait a minute, Johnson set infinitely worse examples. By far the biggest was his actual policy, obviously. "Setting an example" with personal behaviour can have some effect, but actual policy has literally a million times as large an effect, and Johnson spoke and advocated for a "herd immunity" strategy that would have been several times as costly in lives as Sweden's "partial lockdown" - which has worked badly indeed.
It's almost incidental that Johnson also performed many acts of transmission-theatre, shaking hands and actually telling people to go out. This wasn't furtive, like Ferguson's private life, only outed by an aggressive yellow press; they were as public as possible an invitation to ignore the dangers of contact.
The he admitted he was wrong. Not in so many words, but he reversed course overnight. From watching Ferguson's science presentation, as it happens. But this admission, however implicit, should surely have come with immediate resignation, having misled the public, having been wrong about a matter of utmost mortal consquence. How can Britons have faith in his party after that? His best move for the Party was to resign, as the British system makes it an hour's work for another party leader to take over.
What's weird to me isn't that BoJo didn't do it. What's bizarre is that the country didn't demand it. Or at least his opponents, who hate him so. Britons deserve better, and should demand it.
http://brander.ca/c19#bojoresign
The front pages of newspapers, the first ten minutes of newscasts, are filled with the concerns and troubles of the wealthy and powerful, mainly. Journalists struggle (a few of them, not most) to tell the stories of the poor and ethnic groups. And sure enough, they have two and four times the mortality of those who are routinely heard.
I suppose what got me onto this today was the reviled offhand comment by a judge in Wisconsin that "Due to the meatpacking, though, that's where the Brown County got the flare. It wasn't just the regular folks in Brown County," . The stories focus on the judge being racist or classist; to me, it just reveals an unconscious, unexamined assumption that most of us make, that we don't have to listen to, or worry about, slaughterhouse workers. If that were not true, conditions in those places would be better. They are not, so we don't. All of us. Cut the judge a break, she's just revealing a symptom of an underlying condition we all suffer from.
We'd rather our purchases all be, what, ten percent, cheaper? Making us all ten percent richer? Rather than know everybody has a job with decent pay and conditions? We'd also like care homes to be, um, affordable.
Nobody is as silent as the care-home residents; many have dementia and can't speak for themselves. The rest find that really old people are not listened to in the first place.
When nobody is listening, you have to shout very loudly. Feudal Japan had a form of ritual suicide called funshi, or "indignation death", a suicide to make a protest. A modern example would be Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself alight in 2010 to protest autocracy. He didn't get to make a speech, it was just the one word: death.
We didn't pay attention to care homes even with the pandemic descending. We only noticed when the pile of dead bodies got really high. They each got to shout for our attention only once, by dying.
It's nice we're finally paying some attention to long-ignored problems, but the price was high, and there is still no certainty we won't turn the page again when the embarrassment has faded.
http://brander.ca/c19#deadspeak
As this image from their column shows, just tracking the total death count, from all causes, in an area shows up the virus hitting with a very clear signal above the noise. The criterion wipes away all argument about whether a person clearly dying of multiple underlying conditions for some months counts as a "COVID-19 death" or merely a "death with COVID-19 present", not to mention whether we should count the guy who didn't get medical care for high blood pressure because he was afraid of the hospital. Every death counts.
It is consistent between polities, the leaders unable to affect it by changing the number of tests, or imposing their own definition of "death caused by COVID-19". Perhaps that's why it is liked by both the plutocrat-pandering arch-conservatives of The Economist like it, and also the lefties at The Guardian (article by a statistician).
When you search on this topic, however, the majority of documents discussing "excess deaths" and "covid-19" on one page are from scientific sources: National Institute of Health, The Lancet, the CDC. The top link where I searched was a speech by my public health officer - announcing a study into them.
That officer - Dr. Bonnie Henry - is idolized in the province right now, so that settles it. Let's figure out some criteria numbers for that metric and hold all the provinces to them. Which is good news in the Maritimes and the North, and Saskatchewan.
http://brander.ca/c19#excessdeaths
Well, I'm grateful to Mexican farmers, and Mexican farm workers in Canada, all taking risks that I'm not, just to keep me in food.
That's it for today. Not a deep dive, just a pathetically obvious observation: in times of trouble and peril, it is better to have friends than adversaries, better to cooperate than compete. For Canada, a happy story about how we make friends well, keep them, have a lot of goodwill out there to rely upon in times like this. May the Fifth Column of fascism behind the lines of democracy be outed and shamed by the damage they do to pandemic response.
And, yes, that whole sentence was contrived so it could start with "May the Fifth", just to top yesterday. I had better stop now. You did not deserve that.
http://brander.ca/c19#mexico
The Golden Age of SF, that same pulp era that Star Wars pays homage to, was a time of everyday miracles changing lives every year, with cars, electric light, aircraft, submarines, telephones, radio, refrigerators, all coming into full use, over a single generation. No wonder they projected forward another few generations and imagined spaceships the size of cities.
The most-miraculous of those miracles, however, was medicine. Surgery went from guesswork, a near-butchery without anaesthetics, to routinely saving lives. Vaccination, above all, would win most votes for the greatest live-saving achievement of the past century. As that link notes, "little more than a century ago, the U.S. infant mortality rate was a staggering 20 percent, and the childhood mortality rate before age five was another disconcerting 20 percent." And then, some guys in white coats waved their hands and talked some weird words, and that was all over. A billion parents' dearest wish, fulfilled.
Here we are, in that Age of Miracles, and people understandably want one more. But, it's cringeworthy, frankly, listening to the advocates of "end the lockdowns", both on the street and in the press briefing room, as they just keep wishing and wishing, very openly and embarrassingly, for some miracle to just make this all go away. They're like toddlers: "make it didn't happen, Daddy". A vaccine that takes weeks instead of more than a year; a treatment that will make it into a non-lethal disease...bring us something, anything, there has to be something to make my wish come true.
No. There doesn't. This is not a science-fiction movie. This is real. Sometimes problems have only hard solutions that take a long time. Sorry.
http://brander.ca/c19#may4th
This is similar to the touted response of South Africa, which also shut down before it really reached them.
Stop to think about it, this is the same as evacuating a building when you hear the fire alarm, not when you see flames actually reach your floor. It's obvious. But most rich countries did not do it. Taiwan and New Zealand had the best responses, but not because they have the most money.
This isn't really about "smart" in the sense of having good epidemiologists. A quarter-century back, I wrote an essay about the Titanic sinking that got me flown to two speaking engagements, by the US Navy, no less. The crowd agreed that my best line was "It was not a failure of calculation. It was a failure of imagination. They just didn't imagine it could actually happen."
Some of the poorest countries in the world, in Africa, have done amazingly well with almost no resources. Yes, they had the advantage of time; almost nobody travels to them, so they had more warning. But they used the time, whereas the biggest economy of them all famously threw away their own warning time, not believing it could actually happen. Many in Africa had no such delusions, after AIDS and Ebola. So, excerpt from the Financial Times:
They didn't learn from the first 58,000 dead in Asian wars-of-choice, forgot how guerilla warfare worked in a single generation, tried again. So, unless they lose a lot more than 100,000 dead to this pandemic, they'll probably feel invulnerable again in about 50 years, and be stupid for the next one as well. I hope we are not. I hope we are smart, like Africans.
http://brander.ca/c19#dumbrich
The pandemic has cleared the roads of at least half the cars. In most places, especially urban, the accident fatality rate seems to be down less than that, about 40% in France, because the open roads allow more speeding. (In a few polities, especially rural, the death rate has actually gone up; just way down on the whole.)
Those protesting for a herd-immunity strategy talk about people dying from suicide and other "deaths of despair" owing to poverty. A fair reply is that few of them are committing suicide because of shame at inability to contribute; it's money. Give them a social safety net, and most of those suicides will disappear. But, on top of that, we have to subtract from the deaths that lockdown does cause, the deaths it prevents. No, not the COVID-19 deaths, the:
The suicide rate would have to triple to make lockdown a net-killer even without COVID-19! To live our lives, we risk death every day from a dozen causes. A pause in the activities of life actually saves lives on its own.
Update, May 23: Some early stats are in, and it looks like a 20% drop in traffic deaths, 80% in drownings.
http://brander.ca/c19#traffic
But I think the real value of a face mask is how conscious it makes me of my own breathing, normally something you hardly notice. My every exhalation steams up my glasses a bit, making me annoyed and very aware that I'm exhaling moisture. Which reminds me, 20 times a minute, that everybody else is also exhaling moisture, near me. We're all little steamboats, toot, toot.
So I navigate Safeway like the whole place was toxic; stick to business, be aware of every person around you (since about a quarter of the people at Safeway are behaving as if bumping into me is no worry), and dodge.
Interestingly, this value of a face mask is degraded if you wear it all the time and get used to it. So I just wear it in stores while getting stuff there. (The term "shopping" isn't really right; that connotes leisure.) I pull it off once away from the entrance, and go back to just avoiding people by over 2 metres, on the street.
Another value of a face mask, however bad as a filter, is the same as my exaggerated avoidance of people on sidewalks (I go out onto the road): performative. Human beings pick up behaviour cues from all around them. The more you act as if people were plutonium, the more everybody will feel some pressure to do the same.
There's talk of some opening-up moves soon, and I don't want to screw that up.
http://brander.ca/c19#mask
It was just early March when Boris was not merely pretending the virus would go away, like the American administration engaging in bizarre denial; he was advocating "herd immunity", a deliberate strategy to not just stay open, but encourage spread to speed the day when the "herd" as a whole would be over the hump.
Without a middle level of government for Britons to turn to, Johnson could well have prosecuted a "keep everything open, especially schools" strategy, for the whole nation...and the estimate was 510,000 dead that way. It seems unbelievable that he would get credit for changing his mind, when he should be in jail - or on that lamppost - for even speaking aloud his first idea. That he isn't, I think, proves my point: society is a supertanker that takes a long time to turn more than a few degrees to either the right or the left. The difficulty turning to the right has saved us from fascism so far, despite decades of hard work by fascists (who call themselves something else, of course) to bring it back. Alas, it will now keep us from turning more than a few degrees to the left, or to any kind of populist rage. Lucky Boris.
http://brander.ca/c19#ferguson
It would be better to prepare for disappointment. More likely, one, at the most two, major changes will be put over the top by this "help" - and they'll be the ones that were nearly here anyway. (If this doesn't make universal health insurance an American reality, I can't even.)
The people coming out of quarantine are still the same bunch that went in. In Canada, Liberals and Conservatives are still pretty much in the same place in the polls. There's no massive groundswell of support for the NDP. Hey, we'll get better regulation on our care homes for a couple of decades before standards slip again.
In the States, the presidential challenger is ahead several percent in the polls, but one would think that tens-of-percent would be more believable...not since the virus, but since Charlottesville; after the drink-bleach advice, you'd think, 80/20. I'm sure the pandemic performance will shift their voting by as much as ten percent, but revolutionary changes? No. The "democratic socialist" group within their Congress may expand, by, oh, several members, but not enough to more than tweak legislation a bit.
That's the word: tweaks. We'll get tweaks. Care homes. The pandemic departments will be lavishly supplied, of course, not for the many decades that will elapse before there's another pandemic, probably, but a few. (I doubt the American health care will include dental or eyeglasses: sorry, Bernie.) I bet they can undo some tax cuts, but I would not bet they can raise taxes back to pre-Reagan levels to support social services.
No universal basic income, except maybe in Spain, where the need has been more clear through over a decade of "the crisis" already. I wouldn't bet even odds on all those "essential" minimum-wage workers getting more than minimum wage, or unions. I give them 30%.
There may be some climate action, to the extent of my electric vehicles boost theory, and a little infrastructure work, building the grid and some wind turbines..again, things that were already coming and will move faster with a boost. I strongly doubt that any non-starters will become starters.
So, social activists: pick your battles; pick the ones that seem so obvious to you that they need no more help. It's better to assume they've only had a little help from this.
http://brander.ca/c19#inertia
However, today, the death rate ticked back up again - already 1,885 as I write at 4PM PDT - and passed that "58,320" mark about an hour ago. Wow, were the journalists of America ever waiting for that exact instant to hit the POST button on their Vietnam-themed stories. Get a load of the google news search on "vietnam" a few minutes back, at left.
Look at the times the stories were posted: 1 hour ago, 50 minutes ago, 45 minutes ago...all SIX stories within 40 minutes of the number being reached. They were just waiting to pounce on the moment. I can only hope they were not cheering on the dying, so as to publish and knock off for the day.
Without reading any of the stories at left, I can still recommend the one to read: the one by Nick Turse in The Intercept. Not only is The Intercept one of the best reads out there these days, but Nick is the author of "Kill Anything That Moves", the most truthful, and therefore terrible, book on Vietnam.
http://brander.ca/c19#vietnam2
Everybody noted when Fox had the "we have always been at war with Eastasia" (virus) moment several weeks back, when the "hoax" became a "crisis" overnight. I noted just a few posts below when it became impossible to find the word "chloroquine" on their main web page, after weeks of obsessing on it.
http://brander.ca/c19#foxnewspeak
It's weird, now that I think of it, that the local nature of car pollution has been ignored by climate activists trying to focus on the "global" nature of the issue. If you can convince cities to put a surcharge on their pollution, the car market would have to change faster than it has been.
Well, these images have done their work for them. These will surely spur sales of EVs and perhaps get every city switching to electric buses, and electric city-services vehicles. (It's hard to claim range anxiety in a waterworks half-ton, an ambulance, or a police cruiser that never cracks 100 km per day.) Then, cities could move on to charging all the commercial vehicles, everything used in construction and delivery, a premium for fouling the city air.
But the air will remain filthy because of commuter vehicles. The memory of these days will linger, though. Consumers discovered the London congestion fee was a great thing; as the air clears, they'll come to feel the same about the air-pollution fee.
In his essential book, A Thousand Barrels a Second, Dr. Peter Tertzakian noted that it takes over 20 years to "change out" the North American vehicle fleet; it's not just the cost, the car factories can only run so fast. It's a 2006 book, and we could presumably have been half-way there by now, if we'd started in 2010 producing nothing but EVs; we are in fact at 1%. But viruses aren't the only thing that grow exponentially; we all now understand how ideas can "go viral", and the EV idea just got a huge push. We still could use another major improvement in batteries, but even with what we've got, the formerly-fantastic idea of all new vehicle production going electric may be just a few years away.
http://brander.ca/c19#tesla
That the politicans are owned by the money-piles is most-easily proven by what Vox journalist Matt Yglesias explained about the Panama Papers: that if these tiny "sovereign" Caribbean nations were conspiring to undermine pharmaceutical or Blu-Ray copyrights by pumping out cheap medicines or movies, they'd be shut down by diplomatic or financial pressure within weeks. They aren't, because tax-theft is winked at by politicians, some of whom are involved.
But if we need a pile of several trillion dollars to run civil society with for some months, and would rather not indebt two generations to those banks (see below) to raise the bridge money, I think we all know where to find such a pile.
Quite a lot of that pile of money is outright proceeds of foul crimes. A larger share is proceeds of that genteel, white-collar, but equally destructive crime of tax fraud. And the largest share is legal "tax avoidance"...but shouldn't ever have been legal. As the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer put it about NSA spying, "the deeper scandal is what's legal".
The money in the tax havens is particularly easy to discuss confiscating. As with the cruise industry flagging all their ships to Panama (hey, Panama again, funny coincidence!!) then asking for America-funded bailouts, you get little sympathy if you abandon your country.
So, this being a blog and not a respected publication, I'd like to skip all the legal stuff and just advocate that America simply take it. Militarily. As Madeleine Albright once screamed at Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?".
Sure, it's illegal under American law to prosecute aggressive war without UN Security Council permission - but that's been a dead letter since Iraq. So just send in the fleets, conquer all the tax havens and loot their banks, medieval style. It gets around all that tedious legal wrangling over drug-lords vs tax-cheats vs tax-avoiders. All of it spoils of war. Done. Hey, if you're going to be one of Ayn Rand's "looters", just be honest about it.
Only America can do this; only America has that insanely-overbuilt military. But Canada and every other nation would profit, long-term, because the tax havens would shut down forever. What's the point in piling up your money outside the taxman's influence if you're handing 100% of it to the gunboats?
As for all that r>g money piled up inside law-abiding, tax-having countries, that's a stroke of the pen. Just add a zero to that 2% wealth tax of Elizabeth Warren's for one year. Or two. They'd still have 60% of everything over $50 million, whereas the tax-shelterers would lose it all.
The obvious danger here is that governments would then become that Ayn Rand nightmare of "looters", sucking up those money piles for every minor government program and waste, after the crisis. That was assumed to be true of democracy itself. But the rich got richer and our society continued to resemble feudalism despite all that democracy, so I'm sanguine about it.
With a little luck, the wealthy would just stop trying to dodge tax laws, accept that money gets harder and harder to accumulate as your pile gets larger. Right now it gets easier and easier to get richer as you get richer.
Hey, even my gunboat economics aren't as bad as The Terror; the rich not only get to keep their heads, but the first $50 million and most of the rest. Except the tax-dodgers. Screw 'em; they're criminals.
Will any of this happen? Nah. These ideas might work economically, but even the pandemic isn't making them come closer politically. The "military conquest" notion is pure satire, obviously; if America really wanted that money, it could do it by pure pressure, with only the most-oblique hints of actual violence. But even that is not remotely going to happen. We can take a look at that in a future post.
http://brander.ca/c19#rg
I mention, "time machine", because it was a great phrase used in the article by the inhumanly productive Derek Thompson of The Atlantic: The Four Rules of Pandemic Economics, where Rule #2 (after "lives vs the economy is a false choice", the absolute #1), is "Build Companies a Time Machine". Businesses need to have all their books teleported to the future point where they can restart their moneymaking, unharmed by the passage of time. The economist interviewed mentioned "anything - grants, cheap loans, debt relief - that would allow companies to shift their expenses to the future". I'm not hearing the "debt relief" part in the news, though.
The grants and cheap-loans solutions are just moving their private debt to public debt. We're so rich (as a society) that the government really can just print a lot of money and use it to basically keep us all going for a short period, with only modest inflation. But everybody is taking a hit here, nearly every business is hurting. The public solution means we all share the pain, everybody...except the banks. The aquarium, facing bankruptcy, can lose even more to provide a "time machine" to customers, but banks can't?
The most-regulated and controlled business, the one that owes its existence to the government bailouts so recently, is the one that can't be told to take a hit?
I don't remotely know enough about this subject to discuss it in detail. But any who's played with their mortgage on a spreadsheet knows that plugging in "zero interest" is exactly a "time machine" in finance; the clock stops on your loan.
I'm not saying every loan. All these bailouts need tailoring. It might require a case-by-case application.
I'm bringing it up because there's a lot of really radical things happening. Just not a proposal that the banks themselves should suffer by a penny, at least not at the hands of government; instead, government should give everybody money so they can hand it on to banks.
Many loans will go bad anyway, and that will hurt the banks too. Honestly, they should be looking at enforced zero-interest proposals as the lesser of two evils.
I suspect they don't want to set the precedent.
That was also my lesser of two radical proposals. Up tomorrow, the "eat the rich" idea.
http://brander.ca/c19#banks
I wonder if there will be a letter of condolences coming from Ho Chi Minh City, something about sympathy for those killed by American arrogance and ignorance.
Probably not.
http://brander.ca/c19#vietnam
There's a widespread perception, almost entirely on the left, that this crisis == political opportunity; that the pandemic, by highlighting all the iniquities that were so obvious to Noam Chomsky and his readers already, is the perfect time for major changes. The questions to Chomsky and Wood were almost entirely along that line: what does the New World look like: Green New Deal; universal health care and even income; perhaps a Global World Order, "USA 2.0", etc.
I'm all in favour of a better world, though what I'll be pointing out in future post(s), as with my April 9 post, is that there's no sign of it coming. My question today is whether they are even that great an idea - this year. The pandemic is a huge civilizational stress. But nothing is more stressful, in personal life or at society-scale, than change. Is a time of stress a time to take on more?
There's absolutely an argument for it when a change that gets us through the pandemic. Say, a revised system of unemployment-insurance, combined with actual guaranteed minimum income of some sort, will have to be implemented - and will be seen as more efficient and moral than our current welfare system, so will be kept. The universal health care that has been long, long coming down south will finally get over the top.
But revolutionary changes not tied to the current problem make me highly suspicious. They smack too much of the French Revolution's "Year One", referenced by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia 180 years later as "Year Zero". Both complete societal re-designs ended in madness, mass murder, counter-revolution and war. It's the kind of prospect that turns the most ardent progressive into a literal conservative, wary of more than one change at a time.
Tomorrow, I'm going to toss out a few truly radical ideas - I've been reading SF all my life, after all. Perhaps contemplating those will clarify why there's no visible majority for radical change.
http://brander.ca/c19#yearzero
It really hit me, because that's been understood for a long time. Even in local news, we were impressed by Global's Keith Baldry, their legislative reporter, who zeroed in on hospital and ICU numbers as being the only relevant statistic, for him to report. Keith was shrugging at "case counts" and "positive test numbers" back in early March, and advising his fans to watch those ICU admissions. I never did find out where the source data was, because Keith tracked it for me, he was on the job. But where is it for every other health region?
If a local reporter who mostly covers the BC legislative sniping rather than health-and-science, had that nailed right off, why are major national news people still so focused on easy-to-get, but not-very-useful, statistics?
I have found web site that can be used; it just tracks information as a dashboard, does no journalistic interpretation. It proudly notes all the important news sources that cite it. It's covidtracking.com, and it is, alas, only for the States. However, as the States are about to go into "interesting times", for pandemic statistics, this month, it may be the place to visit. Best of all, it not only has 50 of these on the dashboard:
...but you can download these stats for all 50 states into your spreadsheet or other favourite tool. What even this report is missing is the context of available ICU beds or ventilators or whatever resource. It's not hard to add the basic population of each state to your spreadsheet, however, so the relative troubles of each state can be seen...and compared to New York of a week ago, when resources were very stretched.
I'll have to look into the problem, if only to keep my spreadsheet skills up.
Frustrating not to find the equivalent for Canada. CTV news is doing a lovely dashboard, but it's all about the cases, and the ultimate deaths, the other easy-to-get number. Except from care homes with six bodies piled up in the rec room and five in the pottery shop.
http://brander.ca/c19#hospicu
This is not unique to Fox News; all that's really special about them is the sheer speed at which they pull the about-face.
The New York Times and the Washington Post still employ most of the columnists who found the 2002 White House sales pitch for the Iraq War, as believable as Fox found the recent White House sales pitch for chloroquine. That particular quack medication - for the troubles of the Middle East - was enthusiastically pitched as a real game-changer, too. Instead of patience and resources for healing, war would be the quick solution to the lack of civilized behaviour there. Turns out that war, too, actually does less good, and causes more inadvertent deaths, than its enthusiasts mentioned at the start of the treatment.
Unlike the mercifully-quick drug studies, the failure of the war played out over a many years. At first they stuggled to explain how a few tweaks would perfect it. But after about a dozen repetitions of Thomas Friedman's "the next six months are crucial" line, they gradually fell silent on the subject.
And all were hounded from the profession, like doctors who'd peddled a fake medicine would be sanctioned by their professional organization? Hah. No. Journalists don't have one. Or any behaviour in common with professions that do have one.
Now David Frum and George Packer remain among the Atlantic's most-printed writers (just on other subjects), happily kept on by war enthusiast Jeffrey Goldberg. Fred Hiatt, after choosing 27 editorials in favour of the War Treatment for Iraq and only two against, is still picking out op-ed writers for the Post, including Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin, still writing daily - if not about past mistakes, ever.
The Times, of course, uniquely apologized for its credulous coverage. Then it went right back to doing the same thing with the next wars.
So, don't just hate Fox News for promoting a tantalizing solution just because it:
Hate the others who've done the same, got hundreds of thousands of people killed, and got away with it, because it took longer for their wildly-overoptimistic credulity to be exposed.
http://brander.ca/c19#chloroquine
Amazon is pursuing that lately by extending its shutdown in France , where it played hardball when told to only provide essential services. Amazon's claim was that it wasn't sure what those were, and couldn't risk a fine, so, safer to shut down entirely.
Hard to believe. If it made a good-faith effort; communicated its list of proposed essentials back to the law and asked for feedback; and asked for warnings and a chance to comply should there be concerns, was the government really about to fine them? Was a fine really so much more expensive than total shutdown? For a competitor in a free market, the shutdown probably wouldn't make sense.
It's a completely believable move for a near-monopoly, however; assuming that it would be a critial step in the "supply chain" for millions right now, it likely figures that France will just cave - and let them sell anything they want, expose their workers to any risk the Amazon board deems profitable.
Postal services, which are usually the more-affordable shipping option, and most-common resort of the poorer customers, don't have the option to play hardball; they serve the public trust. That's the difference.
http://brander.ca/c19#amazon
Also, the complete lack of political-party signs, confederate flags, automatic weapons, and general American stupidity and racism were hugely reassuring. This is Canada. Still.
Yes, my headline may seem off, since we also just duplicated one of America's worst pathologies, the crazed-gunman-who-was-such-a-nice-quiet-guy story. I guess I'm clinging to the fact that for us, it was the worst in history, and the second worst was 30 years ago. So, even there, we're still better. Much. Not that "lack of mass murders" is some competitive sport, any more than my Covid Cup is a real game. It's more of a question being posed: the two nations have so much in common; what makes us so different?
While nobody even noticed the Vancouver protest, it's arguably the larger story. The American protesters may get more people killed than the Nova Scotia gunman - even if they don't succeed! The protests alone may cause enough infections that the second-and-third-order infections from those, will rise into the thousands, and thus kill dozens. That's the magnitude of this pandemic: it just throws all those shooter stories into the shade, measured by body count. The most minor bumps in a pandemic "curve" are bigger than a major shooting.
http://brander.ca/c19#vanprotest
But my very first writing attempt, November 2016, was "Breaking Up With America", about how I had to stop that. For my mental health, I needed to consign that country to the same box we all keep benighted nations like Nigeria or Somalia in, where you can't afford to get upset when you see headlines about ninety dead in a riot over "witches".
While America may have many admirable people, the news from there is just too relentlessly bad, for most of my life, and almost entirely self-inflicted pain. It's just too hard on outsiders to cheer for their good guys, and then see them unable to raise a protest march over war or torture.
Still, interest in America crept up on me recently, until, of course, the news was about Americans demonstrating to get older Americans, like their supposedly-revered war vets, killed. The same war vets noted yesterday, the ones that endured several years of sub-minimum-wage army employment, and food rationing, to save Europeans.
That was the reminder I needed. It's like the much-repeated phrase that became the theme of the film "Blood Diamond", "This is Africa". It's a sigh of resignation that it's foolish to try to fix Africa: the place has too many people taking advantage of anybody who tries to Do Good. Does saving lives require sacrifice? Protest the sacrifice as an Assault on Freedom, for pure political gain.
It's hard to consign news from Michigan into the same place I keep headlines about slaughter in Iraq, or mass graves found in Mexico, but it's the only way to keep my head on straight.
The news in Canada, British Columbia in particular, is diametrically opposed. Despite wide and close contacts with China (six flights a day to/fro YVR), we're one of the best-off places to be right now. It's time to focus on good news; the source of the bad news has no interest in our opinions, and doesn't want any help.
http://brander.ca/c19#tia
Today I couldn't help it; locked-down too long reading stupidity in the news, I guess. I saw in the National Post that the writers, tentatively, and the comments-writers, voraciously, were joining in on the "end the lockdown" rhetoric.
Impulsively, I trolled. I have no excuse. Trolling is of course the preparation of deliberately-inflammatory material, just to sit back smirking while the victims cry their outrage. People who lean to extreme right-wing views tend to worship the past; today is always a fallen state - Dad's generation were better people. Today, liberal weenie-ness and sensitivity makes us less strong. It's easy enough to use against them whenever they complain about almost anything. So here's my comment in the National Post column about how Canada should "wish Sweden well" in their experiment with partially open businesses.
We've become very weak sisters compared to the Greatest Generation. My parents talked with feeling about the near-complete loss of civilian production during WW2, the food rationing, the drives for scrap metal. Then there was serving in the Army - five years at 50 cents an hour, came out with zero savings with half his 20s lost. (And no skills, if "Loading trucks" doesn't count.)
All this was to save lives in Europe; Canada could have just stayed out of it, as the USA did for nearly 3 years, making money while the rest of us were spending ourselves broke on war production.
And yet, the 30 years after the war were the most expansive and prosperous of all time, when income inequality dropped and dropped because wages were so good.
The people wanting to just surrender to the virus and say "Kill grandma, kill my wife maybe, just don't take my job" wouldn't have lasted long against the Nazis.
It's a trolling failure, so far. I got two thumbs-up and a "well said", when I'd hoped for 97 thumbs-down and several angry replies. Damn.
But there was success later in the day; skipping the details because that topic was about oil companies robbing the public by leaving it to us to clean up abandoned oil wells, I again set two conservative tropes against each other: oil (pro) vs "people who dodge their commitments and debts and leave the rest of us to pay for them" (anti). This turned out very satisfyingly, for a troll: it was the top of a chain of 47 replies, that quickly wandered into other topics, with everybody insulting each other. Trolls find this entertaining.
I found it awful; it's a sick talent, trolling, like having a talent for a cutting insult that really gets under somebody's skin. Or it's basically the same talent. Maybe doing that will cure me entirely of the National Post comments section, which would be very good for my mental health.
http://brander.ca/c19#greatestgen
The Fairmont Hotel is closed. And a few more blocks west, a nice group of not-desperate people have found a way to enjoy a park that would not make Dr. Bonnie Henry (or cops) frown at them.
It's great to see, but the contrast is so jarring. I'm watching local news a lot lately, and just not seeing the problem acknowledged, much less addressed.
You'd think it would be obvious that the cops should be encouraging the DTES people to spread out the places they hang out in all day - even provide free services for them at Canada Place and parks and nearby blocks where the stores are all closed anyway (normally they'd complain bitterly).
I suspect that they haven't even thought of this idea; it's too much in the DNA to assume those people need to be corralled away from "decent folk" like the nice kids above. The kids would leave if that park filled up with DTES residents, even safely-spaced ones under watchful police eyes. Worse, people who were not so uncomfortable around them might start heading out to new DTES hang-out areas for socializing (and drug purchase) if their situation were made safe and pleasant by police oversight. It's always simplest to just ignore this one problem, always has been.
Except this year.
http://brander.ca/c19#canadaplace
But the other thing that caught me was the different social distancing. It wasn't completely absent; there were a few masks, and people did seem to keep an extra half-metre of distance - but nothing like what we should all be doing. The pandemic is going to hit this community hard. Higher risk of transmission, and half of them have an underlying condition.
Hastings street is a busy commercial street just a few blocks away. When you get to this gathering place at a corner beside Gastown, you've hit the DTES.
Just across the street a half-block east is an informal street market.
Various wares spread out on blankets dot the next few blocks up. It's where people sit all day, whether from lack of a house, or because their "house" is a room about 8x10.
(At least this guy has the right attitude.)
I'm not intending to provide more of that poverty porn here, just document that devoting a lot of attention to keeping people spaced at 2m in Stanley Park is probably not the best use of resources. These people have been left to shift for themselves for decades, and we're still doing it. Only this time, their infections are going to come back to haunt the rest of us.
The cops must understand this is a greater problem than strollers on the seawall. But their problem is unchanged: We have nowhere else for them to go. Nobody wants these people spreading out into more space, other neighbourhoods. They've always been concentrated into these few blocks. Yet another thing that never really worked well, exposed as a public health problem for all of us, no longer just a "their problem" for them alone.
http://brander.ca/c19#dtes
Sandman's formula is that "Risk= Hazard + Outrage" ... and "outrage" is a necessarily a temporary emotion.
Modern medicine and especially vaccines have given us such a sense of invulnerability. One American-born friend of mine observed that nobody on the planet feels quite so much invulnerability as Americans, protected by their money, their own continent, and their gigantic military. They actually start wars on purpose, knowing that for them, it's just a TV show, with foreigners doing 99% of the dying. That may relate to why they've shown the most resistance to a lockdown: it's hard for them to believe this risk is real.
We now get outraged at things that previous generations would have shrugged at. A difference we have with the 1918 pandemic is that a fair fraction of our victims, in the age before antibiotics, heart stents, blood pressure medication, and insulin...were already dead of something else; they never made it to 80 to start with. We expect those care-home patients to have those last few years, and are outraged at the loss. As for 40-ish parents of young kids dying of disease, busy doctors in the middle of life, New York Cops, that's just crazy talk. But it used to be more common, and people endured it.
Not everybody today has that sense of invulnerability, that outrage at the very idea their lives are at risk. Those with the roughest lives also tend to risk-taking behaviour, and that includes behaviour that will get them infected. Most of the time, we just shrug and let them have lives of risk, injury, disease and early mortality; but in the age of the Christian Virus, we are pushed by our own self-interest to lower their risk, to lower ours.
Since their lives leave them with little capacity for outrage at a new risk, we have to be outraged on their behalf.
Peter Sandman's excellent paper on "Responding to Community Outrage" is a bit tangential to the current crisis, but relevant, and an excellent read.
http://brander.ca/c19#sandman
My brother wrote me "What I most remember is Shannon next door who was my age and we played together every day - then suddenly she was gone and I wasn't allowed outside. Forget when or why the family moved ... They came back for a visit years later and there she was with this withered leg in an iron brace...And Howard Tilley [father of the family across the alley] in an iron lung for two years, then in a wheelchair for his remaining days."
The mercy that COVID-19 extends to children is a bright spot in 2020, that can perhaps only be appreciated by the generation of polio survivors. It's frankly bizarre to me that polio articles have not been in the news, so few that Bruce's age and up have been irritated by this "Never our living memory" phrase they keep hearing.
The 1956 Polio summer was especially bitter, in a way: the vaccine had been developed in 1955. I just missed the anniversary here on the blog: the day Bruce wrote me was 65 years since the April 12, 1955 announcement that it had been successfully tested. I wouldn't have missed it if a campaign to make it a national holiday had succeeded. Salk gave the patent away for free, campaigned for mandatory vaccination, claimed that public health was a "moral committment". The only problem was distributing it in time, and both Shannon and Mr. Tilley missed being saved by the time that took.
(Off-topic, April 14 is an anniversay: The Titanic went down 108 years ago today. I always notice because I wrote that essay 25 years ago.)
Dr. Salk's free gift to the world should shame every anti-vaxxer, of course, not that we need any more reasons to pity and condemn them. His lack of interest in money should of course also shame any politician working to monetize and indeed monopolize a vaccine for COVID-19.. Bastards.
I'd never thought of a dividing line between my age group and my brothers, less than seven years senior. But everybody born after 1956 is part of a new world, where disease epidemics are not one of a parent's greatest terrors. Infectious diseases do still kill or injure many children, but in nothing like the numbers they used to, before vaccines. They are one of the greatest inventions of all time, and living in their era is a greater privilege than any of our jets, our electronics, our communications. Only those who remember the times when polio stalked the neighbourhood, serial-killing, really appreciate them fully. If COVID-19 brings that appreciation to a new generation, it will have that silver lining, at least.
http://brander.ca/c19#polio
It's true enough at the moment, though, people mostly several metres apart, but occasionally closer as they pass each other. I circle wide around a couple not keeping to the right, going far left up on the grass; but then there's an oncoming couple and I have to dive right across the pathway at a 45 degree angle, going to the path edge like the last ten centimetres of it was a plank bridging two buildings, and stay just outside their Death Zone.
Then two people are each walking singly, one far right, the other far left; this just leaves a 4-metre gap between them, measured by the diagonal, and I, desperate, accelerate to dash through the thin Safe Zone outside their killer radiation.
Killer radiation?
Hey, anything can be a game if you play it so. Even social distancing. Is there a kid who never jumped from furniture to furniture, "terrified" of a single toe hitting the carpet, because they're playing "The Floor Is Lava".
My runs are more fun now, and safe, because I'm playing my own running game:
People Are Plutonium.
http://brander.ca/c19#playful
The soap's dissolving
Na na na, nah,
http://brander.ca/c19#goodbye
The complaint, per se, is perfectly correct. They could have warned us in mid-December, they did not until January 21. Simple fact. They were, of course, the first to suffer for it, their denial of reality cost them thousands of lives.
But, hey, you know who had NO warning at all, zip, nada, zero? China!
So, if your country's story with COVID-19 is more depressing than that of Hubei province, you can hardly blame it on lack of warning. Hubei had less.
My "Covid Cup" formulation has nations judged on their casualties per million population. China, like America and Canada, really has separate responses, curves, and stories for each of its federation of provinces. The story there is really just about Hubei province, the only part locked down - so, not 1.2 billion people, really just 58.5 million. Their 3339 deaths come to a score of 57 per million. America just hit 62. (Canada will reach 57 at about 2100 deaths, which we seem doomed to hit in around two weeks.)
We would all have had a month more to prepare if China had been honest. We would also have had another month to prepare if we'd all started working hard on January 22. After all the years of warning, after the Hollywood movie in 2011, there was no excuse not to assume the worst immediately. So divide your complaints between China, and your own government, at least equally.
http://brander.ca/c19#chinawarning
On Easter weekend, consider the Christian Virus. The Christian Virus crosses degrees of separation; it brings together the rich with the homeless and the prisoners in jail. Wealth is no innoculation before it. Should 80-something billionaires contract it, they will stand before its judgement on an equal footing with beggars. And they could contract it, easily enough.
Your cleaner has a family, who have friends, who have families...that work in a jail. Or a grocery. Or a hospital. Or are homeless. Three degrees of separation is two weeks travel for the Christian Virus.
So suddenly problems for the poor and downtrodden are on the front-burner. They had been discussed at leisure, over decades. Great concerns were always expressed that help might cause moral hazards, and costs of helping the unworthy. Now, there is a Massive Effort to get the Los Angeles homeless into hotels. The country that imprisons more of its population that any other is letting out the ones whose confinement never served much judicial purpose.
There's no actual Christianity in the sudden concern. The virus has simply created new situation where the health and safety of the humblest and the worst among us are necessary to our own, and where the ability of the powerful to insulate themselves from the rest of us is diminished.
The virus is like Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, making human beings care for their fellows, to promote their own welfare. It turns out that threatening us with two weeks of Worst Flu Ever, plus a mere 1% chance of dying, works better than threats of Eternal Damnation. Quite bluntly, the virus is doing Christianity's job better than the religion itself ever did.
Every time something terrible happens, it's generally claimed that it is all part of a Great Plan too large for our tiny human minds to see. Perhaps this time, we're being given a hint.
http://brander.ca/c19#christianvirus
I wrote that before reviewing my own photographs of Spain, below, that mirror behaviour in Italy, France and Switzerland, not to mention my sight of the Italian Age Pyramid, again below; perhaps these factors will put Italy in the cellar of the "major league". But the USA is certainly looking to take the cake for "dumb, bad response".
The US has long been noted for its exceptionalism. Not just the political kind; I mean the cultural attribute that makes it stand out from all other industrialized nations: its freakishly high income inequality. The image at top left has only one nation labeled, and I've shrunk it sharply, because it only says one thing: for their income level, the United States have the highest income inequality by far. That, alone, would let you predict that their encounter with a health-and-social-coordination challenge will be the worst. That factor predicts nearly every other bad social outcome. There's a whole book full of proof.
The book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, has been out for over ten years, has only been shown to be more-true all that time.
It's ironic, today, that the authors are epidemiologists, were just sorting through statistics for correlations that might be causes - and they found that income inequality correlates with nearly every measure of societal success: health, crime, marriage success, drug consumption, violence, teen pregnancy...you name it, societies with less inequality have better statistics of every kind.
The data drills down internally, too: most likely, the states with the highest income inequality will be the states with the most dead; even the counties and cities.
It's not just during a crisis that it costs lives to ignore the epidemiologists; America has been losing tens of thousands of people to the Grim Reaper, per year, for a long time, and from highly preventable causes. The reasons are many, but they all fall out from the cultural attitudes that make them so sanguine about purchasing prosperity upon the backs of others.
Which leaves me repeating my message from yesterday: COVID is merely highlighting a lot of existing problems that we all, (but America especially), have always studiously ignored. I'd like to think this will see problems like income inequality addressed, but I'm pessimistic. From long practice, we are very, very good at ignoring problems of poverty and race and pollution. America, exceptionally so.
http://brander.ca/c19#spiritlevel
Ditto, the financial collapse: responded to in ways that made banks bigger, richer, and income inequality even greater. Revolution was more visibly-brewing then, but it's like the old maxim: people overestimate short-term effects and understimate long-term effects.
If you want proof that "nothing changed" (overnight), look at the end of the Sanders campaign. If COVID-19 had really changed everybody's minds about everything from the overwhelming importance of universal medical care, to regulating Wall St. and assuring basic income supports, then there was still room for everybody to say so by giving Sanders 90% of the vote in Wisconsin, and all the primary votes after that, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, and making "Our Revolution" an actual revolution.
Hah. If that were about to happen, we'd have known in 2018, because there wouldn't have been "AOC and The Squad", there would have been 10 AOCs and fifty in that "squad". That would have told you a revolution was at hand. (An entirely legal one involving congressional voting patterns.)
There is probably a revolution brewing, and the near-certainty is that the political outcomes from the pandemic will be so rotten, that they will push that revolution along. The deeper dive, for me, is from history professor Rebecca Spang and her Atlantic article The Revolution is Under Way Already. Real revolution is deep change in the outlook of a whole people, a statistical thing. Gay marriage and cannabis legalization were jokes, until they suddenly weren't, because support crossed the 50% line, with neither sea-change championed by any charismatic leader.
Sanders has been part of a real revolution, which is being pointed out by many pundits: that he was a single-digit-popularity weirdo a few years ago, and now he came that close to power, without taking a penny from the large donors, a unique and unprecedented accomplishment. But he was a symptom of the real change, growing slowly in the people.
The American pandemic response will be terrible, I'm sure. Income inequality will increase, large corporations and banks will become richer and less-accountable, the safety net will not feel safe. This is not just because of the executive, but the congress. The real revolution will be the election of a very different-looking congress. When that giant "Squad" arrives, and the pandemic may finally do it, that'll be the revolution. Not one guy.
http://brander.ca/c19#notdifferent
Now, with a lung-searing disease circling the globe, a past life in polluted air may doom you if you catch it, when your twin raised in the mountains will live.
The 100,000 a year have been invisible statistics: visible to statisticians, but the public just reads the figure in the paper, as here, and it comes without an emotional impact. My brother Bruce said it best, over dinner years ago: "Three hundred thousand people per year die from smoking in America. If they all died on one day in Chicago, smoking would be illegal the next day." (Bruce has just written to tell me to properly attribute it to Peter Sandman.)
COVID-19 does something like that. At first, its just statistics, the invisible kind about increased mortality in nursing homes; then suddenly a thousand people die on one day in New York. (That'll probably be about the end of this week; 731 yesterday, but 779 as I write at noon EDT.)
The invisible statistics tell us not to be surprised to find out that public leaders are actually just as indifferent to the deaths of tens of thousands of their own countrymen, as they shrugged at dead Arabs in their overseas wars. They always were. Harvard estimated that America's lack of universal health insurance cost 45,000 lives per year. Every year. But they died of a hundred different things, and the common factor shortening their odds of making it was unseen. Same withAfrican-American mortality, always there but now highlighted. It's grimly certain that Indigenous Canadian statistics for COVID will also come out.
If COVID-19 has a silver lining, and it probably doesn't, it's that it's visible statistics haul the invisible ones out into the light for another look. But people will probably forget again.
http://brander.ca/c19#visiblestatistics
Two good articles up now:
"Estimates of the Death Toll Have Little Meaning" ...and why.
"Why We Still Don't Know What the Mortality Rate Is" ...contrary to my offering many numbers for each age group. I did stress in that post that the data was just from Wuhan, and had major error bars.
There are going to be other factors than age. The New York Times this morning reports that there's clear data that hospitalizations and deaths are clearly more common in areas that had higher levels of particulate pollution. Which would be very bad in many cities in India and China. And the Times and CNN and others have just all spotted that death rates are way higher for some African-American communities.
Neither of which should be surprising, when you think of it. Death rates for African-Americans from everything are higher. And air pollution is, thinking about it, already known to kill tens of thousands of Americans per year, coal alone is blamed for 100,000 deaths per year around the globe. (Rant about nuclear being safer, has been deleted. After the Chernobyl documentary, I gave up.)
http://brander.ca/c19#newscientist
Italy is one of the oldest nations on Earth, with a lot of seniors and comparatively few of the young people who have a small fraction of the death-rate
The tool for showing a country's demographics is called its "age pyramid", a bar chart with the young people at the bottom and the old at the top - narrow at the top because of population growth and because the old have died off on the way up the pyramid.
Traditionally, one puts a bar-chart for the women on the right, men on the left. It shows how more men than women die off at older ages. At left, you can see the baby-boom bulge from 50-65, the Gen-X baby bust from 35-49, and the baby-boom echo from 25-35.
I enjoyed a lecture from David Foot, of "Boom, Bust, and Echo", some years back, that explained the demographics-is-destiny concept. Quebec wasn't taking Alberta's transfer payments because their politics were defective; they were just older, with way more retirees taking money out of Canada Pension, and fewer young people paying in. Alberta and BC were the youngest provinces. His whole book was about how demographic forces like that were mistaken for political triumphs all the time.
For both Italy and India, I didn't see much difference between the female and male halves of the pyramid, so I just picked the female side for India, and the male side, for Italy, and put them side-by-side for comparison.
To COVID-19, India is not a nation of 1.3 billion prospective victims; it only has a few milion people over the age of 80, only some tens of millions over the age of 65. (Remember to double the numbers you count on one side to add in the opposite sex. Also remember the X-scale on the India side is 20X larger.)
It's funny to say "only", because India's population over age 60 - maybe 120 million - is larger than the whole population of most countries - and they seem doomed to lose literally millions of them if they can't successfully lock-down. Even if so, their overall death rate, divided by those 1.3 billion people, will be a fraction of a percent, probably lower than Italy's, for all their lack of medicine.
http://brander.ca/c19#italyindia
I'm glad to bring this up, because it's likely wrong to pick your age out on the log graph I posted below, spot the percentage mortality, and imagine this is your risk if you start getting a fever. The graph probably more reflects the likelyhood of finding somebody with heart, blood pressure, or diabetes problems. If you have few health problems, your risk is probably a fraction of the number on the graph. Only 0.8% of the dead in Italy had zero previous diseases.
Of course, those of less-advanced age, but some health issues, can be more nervous now, so it's not like the news is good or bad; it's just clarifying.
Back to the South, Margaret Renkl at the New York Times says the South is a "perfect storm" because they have the worst health systems, and the most social/political resistance to a lockdown. Also at the NYT, two doctors double-down on the message in The Atlantic, below. They write that America's existing health problems of obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure may kill thousands that otherwise might have made it. They don't mention the South, but The Atlantic noted that these are the issues that are worst there.
http://brander.ca/c19#underlyingitaly
Some argument for this just appeared in The Atlantic this week. The article, "The Coronavirus's Unique Threat to the South", by Vann R. Newkirk II, shows that those "age-related mortality" figures from the South are different from the Wuhan data quoted by The Lancet in my post below. They're even distinctly higher than other US States.
I'll stop dead, right there. I don't want to be accused, by some centrist, of "unseemly gloating" for pointing out, however quietly and soberly, that any high-social-spender was correct, ever, about anything.
I'll focus on the upside. If you're a senior with generally good health, be of good cheer: your slot in the cemetary may be taken by an obese, hard-drinking, 45-year-old smoker.
http://brander.ca/c19#riskcause
I took them about February 23rd of last year, almost exactly 1 year before Spain's first confirmed case, which is to say, probably after there were hundreds of cases in Madrid that were still asymptomatic but spreading. The weather would have been the same this February: pleasant for strolling.
The three pictures are of one of about a dozen large plazas and squares in central Madrid. Most have heard of the Puerta del Sol, the largest of them, four times this size, and the Plaza Mayor, equally big. They are connected by broad, all-pedestrian corridors connecting them, with shopping and sidewalk cafes. Click on those links for far more examples, but these three are views of the same place in different directions.
The Metro sign tells me this is the Plaza del Callao, which isn't even on this map, but it's about the size of the Plaza del Carmen, just south of it and at the middle-top of this map. Everything red on this map would be this full of people on a typical Tuesday night in Madrid. Busier on a weekend night. So you need to multiply this area by all the red you see on the map: tens of thousands of people in close contact, for extended periods, every weeknight. Double it on weekends.
A friend tells me that this culture in Italy is called "La passaggiata" and is common in Greece and Switzerland as well. Switzerland has six times the cases and twelve times the deaths of Canada, per million population.
After meeting in these plazas, chatting for a while, they generally repair to very packed bars and restaurants. The whole red area above, the plazas and all the broad pedestrian boulevards that connect them, must have a density of nearly one person per square metre, every evening, for hours.
Madrid for me was the ultimate friendly, sociable city; I've never been to a place with so much street life that is "vibrant" as our urban planners say when they mean "pedestrian traffic". I suspect it caused a rapid early spread. My relatives there are suffering from the lack of socializing; it's a deep part of the culture.
http://brander.ca/c19#madridcrowds
He noted that courtroom dramas frequently have a scene where a lying witness is confronted with contradictory information that shows up their lie. In drama, the witness is then demolished, breaks down completely and confesses the truth. In Nizer's experience, most resist caving in the way a tortured soldier might keep silent to the very last shred of his strength.
People have marveled at how resistant the GOP and supporters are to truth about COVID-19. Informed by sober experts? Denial. Confronted by the experience of other countries? We're different. Shown that the start of it is happening just as those experts predicted, and the next 14 days can be forecast with the simplest statistics? Maybe it won't happen.
It's difficult to avoid amusement (very dark humour) as we watch them be tortured by the facts, the body-count battering away the armor around their worldview. They've always been able to simply deny before. But it's hard to deny the existence of a pile of bodies, the way you can deny climate science or economics that take years to play out.
They continue to resist, of course, every concession to the facts followed within hours or minutes by some sort of denial, frequently of their own recent words.
There's no way to enjoy this, but I have to admit I see a silver lining.
http://brander.ca/c19#gop_torture
"We gathered in a circle to focus our energies", said Psychic Science spokesman George Kreskin yesterday, "and pushed all our psychic powers into a single message sent three years back in time to the mind of the American president. We tried to warn him about the coming of COVID-19, so that he would have time to prepare."
"We did establish mental contact, but the connection was very poor. We finally kept repeating the term 'COVID' over and over; it was our best shot."
"Unfortunately, all that got through to May of 2017 was the garbled term 'COVFEFE'. Damn."
http://brander.ca/c19#telepaths
People have been shocked to read of multiple prominent Republican politicians, media, and supporters like Lt. Gov Dan Patrick of Texas, advocating that we sacrifice to COVID-19 all the people it wants to eat, rather than sacrifice "the economy".
It's not clear yet how many trillions the "cure" will cost the economy. Certainly, it will cost the rich far more than the poor. When great losses come from war, for instance, they reduce inequality. But like a war, this will also kill people. Some 2.2 million at worst, and maybe 100,000 at best, according to a British study that converted Boris Johnson last March 13th. So there's over 2 million lives to be saved.
Should we all endure some poverty to save them? Some victims are deemed worthier than others. A dead addict in an alley is barely news, but other victims get extra sympathy. While more than a hundred Americans die every day by violence, only a few make the news. The murder of a police officer in the line of duty is one such death. Let's talk about those very worthy cops.
As of April 1, it's in the news that over 1400 NYPD officers have already tested positive for COVID-19, and three of them have now died. [Postscript,April 20: 30 cops now.] The force skews young, obviously; most are in the 25-50 age range and early retirement is encouraged, so few are over 60. Less than one percent of them will die if COVID-19 is simply let loose to stalk the entire population.
And not all would even be infected. Maybe 30,000 of the 55,000 NYC police would get the bug; half would have no serious symptoms; fewer than 5,000 would have a severe illness; and, because of youth, under half a percent, most likely - maybe only another hundred officers - would leave hospitals in boxes. (More likely 200; but let's be conservative.)
But the GOP were not just advocating the sacrifice of 100 NYPD officers. I am just using them as a microcosm of Americans aged 25-55.
Data from Wuhan,see below, suggested that COVID-19 kills about 1% of people my age (61), making me the "median age" for dying; I have the same chance as the overall population. Above the age of 80, it's more like 5%. For those under 30, it's as low as 0.03%.
But that's nearly 20,000 of the 44 million in America's 15-24 age group? Under a twentieth of a percent of the college crowd, so only 6,000 kids 18-21. How do you ask America's parents to surrender thousands of children to the flames?
There are 130 million other Americans in the NYPD age profile, so one million of those famous "2.2 million" in the British estimate would be in the prime of life. Barely half would be "useless" (for money-making).
Yes, COVID-19 mostly kills old people, especially the ones who could be killed anyway by the flu or even colds. But allowing it free reign will kill so many people that all age groups would die in droves and masses and piles. Of the more than two million dead, a good million would qualify as "worthy victims" by any measure.
http://brander.ca/c19#cop_killers
They grouped the patients by decade of age: 20s, 30s, 40s. I have put their figure for each decade against a single point in the middle, age 25, 35, and so on:
The article graphed these numbers, with huge error bars that indicate we shouldn't treat these as especially accurate:
The numbers kind of jumped out at me, and it's amazing to me how these fine scholars could have missed pointing something out that you can see plainly with the same figures in a semi-log graph:
...the odds grow exponentially. My wife is just 8 years younger (53 vs 61) yet my odds of dying are double what hers are. (Triple if I were 65; I'm interpolating down to 1.3% odds at age 61.)
Even if the numbers themselves turn out to be off, the methodology that produced them was consistent for each age group, so the relationship between the data points will be highly consistent: and the dotted "trend line" that is a straight line on the log graph has an "R-squared" factor, a correlation coefficient, of 0.99 - which is statistician for "Not remotely a coincidence". Whatever your odds, they grow exponentially with age.
Exponential relationships are everywhere, or it would be funny for this factoid to surface, just as millions are having exponentials and semi-log plots explained to them so they can understand that the growth rate of dead bodies:
May appear to be hard to predict, but on a semilog plot, that swooping curve is a straight line that's dead easy to extrapolate:
Those 100,000 deaths are obviously just 12 days away, as long as that line remains straight. We have little data to suggest it won't.
http://brander.ca/c19#age_related
Text is COPYRIGHT, Roy Brander, 2019. All graphics are available Internet grabs that link to their source, and will be taken down upon request, to "roy.brander" at Google's mail system.
February 12: April Is the Cruelest Month
(From a TS Eliot Poem)
I'm not really on a different topic from yesterday, I'm just taking time to wallow in it a bit, obsess over it.
February 11: Resigned to an April Wave, Let's Calculate the Death-Rate
I won't even go over all the stuff that every other pandemic article, comparing case-trends, to variant expectations, to vaccination rates, save to sum up:
So, it will be like the Great Barrington boneheads got their wish: the old protected, and the rest of us just getting infected. How bad will it be?
February 10: Shun "The Sociables", A Menace to Us All
A regular CCCC reader is among the culprits identified by a large group of curlers and physicians as the real problem with the pandemic: socializing.
February 9: Handicapping the COVID Cup by Age Demographics
About ten years ago, I caught most of a lecture by David Foot, the Canadian Demographer who wrote "Boom, Bust, and Echo", and explained how "demographics is destiny", how much of society can be predicted by just looking at it's "Population Pyramid", as with Canada's, at left, in 2006. (The most recent year he had for all provinces, in his lecture). The overall Canada pyramid is the colourful background to all the graphics below.
The other graphs, as for Alberta here, show the target population as the white outlines superimposed on the Canadian average.
For a sharp contrast, Quebec has the opposite situation: short of teenagers and kids, a little short of young workers, and has way more old people.
For a real contrast, you can look at different countries, as Foot's lecture did. The terrible death toll in Italy in the beginning, and the extreme fears that people have about the Italian economy in coming years, are clear on this pyramid. Italy really DOES have double the number of old people that Canada does, and an extreme deficiency of kids and young adults. (Remember to add 10 years to this 2010 chart: the lack of those 20-29 is now for 30-39, and there's even fewer 20-29 than in 2010. Italy really, really needs immigration.
For the biggest possible contrast, you can't do better than India, though I could have put up the age pyramid for our own Nunavut, and it would look the same: just a huge number of young, young people, and almost no oldsters.
February 8: Oh, Yes, I'd Take the 50% Vaccine. And Be Done.
Two Christmases back, I went through a week of minor hell. My then-86-year-old mother-in-law across the hall (we were visiting for Christmas) went through her week of minor hell, after first a week of major hell. The Flu.
February 7: Quebec's CCCC Milestone Passed Last Week
COVID Cup Standings, North American Deaths-per-Million
The news will be mentioning that Quebec has passed 10,000 dead in its own right. I only flashed a guilty start: I'd missed the CCCC version of a milestone, when they passed 1000 deaths-per-million, (the CCCC metric of COVID-Cup victory or failure), early last week. (Or week before, it being Sunday today.) They're doing most of Canada's dying, recently, and have already passed 1200 deaths-per-million.
February 6: Everybody Read the "Get To Zero" Screed
Apparently, Andrew Nikiforuk's analysis and polemic at The Tyee is now their most-forwarded item ever.
February 5: The Real Reason to Double-Mask
Double-masking? Does it work? We aren't sure. Does it make you feel better if you're anxious? Sure, but so do many meaningless rituals.
February 4: BC Finally Declining - Just Barely
Other news sources have already noted that BC is clearly, finally, in declining cases, after sitting on that 500-cases-per-day "ledge" for a week or more. Well, breathe out a sigh of relief, but not a large one.
February 3: Let's Hope Israel Falls off a Cliff
--- Cases --- --- Deaths
...just their case-rate, I mean. Readers will have to forgive the rough-hewn graphics effort at left; a blog isn't supposed to be all polished. (And I suck at polish, anyway.)
But, basically, they are still near the peak of a bad second curve, when they amazed the world by vaccinating 1, sometimes 2 percent of their population every day. They have will hit 60% later today, for first doses. One-sixth of their population is now at 28 days, 7 days past the second dose and at 90% immunity or higher. Fifty percent is a week past their first dose, and at perhaps 80% immunity. And, of course, they are still innoculating at a wonderful rate of 10% of the population every 8 days, should hit "herd immunity" in a week or so.
February 2: A Year After "Red Dawn"
At left, a screen shot from the original "Red Dawn", the nickname for an e-mail chain among infectious disease specialists almost exactly a year ago.
February 1: Biden's Path to Victory
The path is between these two graphs. "Path to victory" has become a well-worn phrase in US presidential election coverage, but here it's the path to the Big Biden Pandemic Victory Party.
January 31: Indiana University, the South Korea of Universities
Boy, do I have a heartwarming, inspiring, uplifting story for you.
"Fortunately, large universities can find ways to tackle society's toughest problems, including the need for new ways to detect infections en masse. Last spring, Rutgers developed a saliva-based test that didn't rely on medical professionals to collect nasopharyngeal swabs. "
(CCCC decried that nobody was using the easier testing, that we could have had almost daily testing. Public health remained impenetrable to the new ideas, but a University had independence to run its own health-care system and just adopt them! Envy...Universities, of course, have their own labs!)
...I'll stop before I just copy the whole article. Here's your final point: the sum of their work, where huge numbers of people are tested constantly, outbreaks shut down same-day, people kept safe...was $700 per student.
January 30: Blame Everybody But Fraser
Boy, did I miss a beat yesterday, thinking the blame was all evenly distributed. I was so focused on just the last few weeks, when cases "levelled off", that I didn't look back at the earlier context.
In both graphs, there's a levelling-off for most of January: but Fraser is levelling off after two months of steady decline. The rest of us declined until Christmas, had that "Christmas Bump"...and just levelled off at the new, higher, bad level. We haven't really gone down in cases since December.
January 29: Blame Evenly Distributed
Well, that was pretty much the waste of a half-day. I found that BC has a download available of all 66,000 cases - only noted as to gender, health region, date, and age-decade. I blew many hours getting it into an SQL database, where I figured I could work reporting magic upon it, as I did through a whole career.
The numbers, for the 7-day-average (anything else is crazy-making, you get huge "dips" on the weekends) for the last two weeks, by region.
January 28: Canadian Shield
Thanks to Alan Beairsto for the tip on this. As near as I can tell, the physicians and other experts involved in "Canadian Strategic Choice" and the promotion of a set of COVID protective strategies they call "The Canadian Shield", don't want your help. Their page doesn't solicit membership, donations, or calls to your MP.
January 27: What If We Get a Movie Ending?
...that would be terrible.
January 26: Hear Me, Oh Israel: Well Done.
Quebec is a somewhat-separate culture within a larger country, a province with its own health care, justice, and pension systems - of just under 10 million people. Israel is a very-separate country in a hostile region - and just under 10 million people.
January 25: Pity Poor Portugal
I admit it, I didn't even look at Portugal yesterday because it's filed with Greece, and Vietnam, and Cuba in my mental list of "Pandemic Hero Nations that did a great job with no money somehow". (Mostly with obedient lockdown behaviour - I think in Greece and Portugal because of strong culture ... Vietnam and Cuba, maybe more the soldiers that enforced quarantines.)
And now, the story gets horrifying. Portugal today, has a 7-day average at over 12,000 cases per day. They have just over a quarter of the population of Canada, so it's like Canada having 46,000 cases per day.
January 24: A Survey of Europe's Third Wave
You can't keep up with this thing. Readers are starting to send me pandemic-reading recommendations, and I'm not getting to them. Will the race between vaccination and the new fast-spreading variant, end in a crushed third wave, or a massive one? Will Colchesine and antibody treatments make it a shrug to get the disease?
Country Graph Country CCCC 
Britain has deeply screwed itself. As anybody I respect would agree, this started with the election of Boris Johnson, and his pandemic strategy is working out every bit as well as his Brexit strategy. They are sort-of in a third wave, though the second wave never really ended; it went down to much higher than the top of their first wave, and now has gone to world-record heights. Boris has completely ruined my thesis about the USA doing the worst in the developed world.
Spain has been pretty good at lockdowns, take it seriously, and crushed their second wave much better. The third has been way worse again, and because they responded slowly. Christmas traditions are very deep in Spain, family visiting an even higher priority, so Christmas was bad, and they're just starting to get a grip on it.
Italy, on the other hand, the worst-hit of all Europe last spring, is really still crushing their second wave; it had a "Christmas Bump" that doesn't really deserve the term "third wave", and now they're pushing that down. All hail, Italy; what are they doing right?
France is really different from the whole rest of the continent and most of the world. They crushed the second wave before the Christmas season started, and had no holiday bump - what they've got is a slow, steady increase in numbers, that isn't remotely exponential. While they're in epidemic status - increasing numbers - it looks good compared to the UK and even Spain. Not to be fooled, of coruse: their slow wave is has been averaging a death-rate of 400/day, twice as bad as Canada, by population. Not a success story, just not a disaster story.
Belgium surprised everybody with how bad it got last spring. We think of it as the most well-run of nations because its the seat of the EU, where edicts about trade always come "from Brussels". Then it soars to the worst death-counts, because it turned out to have a lot of vulnerable old people.
And Germany is just weird. They've been struggling with, but not beating a huge second wave for three months now, and only since the New Year are there signs that they're winning at last. Germany was our hero until last Fall; a tiny first wave, totally crushed like a bug, held it down all summer.
January 23: Canada "Advances" to 500 Club in COVID Cup
It happened overnight. Last night, Canada was at 496 deaths/million population on worldometers; those 128 dead reported as of 9AM PST brought us to exactly 500. I noted the American entry into "the 1000 club" on December 23rd, exactly a month ago. In that month, they made it to 1278, some 93,610 Americans having died in the last month.
January 22: The Diamond Jubilee of "Military-Industrial Complex"
I made a note of it over a week ago, but not a sticky note for my screen, so even I forgot. January 17, 2021, was the sixtieth anniversary of Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning to his country about "the immense military establishment" that had joined with "a large arms industry."
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
(emphasis mine).
January 21: The Bully Pulpit
Joe Biden can do his country no larger favour than to come in bullying. "The Bully Pulpit" was a term invented by Teddy Roosevelt, to point out one of the American President's soft powers: he gets attention when he speaks, can change political conversations.
January 20: The War for Science
"What do we want? Evidence-based policy. When do we want it? After peer review."
That was one of the chants at the March for Science, an international set of demonstrations in April 2017.
...
As an economist watching this disaster, I was mainly horrified. But I couldn't help also thinking, "Welcome to my world." My sense is that many medical experts are still shocked to see what should be matters of science utterly politicized. But in the social sciences it has been that way all along.
Those are extracts from a newsletter you can sign up for, from Paul Krugman, NY Times' economics columnist and author of the much-aforementioned "Arguing with Zombies" (He coined "zombie ideas" for the convenient beliefs that won't die.)
Really, the "stolen election" beliefs should make us all heave a sigh of relief. It's out in the open now, how deep the delusions can run, how utterly impossible it can be to argue "on the evidence".
January 19: Nice To See Some Creativity
There's a need for positive news, so often. I'm aching to report good news about the curve being crushed, and while other news are already noting reductions in both Canada and even the US, I'm reluctant to jump on board without a few more days of data.
The Tyee, about a shelter buying RVs to use as isolation accomodation.
January 18: Also a Sign of Poor Resilience
January 17: "American Carnage" ? Try, "American Holocaust"
The round number of "400,000" clicked up on on Worldometers for the USA a couple of days ago, and the news headlines are now quoting it. But I think everybody is numb to the numbers ticking by.
January 16: Alberta is Half as Smart as BC ... and Getting Dumber
It's not just California and Canada that can be compared, straight-across, because of very similar populations. BC and Alberta aren't that different, either.
.
Somewhere in there, we really need to know how many cases were caused by "cynical spreaders".
January 15: The "Virus Passport" Question
I was disappointed that the PM is against passports.
January 14: In A Fearful State
Reader Allan Beairsto pointed out last night that California, most populous in the nation, actually has 4% more population than all of our nation. Statistics between Canada and California compare almost exactly, per capita.
January 13: American Dips
The many emotional stresses of the pandemic are wearing me out, from writing about the pain of so many. I'd like to write about jail vaccinations, and the care-home in Chinatown that's kept a zero case-rate, but it's wearing.
January 12: Random Statistics
Number of vaccinations in Canada in one month: 377,221
January 11: Not Used to Being Worse than America
CCCC has been kind of a hotbed of America criticism since it started. Indeed, it started off predicting America would be the worst.
America doesn't think much of itself on the vaccination front, lately. If you see "vaccine" in an American headline, it's probably for a story about how unsatisfied they are to have just over two percent of their population vaccinated, so far.
January 10: How Science Does NOT Work
There's no "International Journal of Claimed Truths About Physics". So there's no "International Journal of Fact-Checking Physics Claims".
But it does seem to work that way in politics and journalism.
January 9: The Sick Joys of Trolling
An exceptionally political week - crossed with new records in death-counts that have a pandemic blog mostly whining for attention, 'Hey guys, while you argue, people are dying'.
Alas, the screen-snap is all that remains. It won't appear on the Post; the tag says "Content Disabled" which only links to the note "violates our content guidelines". I was a little puzzled. There were no swear words, no insults to any person. I just called a hypothetical person with a flag, a "redneck".
Today, the big top headline in the paper was a story about how a second lockdown - clearly absolutely needed in Ontario and Quebec, as their ICUs buckle under the still-soaring load, that "Curfew to curtail COVID-19 spread might just worsen public mental health, morale".
I have no idea how the NP, or the right-wing commentators I was trolling, will react. But the need for the experiment was validated when I hit the POST button: I was immediately filled with a smug, smirking, satisfied sensation. It was nothing at all like the good feeling I get when I construct an argument I'm proud of on this blog.
January 8: One Point One Two, Zero Point Eight Eight
I'm quite pleased with my little innovation the other day, of just taking the 7-day average case-load from a graph, five days apart, and calling that the "R" figure for the population graphed.
January 7: Joke Day
So, worldometers was mostly just catching-up delayed reports, yesterday, when it ticked over 4,100 deaths in a single day. I don't think it will continue at that rate. At least, if it does, I just blew a fuse on thinking about it, on top of everything else.
The images of packed crowds, the story of the many congress members packed into a "safe room" for hours, with the right-wingers smugly refusing face masks the whole time...on the same day as 4,100 dead, really were a bit much for the ol' fuse-box, sorry.
There's little need to joke about the, umm, "pro-Trump activists", who, as you can see at upper left, are better at making a joke of themselves than any snotty coastal elite liberal could ever do. Yesterday does make one wonder if this show will ever, ever, go over-the-top and cause its own believers to suddenly realize they're delusional.
January 6: The Hardest Vaccine Calculation
Where do I fit in? At what "priority level" do I sit?
January 5: The Simplest Vaccine Calculation
The simplest vaccine calculation is the only one a non-epidemiologist can do. What the epidemiologists can do, I suspect, is toss out a number with the hasty, boldfaced, disclaimer "has huge error bar!"
Such models should be labelled "for entertainment purposes only", but they can help to understand the basic patterns. At left, a table that assumes the vaccine is a wonderous 95% effective indeed, which dramatizes its effects a bit. It gives the declining "R" as a function of total vaccination, based on different starting growth factors the population may already have.
If Ontario could keep up that level of distancing, then 1.12 could become 0.99 with just a bit over 10% vaccination. But, they aren't getting there for a month at least, even assuming vaccinations increase ten-fold this week. By a month from now, their behaviour will have changed, presumably for the better, as holiday visting ends, and the endless upcoming news of dying people sinks in again.
We will always have a 'reservoir' of bad behaviours to revert to, as the vaccines make them possible. It's like computers getting 10,000% faster over a decade, but people kept making them slow anyway, by wasteful behaviours with them. By summer, of course, it won't be the behaviour of Italy last Spring that will be demanded: the theatre chains will want their summer blockbusters back, which is going straight to the 2.8 column again.
January 4: Why Are We Worse At Vaccination? Is it Really Supply?
We were, of course, warned that "We expect to have a limited supply of just a few million doses in the early weeks and months...". The PM took a few hits on TV while admitting it, though the fault would be Mr. Harper's, for failing to see years into the future and starting a vaccine factory ages ago. (Apparently, Quebec will have one in 2022.)
January 3: They Were Warned
Britain went through this already. Waaay back in May, when it came out that Boris Johnson adviser Dominic Cummings took an April trip, based on his assumption that he was just sooo special. CCCC covered how pandemic hero Neil Ferguson dutifully resigned when he'd broken lockdown rules, between the time Cummings did, and when Cummings was found out. Ferguson had in fact been through the disease at the time, was presumptively immune and safe...but rules are rules, and Ferguson showed respect and contrition. He knew that leadership is by example.
January 2: A Conspiracy Theory I Could Have Believed
A friend on Facebook posts a lot of memes on topics related to pandemic conspiracies, many of them featuring suspicion of China. He recently derided me for my skepticism and urged me to 'figure it out for myself'.
January 1: Meet VOC - When You're #2, You Try Harder
BBC has the first scientific results up about the new variant.
December 31: The Last Thing in the Box
CCCC today completes nine straight months of watching people die on worldometers and other "pandemic dashboards" that track sickness and death.
All the end-of-year pieces are out now on 2020, counting out all the terrible things that happened: Mideast violence, Australia and California practically burning down, floods, massive recession and poverty, and the worst disease event in living memory.
December 30: In Favour of Vaccine Snobbery and Exclusion: Jobs for Jabs
Before we get into general-population vaccination, let's be clear that there must be no quarter, no tolerance of anti-vaxxers. They do not have a religious argument, unless they make up their own religion. They can have all the "personal freedom" arguments they want, as long as they risk nobody else. For me that means:
The workplaces should be forced to have that rule, as needed; you shouldn't be able to intimidate a worker out of their job by requiring them to work under risky conditions. There is risk even to the vaccinated. We simply do not know whether vaccination actually prevents infection, or merely causes all cases to be asymptomatic, allowing any vaccinated person to be a carrier to others in their life.
December 29: Canada Cracks 400 Dead per Million; Headed for 1000-Club?
The news are carrying the latest round number for total dead, 15,000, last night. Another round number was crossed on worldometers (which is a little ahead of the public-health confirmations, at 15,263 dead already this morning), of 400 dead per million, the metric that allows comparison between polities.
December 28: "We've done an amazing job. And it's rounding the corner." Part II
This was the title of an October 16 post, right after America's President uttered those amazing words.
December 27: New Variant, Same Solution
I'm basically on-vacation from doing any work on this the last few days, (obviously), but I don't need to do any work to point out something very, very obvious. I should still get credit, because nobody else seems to be noting this, in all the many, many stories on the "new variant", that of course is everywhere on Earth right now, not just Canada.
December 26: Walking the Walk by Talking the Talk (only on Skype)
We did ourselves as said; Christmas passed without more other humans, than waving at some others in our condo while taking out garbage. We had a lovely supper together, and - here's a throwback to ancient traditions now being lost - watched "The Polar Express" on CTV - over the airwaves, no less, we've given up cable - at the same time as other Canadians. While I ate a gross amount of candy.
December 25: Give the Gift of Life This Christmas!
Stay home. Call your family. Call your friends!
December 24: An Xmas Present for CCCC: BC Climbs Down the Mountain
CCCC stands by its post of December 15th, "Yep, We Are So Screwed", because Christmas and New Year's, and weeks after, certainly are. Heartbreaking for the hospitality industry to go back into restrictions at their best time of the year. We built that mountain at left out of mistakes and denial, and it's going to be a long climb down it, yet.
December 23: UK and USA Share The Worst Xmas Present
...Membership in the "1000 Deaths per Million" Club
In America, the daily-case rate does seem to be levelling off; alas, it does not seem to be dropping, not yet - and the dying is only increasing. In the UK, the dying had actually levelled off and started to decline for a few weeks, but now has picked up again, because their daily case-rate has been on a steep exponential for two weeks.
December 22: Imperial Bad Guys Comeuppance?
The connection is anything but perfect, it has many exceptions. But it's close enough, that historians may be chewing on it for decades to come.
December 21: The Winter of our Discontent
(Kwitcherbitchin' Lear, you got the vaccine already)
I prefer to be original when possible, but I've just got to go along with what must be the most-common wry headline on opinions columns today.
December 20: How Miraculous Are The New Vaccines? Very.
The expertise of Dr. Rick Bright about vaccines is not to be gainsayed. Granted, Dr. Bright has spent much of his career climbing the bureaucratic ladder in the US government's Health and Human Services; it's been some years since he washed a test-tube himself. When he resigned and turned whistleblower over the "hydroxychloroquine controversy" several months ago, there were any number of articles with anonymous critiques of his management style, (likely encouraged by Trump appointees).
December 19: Pandemic Keeps Revealing Deep Cultural Prejudices
On the "outrage" beat, many news pages are carrying the comically inept, awful, terrible, no-good forgetting of the medical residents that actually treat hospital COVID-19 patients in their vaccination program.
According to an email sent by a chief resident to other residents, Stanford's leaders explained that an algorithm was used to assign its first allotment of the vaccine. The algorithm was said to have prioritized those health care workers at highest risk for COVID infections, along with factors like age and the location or unit where they work in the hospital. Residents apparently did not have an assigned location, and along with their typically young age, they were dropped low on the priority list.
...just that simple. We put them in as no-location. The mistake, though, was ignoring the medical residents when you were programming the algorithm. The correct algorithm was just to list off everybody who was known to be in contact with COVID-19 patients first, then get on with people whose contact-chances might be inferred, second-hand, from their location.
December 18: Vaccinate Sports
I spotted a story the other day about an inquiry as to whether sports teams could be vaccinated soon, so that they can play in greater safety, with fewer restrictions. The story included a reaction that this was like billionaires expecting to be vaccinated first, because of money, or politicians, because of power.
December 17: Dying Young: Ten Times as Many Americans
Next year will mark 30 years that I've successfully avoided everything but the poster for this tearjerker. I'll save my tears for Americans, trapped in a political madhouse with "leaders" that care nothing for their lives.
I found the numbers so shocking that I'd like to walk through my journey step-by-step, check my work. At left, the simple raw counts of dead bodies, both sides of the border. There is one data-artifact: the Canadian column for "50-64" is the report for "50-59" plus 40% of the count for "60-69". Death rates rise with age, so I figured that 40% to the first five years, 60% to the second five years, of that decade, was a good guess. I think you'll see that the exact number is unimportant for the main thesis. (My thesis is, "Americans are much worse at this pandemic". Whether they are 9 times worse or 10, you'd absolutely prefer to have spent 2020 in Canada!)
Step two was to divide the American population (331.9M) over the Canadian (37.9M) to get a population ratio of 8.76. Yes, we're no longer one-tenth of the USA, more than a ninth, even. It's all that immigration, I guess. This gives the table at right, with the Canadian numbers multiplied by 8.76, so you can see how many Americans would have died instead, had they only gone with Canadian governance and cultural values, our community spirit of shared sacrifice.
December 16: First Nations First
They were the First Nations in the land; about 90% of them were killed off by North American pandemics we brought along with the guns and steel. So, for that reason alone, absolutely goddam right that they should be first in line when the general population starts to receive vaccinations, right behind the very old and infirm.
December 15: Yep, We Are So Screwed
This is a follow-up to my despairing post of two days' ago, "Crushed" when I looked out at the Saturday rush-hour (about twice as bad as yesterday's Monday rush-hour, at left) and realized that Monday's case reports would be just as bad as the week before's; that we were just going to spend a month on top of the curve rather than crushing it, because Xmas, and "end of year" at work, were more important.
December 14: Nikiforuk vs Kenney
I developed a real problem with journalist Andrew Nikiforuk decades ago. He didn't like the way that the Alberta oil industry treated landowners, which is very commendable; but he let that dislike give him even a speck of sympathy for one Weibo Ludwig, whom you can look up for yourself. A truly creepy and frightening individual, who deserved none. But I really got upset at one of Nikiforuk's books that really argued the position that HIV was not the real source of AIDS, and, anyway, have paid him little attention for many years.
New Zealand and Australia did the lockdowns right (with support for small businesses) and are enjoying a normal Christmas. Alberta could have pursued that course in early summer but chose the status quo of limping along and further endangering the health-care system and the economy.
Nikiforuk builds the case for that statement in a ten-minute read. It clears the head, after reading crazy stuff about how Kenney is bad for locking down, even now.
December 13: Crushed
I was reflecting the other day, in front of my fantastic view, that I'm in the third, or is it fourth, weekend of hoping the three day's of data, that will come tomorrow, will show a significant drop in infections. I cheered last week, when Keith Baldry on Global pointed out how the numbers were, in fact, in decline, if not rapid. But Friday's number in the 700s made me wonder again.
December 12: Three Weeks of Inevitable Dying
I should produce a post that takes research, but today I'm basically just back to my late-April mesmerization by death-toll dashboards again. What's got my eyes round is the multiplication by twenty. Because most provinces and states are at a high level of daily infections, that just isn't declining much (yes, depressed again by a case-count over 700 in BC, yesterday - exponential increase may have stopped, but there's just so little decrease) we are sentenced to three weeks of death-tolls that look like today's.
"Future Zombie movies will look really naive and unbelievable if they don't show half the population running towards the zombies, daring them to bite, since it's all a hoax".)
December 11: The Very Simple Version of Vaccine Math
How many people need to be vaccinated, as we contemplate the bizarre notion that anybody does not want it.
December 10: The Third-Worst War
Well, the round numbers are all hitting at once, and a few papers are tiredly pointing them out. As noted a few weeks ago, numerical comparisons are getting exhausted, a certain numbness is setting in. In that post, I mentioned the number "294,265", my adding-up of every American military casuality in war, save only the two biggest, WW2, and their Civil War. Both those are over 400,000, and up to even a month ago, I would have said that 'America will not reach that high, so this is the last war comparison'.
December 9: Call Off Christmas
In the
words of the Sheriff of Nottingham in the "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" movie (1991): "Call Off Christmas". (Alan Rickman was the best thing in this movie. We recommend the barely noticed "Robin Hood", same year. It was ruined by the giant ad dollars dropped on the competing Kevin Costner movie. Just plain "Robin Hood", with Uma Thurman and Patrick Bergen, was the better movie. By Far. Rickman did not save the Costner version, and I'm glad YouTube lets me enjoy his best scene without having to re-watch it.)
December 8: Waiting Rewarded
Thanks to Keith at Global News for finding the cheer in that awaited weekend news. For a moment, it still looked bad - over 2000 new cases.
December 7: Weekend Waiting
December the Seventh, Nineteen-Forty-One, was a "Day that Shall Live in Infamy", because the Japanese killed just over 2400 Americans at Pearl Harbour.
The death-o-meter will quite possibly tick up to the 9/11 number, today, and some blend of Pearl Harbour memories and 9/11 references will likely show up in your late-night news, after the number comes in.
December 6: Can I Just Think about Dungeons and Dragons Today?
...the real news has too many dead people.
December 5: Let's Have a Global Conspiracy Against Anti-Vaxxers
I only wish we could have a fun conspiracy, something involving hooded costumes, meeting in a Star Chamber, in the Empire State Building sub-basement, at midnight. The anti-vaxxers would like that, too, it's the kind of conspiracy they prefer to oppose, even if they have to imagine it, first.
That started a bit of a backlash, which this year can obviously push up to a tsunami of common-sense, provided we give no quarter, no sympathy, no concessions at all to the forces of stupidity. Finally, we have a vaccine that only the craziest would not want. Anti-vaxxers have had their limited success because so many deadly diseases are now more than a generation in the past, and they don't know them, in life, or even from their parents. Now, it's been made very clear how bad the risk is - and how the unvaccinated are risking lives not their own.
December 4: Immunity Should be Seen and Not Herd
Today's post is the reverse of yesterday's, an unabashed promotion for a single pandemic article, by Malia Jones, left, in Slate magazine.
December 3: Rear-View Mirror
I'm pretty much too depressed to look up some pandemic story and highlight it for you, today. Recall a saying from April, that you can only see the crest of an epidemic curve in the rear-view mirror. You can hope that every day where the number doesn't go up means the crest is reached, or nearly; we had a couple of days recently, where the number went down for BC, at least - but it was just the usual vagaries of reporting, especially around weekends.
December 2: Herding Cats
It's a good 15 years now since EDS, an HP-owned IT consulting company, did their "Herding Cats" video, brilliantly funny, with its close attention to detail - and all the remarkable cat-herding that must have been needed to make the video. Click on the image for a view.
December 1: The Next Voice You Hear
...was the title of an odd, cheaply-made 1950s movie, (starring a future First Lady!) where God comes on the radio, and provides inspiration and advice. There's no technical explanation for the phenomenon - every station, worldwide, each in the right language - and a controversy over belief ensues.
"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' "
In the most-memorable case, Hurricane Katrina, Pat Robertson blamed it on legalized abortion.
November 30: The Political Price of COVID-20
So, what if Wuhan, China, were first starting to see cases of a new respiratory disease, today? Most countries would have done about the same. But, of course, this post is about the United States.
November 29: The Political Price of COVID-18
As promised, a thought experiment about timing. What if it had come just the one year earlier? Was 2020 not just, as yesterday noted, a lucky decade for it to hit, but a lucky year?
November 28: The Luck of 2020
All the jokes, many of them bitter, ensure that "2020" will go down in history as "The Bad Luck Year", for the whole world.
November 27: Patriotism
Chris Nelson in the Calgary Herald and National Post today (no, not providing a link, not worth your time) derides "We're all in this together", as "sappy". More fully:
We were inundated with pious advertising campaigns...Short of asking us to link arms ...and sing Kumbaya, there wasn't a homespun homily not dusted off and presented as some part of our collective, stop-COVID-in-its-tracks campaign.
Well, sure, Chris, of course it is all "sappy".
No. People are being asked to sacrifice for their country, for their whole country, for everybody. An invader has come to our shores; it wants to hurt us all. These are the only known ways to fight the invader, all patriots must rally to the fight.
November 26: A Thanksgiving Prayer for America
Dear Lord, let thy grace fall upon us, as we gather together about the family table, from far and wide across this great nation.
November 25: Resistance
Thank you Jason Kenney for NOT locking us down. I think the increased restrictions make sense but don't go overboard. There are so many people struggling and so many businesses on the verge of closing.
...that was in my Facebook feed this morning, from family, known her all her life. A wonderful person.
We are told by the media that we are in the middle of a pandemic so deadly that we need to completely reorder our society and bring in a New World Order. Trudeau admitted as much at Davos where he met up with, you guessed it, George Soros. The same pedophile elites that have done nothing but destroy everything good in life while enriching themselves have volunteered to lead us into this glorious new future where "you will own nothing, and you'll like it".
...that was in my Facebook feed a week or so back; again, a friend for over 40 years. A great father and grandfather, pillar of his community and church, a truly sweet guy.
November 24: Waiting for the Second Derivative
I took a day off. The pandemic did not. (It never does. There's a Terminator movie joke in there somewhere: "It doesn't feel any pity"...)
November 22: Madrid Hanging in There
I wrote just the other day about Spain crushing the new curve, a process I'm happy to say has continued, their daily case numbers are now declining sharply. Whew.
November 21: Introverts Rejoice! (Quietly, of course).
I like socializing, I like parties, I so badly wanted to go see family this Fall, and Christmas. But there's a little spot in there that also finds it all stressful, that kind of goes "whew!" when you're back home from the party and putting the tea on.
November 20: All Numeric Comparisons Exhausted
The newsies that follow the Johns Hopkins site for the current pandemic statistics, just paused to write stories noting that the American death toll has crossed the quarter-million mark. Those of us who prefer worldometers were there some days ago, and worldometers is currently at 258,698.
November 19: Airflow
The actual virus news is bad. So is much of the political news, that reinforces yesterday's story about pandemic-response decisions being political, not scientific. I'm in search of good news.
November 18: States of Denial
Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota. Four states that touch, and indeed, should probably be just the one state the size of a Canadian prairie province, like those to their north. Just 3.2 million people, almost enough to justify one senator, were their Senate rep-by-pop. Of course, they have eight senators, like the 110 million people of California, Texas, Florida, and New York. That's why the USA is not democratic enough to be admitted to the EU, if they were to ask.
"Their last dying words are, 'This can't be happening. It's not real,'" Doering said, adding that some patients prefer to believe that they have pneumonia or other diseases rather than covid-19, despite seeing their positive test results.
It's hard to add anything on to that. At least you can save time spent trying to get them to un-deny lesser things, like the usefulness of masks, or the good intentions of health-care officials. If you can deny you're dying of a given cause, to the nurse caring for you, right to the last breath, then you can easily deny anything.
November 17: As It Gets Bad, Take Heart From The Wins
So, it's bad. It's getting worse. We don't know when it will turn around, either. Are the new restrictions enough to get "R" back below 1.0? Will people obey them? It's getting scary out there, with hospitals filling up. It's scary that Manitoba, which has been so exemplary and safe for months, is now the least-safe place to breathe indoors.
The deaths barely ticked up, thorugh the curve was as high as the first. Mostly, it was a younger demographic, of course, as covered here months ago; partly, it was new therapies. Either way, it makes the virus a lot less terrifying.
November 16: A Word From the Financial Post: We're All Just Money
I used to do cost-benefit calculations that mostly involved money, but also "service", and we put a notional value on that - a house out of water for a night, we'd spend $100 rather than see it happen, that is, $2500 preventing one main break that would inconvenience 25 houses. These calculations get controversial when you're spending on infrastructure to prevent death, like guardrails on a road: you have to put a figure on what you'd spend to avoid a human death, and we currently round that up to about $10 million. (Highway departments budgeting for guardrails, and chemical plants putting in pollution controls, may use different figures, and there's not enough journalism done pointing out the disagreements.)
I didn't like the article much. It breezes past the issue that it's not just death. Several times as many people may be permanently injured, in nerves, veins, and organs, as die - and may suffer permanent loss of economic productivity, and indeed need expensive care, themselves. I just spent more words on the issue than the article did; that's all skipped.
November 15: Andre' Picard, Gold-Star Award
I have to promote some more Canadian journalism today, though it's hardly "independent", as the Globe and Mail is, of course, Canada's most-venerable, 'mainstream media' newspaper. I've got my problems with the Globe, won't subscribe to them. It irritates me excessively that they have special, front-page sections on "Investing", and "Report on Business"; but no section for that part of the economy called "Labour", which of course describes over 90% of the population.
But, on health and medicine, they do have Andre' Picard. Picard is an example of something I'm normally disapproving of: a reporter with only general knowledge to start with, had to pick it all up on the job. I'm an admirer of the book, "Informing the News", by Tom Patterson, which advocates that reporters have knowledge specialties with formal training. (Most-damning story from the book: Wall Street analysts complaining that the reporter sent to interview them had to have the terms "credit" and "debit" explained.)
November 14: Canadaland on Care Homes
I end my plugs of Canadian independent journalism with a repeat, today, of my plug for Canadaland's "Commons" Series, "The Pandemic", which focused on the care-home debacle. I wrote about it on August 29, "The Plight of the Living Dead", an admittedly awful term that came to mind as I read about the deep dementia that afflicts so many residents.
November 13: Will You Kindly Stop Giving Your Coronavirus to 1.3 Other People!
It's very rude. Especially the part where they might die.
We're doing our bit; everybody else has to, right now, because those curves have gone all smoothly exponential again, where we can predict next month's death-count with that button on my calculator.
November 12: Good Coverage by Canadians (I)
I'll be doing free plugs for Canadian news media for a few days. In my quest for pandemic mental health, I'm trying to reduce my consumption of American news media, the way I'd try to stop eating licorice for lunch. It raises your blood pressure too much.
Canada is no world leader on COVID-19, but if the U.S. had managed to replicate our flawed pandemic response, they would have saved almost 150,000 lives and $10 trillion. This is the terrible cost of having to accommodate endemic dumbass behaviour.
Ahhh...the relief of just flatly stating that, the Cold Equations, the numeric reality.
November 11: Remembrance Day is NOT Cancelled
November 10: Christmas is Cancelled
It feels that way, at least. Relatives in Calgary will be celebrating without us visiting, and we're skipping the presents for good measure. (The "present" is that an 88-year-old adds zero more infection risks that month. Our presents are our absence. Not funny?)
November 9: A Modest Proposal
November 9, 2020
The White House
November 8: Dr. Bonnie, Doing Surgery Instead of Slashing
Lockdowns no longer loom! Dr. Bonnie's new restrictions are out, and they barely touch commerce.
I think Dr. B will get exactly that, if reputation and the obvious evidence of ever-higher case counts means anything. I know that I'm wondering whether to get a haircut. I was thinking of getting one a little early, because "lockdowns loomed", and realized that thinking is all-too-close to the, umm, "Bridiots" in the photo at right: going out for a night of drinking and breathing on each other in crowded bars, just before the lockdown. Sigh.
November 7: Lockdowns Loom
A great bolster argument for not getting your head involved in endless American political dramas: while we were distracted, the world went to hell.
"There are only safe behaviours", is the CCCC motto: and "safe behaviours", the virus gets to define. We're learning how protected we were by the summer, apparently, how able we were to get away with various occasions. For BC, at least, Dr. Bonnie seems to be pointing at family gatherings, not at commerce. I suppose in summer, windows were open during those family dinners, and it made a difference.
Since the post is intended to turn us back to the Real Problem from the invented problems of the Drama Queen Nation, I'd rather avoid all American news altogether.
November 6: Toxic Work Environment
Day two completed of my ignoring the news as best I can, when that's almost impossible. What's been impressive to me, is how much generally better I feel through the day, catching up with books and avoiding news.
November 5: News Blackout
About the only "pandemic hook" I've got for this post is the realization that the pandemic, and perhaps looking up material to blog here, has given me a news addiction that I'm glad to break. I haven't looked at a news page since 11pm on the 3rd, when I realized how many Americans had still turned out for President Pandemic-Promoter, and suffered a disgust-attack that made me genuinely ill.
November 4: Sickening
I think it was Alice Cooper, doing a joke election campaign, had the slogan "A Troubled Man For Troubled Times". I can go way further: "The Sickest People in a Sick Nation Vote for a Sick Man for Sick Times". And prove every word.
November 3: Watch This Instead of the Election
I don't know what solution you have for seeing something on America's "Hulu", though I think it's also a Shaw video-on-demand offering, but by hook or by crook (many chose "crook", via bittorrent), see this movie. What's the point in watching the American election coverage? You can't affect the outcome. Just take the day off, except that watching this movie is work. Emotional work.
November 2: American Losers
The "good guys" will probably win a lot in the American elections tomorrow, but I can barely stand to follow it any more. (It's also hard to look away, the car-wreck phenomenon.) Frankly, it's appalling. America generally appalls me, of course, but I have to admit I kept watching them through these years, hoping that all the ugliness and failure would lift scales from their eyes, bring fundamental change, etc etc.
November 1: Rally Side Effects? Associated Events? Bad Attitudes?
A few papers are carrying the story I touted yesterday, of the Stanford economists associating 30,000 infections and (thus a presumed) 700 deaths, with GOP election rallies. I have to admit I put it out there very quickly, as it hit my news moments earlier and felt "breaking". Easy to put up the link and be done the blog.
October 31: Rallies Have Killed 700. So Far.
Stanford economists have analysed the infections springing from rallies, and they estimate about 30,000 infections, presumably costing 700 deaths.
October 30: A Rough Beast, Its Hour Come 'Round at Last, Chews Its Way Into the Vitals of a Nation
The Times had a new infographic this morning. I am weak for infographics, having basically dedicated most of a career to creating them. (The Post had a 13-graphic example article on the problem of depicting red and blue states fairly, when the reds are so much less dense. It was like red-and-blue Hallowe'en candy for me.)
October 29: Worst Democracy
The inception of this blog was the essay (link always at top) about "America finishing in the bottom of the major league", a prediction of the worst pandemic response of all the respected industrial democracies.
October 28: Anger
It's like the stages of grief. Yesterday's theme was "denial".
So, Jared calls friends and has them put the word out for 20-somethings that are willing to work seven days a week for no money. That was how he organized his team. No hiring. Any volunteers accepted, including Max Kennedy, right. (One of those Kennedys, Robert's grandson. Click on him for the story.) They are not given any resources; they use their own laptops and Gmail accounts, and cold-call people to ask how one might buy masks. They are given no purchasing power at all. At one point, Kushner visits, and offers them any support they need; told "the ability to pay up front", he says "Done!", and never follows up in any way - just a show.
October 27: Covid Denial like Climate Denial
I'm proud of actually stealing a march on the news columnist that I first began reading regularly, Paul Krugman. The man has been good at explaining the infinitely complex topic of economics to non-geniuses for thirty years, now, and it's made him good at explaining less-complex issues even more clearly and succinctly.
What Krugman added today was very short and simple, his great talent. It knocks both denials down to three main points, and they're the same points. These guys use the same strategy, over and over, from cancer to covid.
October 26: Grudging Credit Where Due, Jennifer Rubin
I don't want to like Jennifer Rubin, who's just become a superstar for the Washington Post, the last few years. She's a never-Trumper Republican, was totally OK with the Iraq War, torture, Bush and Bombs forever, rah, rah, rah. OK, I exaggerate, but I'm an Iraq-War hardliner, it's binary: you were either against it, to switch away support in time for the 2004 election, or you're Dr. Evil. Whereas Rubin wrote Where are the Iraq War defenders? ... in 2013. So, keeping this short, I hate her, and loathe that her never-Trumping may get her peace-through-bombs philosophy a hearing from the new administration.
She has indeed put out a frightening pace of work, posting blog entries that are printed as separate columns, not just daily, but multiple times per day. They obviously have a staff of researchers feeding her the facts and figures, or she couldn't put out so much work, with links and background. It's good stuff. Because there's so much Rubin, I often avoid clicking on her, looking for other's work (and general antipathy) - then I click on the "top story" link that only has a title, and its Rubin's latest, over and over again. Because it's both good material, with facts and background narrative, and because she's relentlessly caustic and incisive - in the sticking-in-a-knife sense of that word - about the moral dimensions. This is "horse-race coverage" that doesn't forget to mention the one jockey rapes the horse, nightly.
In the bizarre effort to maintain "balance," the mainstream media have failed to press the question to Trump: "Aren't you responsible for possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths because you never wanted to admit failure?"
The question for them is: "How are tax cuts or Supreme Court justices worth the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives?" That is a question that should haunt them forever.
And ends by comparing it to coverage of war, where every (American, at least) death is agonized over:
You would think the death of thousands upon thousands of Americans would top every story and be addressed in every interview with an administration figure and fellow Republicans.
I couldn't have said it better, so, with grudging respect, I've just turned over half the space today, to the columnist that irritates me so.
October 25: Totally Under Control
"Totally Under Control" is the title of the new Alex Gibney documentary on the pandemic; the title is taken from an early White House speech, claiming "total control" when there were very few infections known. "Known", because testing was already a month behind the real story, which is that it was spreading in multiple locations. The documentary deserves multiple blog posts; we're taking it in about 20 minutes a night, to ward off the depression and fury it generates.
I just mention the title today, because of the contrast between two articles. At the Washington Post, Philip Bump reviews the epidemiologist's report on how many American deaths are attributable to the bad response. I had issues with it - Bump failed to compare to Canada, which is a better comparison than any European country (he picked Germany) because we also have the separate health-care officers for every province, as with their states. The analysis gets so muddled with multiple what-ifs that he ends up only concluding that "tens of thousands" of America's 230,000 covid dead (and 300,000 total "excess deaths", I'm glad he brought up) could have been saved. Comparison to Canada indicates it was more than half, that America's response will have cost a good 200,000 and more American lives, by February. ("February" for multiple reasons: no projection can go very far ahead; there will be a new administration; and vaccinations in numbers.)
The plea also sounds weird to anybody who's read the part of Philip Bump's WaPo article about masks: that universal mask usage, alone, could save 100,000 lives in the US, going forward.
October 24: Not Much To Say About "Fatigue"
I'm kind of speechless, today. All the news is bad, in terms of infections: across Europe, America, everywhere it seems, the numbers are up. Worse, one keeps seeing things like "pandemic fatigue" in the papers. Gosh, folks, I'm sorry you're tired of it. Ever wonder if Iraq got "war fatigue" at some point in the last 30 years? Well, they had to get up the next morning and deal with the war, anyway, fatigued or not. They didn't get to pretend it wasn't happening.
October 23: A Mask Argument Without Words
All praise to the Post for getting this one out, today, and far more praise to The "COVIDcast" team at Carnegie-Mellon University. Do click on that last link; it's not just to the source of this graph, but many others, some mesmerizing. Try the "timelapse" feature and watch the cases spread into the central northwest, day by day, over the Fall.
October 22: Deaths Tick Up Again: Urban in Canada, Rural in the USA
Well, sickness and dying are on the march all over; North America and Europe are both losing one battle after another in this phase of the war. But there's a difference between Canada and the USA.
Both have seen soaring case-loads, and a recent rise in deaths per day. The "deaths per day" has been going down for months; people kind of took the news of rising cases without worry, because the death-rate kept going down as younger people, out at work and school (and parties) were a higher proportion of them.
The editorial position of CCCC, is that we do not revel in the sad infection of this total dick. Infection is a serious matter, and any schadenfreude about this loathesome jerk suffering medically, is wholly inappropriate, and not to be tolerated - despite his near-murderous withdrawal of badly-needed medical resources from Alberta's most-vulnerable areas. Covid is not a "just dessert" for him, that being unemployment and infamy.
October 21: "Excess Deaths" Only Add 50% to Virus Toll in USA
The numbers for Canada may come up differently, but the stats for the States are in. The "excess deaths", where deaths by every other cause, from heart and lung to traffic, are up this year, indicating that either covid or the response to it has cost America another 100,000 lives, on top of the 200,000 directly ascribed to the disease.
October 20: Home-Made Masks
There's more and more data indicating these are useful, and that vaccines are going to take a while, so we might as well get used to masks as a fashion item. Connie has finally applied her considerable seamstress skills to the problem, and come up with some well-engineered tailoring.
October 19: Mulish Montana
All the trouble I've gone to, to highlight how bad it is in Montana right now (October 17, below), and all through the barely-inhabited states of the northwest, and the Montanans aren't getting it. There are multiple articles up about how difficult it is to promote masks. The Times has another. Not just the citizens, the sheriffs just decide whether they feel like obeying state orders, are empowered to make public health decisions, apparently, and do. Businesses compromise by getting staff to wear masks, and asking customers to, some of whom instead berate the high-school-aged waitresses for "kneeling to tyranny".
October 18: Great Barrington Merchants of Doubt
CCCC already dismissed the Not-So-Great Barrington Bunch and I would have been content to leave it there. If you want the case against their case, The Guardian made it well, a week ago. Ultra-short version: it's not backed by scientific work or evidence. They may have scientific backgrounds, but they haven't published any of these beliefs in peer-reviewed journals, gathered no data, run no models of their herd-immunity strategy. Scientists don't "declare", they publish data and their work upon it, for study and open criticism. "Scientist" isn't something you inherently are, it's a thing you do, and they ain't doing it. (dusts palms).
October 17: Statistical Proof that GOP States Are Getting Sicker
That map yesterday, showing the worst infection rates up in the hard-red states of Montana and Wyoming as the worst in the country, had me wondering if it was just regional. My fave "worldometers" dashboard doesn't show active cases or new cases on a per-million basis, so I downloaded yesterday's page and did that math. The top of the spreadsheet is at right:
The "GOP+" column comes from this handy summary of 2016 published by CBS News. That page gives the total votes for Democratic and GOP Presidential candidates in 2016, and my number shows the GOP-Dem difference, divided by total votes, so that negative numbers were Democratic victory states, positive were GOP electoral college wins. The "51%" you see for Wyoming was from 175,000 for the GOP, 56,000 for the Democrats, by far the largest margin in the country. (It's Cheney country, pardner.) It means 51% of the votes cast in Wyoming were GOP votes that were not needed to defeat the Democrat.
Postscript, Later Same Day
The Post has a good article up, reviewing the possible role of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in mid-August. Doh. I was not thinking of that kind of rally. It was an epidemiologist's nightmare: 500,000 drinking, partying revellers from half-way across the country, all meeting, then going back to their homes. I'm not sure if motorcycle rallying is associated with voting GOP, but going to this one, this year, probably was.
October 16: "We've done an amazing job. And it's rounding the corner."
Yeah. Right. Congratulations.
What's particularly depressing about the "corner", is that the second wave bottomed out at 36,000 cases/day, over half again the first-wave trough of 21,000; the third wave now building is going to be bigger than the second, which was bigger than the first. It will crest within a month or so, before the first vaccination program starts.
October 15: Ottawa Puts Thinking Cap On. No, Not The Politicians.
Because of my employment history, these stories will always get prompt promotion here at CCCC: Colby Cosh at the National Post has a story on Ottawa monitoring coronaviruses via wastewater sampling.
October 14: BC Has This Handled
I'm even prouder of BC this morning than yesterday. That said, we didn't even watch all of the debate. Our decisions are made, after all: Horgan must be spanked for even calling the election, so though Dr. Bonnie has made him look good, no votes for him. The Liberals are too conservative. Horgan made a good point that it was the Liberals that let go 10,000 care staff some 17 years back, a funny reminder of Jason Kenney also screwing Alberta with 11,000 medical layoffs this week. (Wilkinson was dumb enough to fail to point out that the NDP has had the last 13 of those 17 years to remedy it, and didn't, arguably a higher degree of culpability.) The green Green leader, Sonia Furstenau, did fine, so, wow, only 5 years in BC, and we're already Greens. This election.
October 13: Canada Inferior at Drama?
Relax, CBC. I don't mean "Murdoch Mysteries". I mean our politics.
October 12: Just Give Thanks If You Haven't Caught It
Hard to give thanks in 2020, isn't it?
October 11: Who's Zoomin' Who?
I do too much journalism around here; sometimes, blogging is about doing some research and presentation, mostly it's about dashing off a cranky opinion and letting everybody get on with their day, especially me.
October 10: American Carnage Now Baked-In Through Their Election Day
The three-weeks-to-go day, next Tuesday, would have been a rounder day to pick, I guess, but epidemic arithmetic isn't that exact.
Texas would be quite the electoral coup. It's now the second-most-populous state, at 29 million. It was considered "not in play" before the pandemic, and now the GOP may actually lose their crown jewel. In that regard, the coronavirus has a well-known liberal bias: it's "conservative" down there to pretend it doesn't exist, so when it goes right on existing and killing people, every coffin is a message that "The GOP sucks at their job." And Texas has leveled off at about 100/day, so there will be over 2,000 repetitions of the message "The GOP killed me." At least, if the Democrats are marginally competent at that message translation.
Florida is not a huge coup, in the sense that it's been a swing-state for decades, but the odds of a swing away from the GOP are helped by it having the actual highest death-rate, despite lower population than Texas. Theirs is still declining, slowly, will be under 100/day soon - but both states will be close to 20,000 dead, each, when the polls open. If the Democrats win both states, then the four most-populous states in the Union (California, Texas, Florida, New York).
October 9: Doesn't Suck To Be Us
The news is pretty much all bad, this morning:
Oh, and it's raining. I'm not even allowed to complain about that, as a Vancouverite. Douglas Coupland even put a number on it in his book about his hometown, "City of Glass": we aren't allowed to complain about rain for the first sixty consecutive days.
October 8: Barringtons Not So Great
Because of the incessant din of a certain other news item, this story is mercifully getting a short shrift.
October 7: It's a Nice Day
It's a crisp morning in early Fall, the leaves are turning, the birds are chirping. The kids are in school, and pretty safe there, as noted yesterday.
October 6: Humble Pie
It's time for a serving. After 3 straight days of attention to America's tiresome celebrity dramas, the news back home is good, when I was predicting bad. It's so great to be wrong.
October 5: Do Not Expect Change from the GOP
When a big celebrity gets ill with Covid, it makes the disease more "real" to people who haven't had a family or friend catch it yet, hopefully inspires a greater sense of awareness, presence-of-mind, better behaviour for a while. The celebrity towards which all American Republicans turn for sunlight is down with the bug. Will it change them? Will we see Republicans all in masks now, distancing, changing their positions on activity restrictions?
October 4: Edgar Allen Poe, Prophet?
The Masque of the Orange Death...
I've been saving this one a long time. You could apply the Poe story as a metaphor for North America: it won't come here, it only affects filthy, diseased foreigners in old countries. Or "Real America": it only affects filthy, diseased, crowded, crime-ridden cities, not our 'burbs and towns.
...upon occasion of this great fete; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm ... There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.
The story contains its own metaphor, of course: the disease appears at the party, personified as a reveller in a mask, and starts touching people, who fall where they stand. But Poe's personification was an accurate description of exactly what has happened: the Prince Prosperos, both of them, were wrong to imagine you can create a safe place from disease, where behaviour can go on as "normal". It'll sneak in past all your guards, military and medical, as long a your behaviour isn't safe.
October 3: Techno-Thriller with The President as His Own Threat
I once heard that "techno-thriller" is a genre in which American might is celebrated as it protects the President, who is invariably threatened by vile schemes.
It's the entire senior team around the White House participating in this fiction that, 'We can ignore it,'? said Simon Rosenberg, founder of the liberal think tank NDN.
October 2: Shut UP With Your Schadenfreude
This is probably a disaster.
Postscript: Afternoon, October 2
I appear to have understated the current odds of a bad outcome. James Hamblin, M.D., writing at The Atlantic has pulled the best-estimate figures. They are worrying, for the patient.
Eight percent of COVID-19 patients ages 65 to 74 die from the disease. Those 75 to 84 are at far higher risk: 18 percent die. And men are significantly more likely to die of COVID-19 than women. Obesity is also predictive of a severe course. Compared with people in the “normal” BMI range, obese patients are 74 percent more likely to be admitted to an ICU and 48 percent more likely to die.
For the borderline between that 8% for those younger, and 18% for those older, it's right to take the geometric mean (12%), not the arithmetic mean (10%), because the fatality odds go up exponentially with age, my very first CCCC post. Clearly, we need to bump up those hospitalization odds to at least 20%, odds of not being able to pretend this is minor probably double that. But still: "back to work by mid-October" is clearly the most-likely outcome.Frankly, "inspiring the followers to be dismissive of the virus" is the most-likely outcome.
October 1: Their Hour Come 'Round at Last
At left, a still from a 48-minute video of a sewer pipe going past. The most mock-worthy part of my career: at the very end, I spent a lot of time working on the "video system" that stored some 30,000 such videos in multiple terabytes of cloud servers, so that any one of them could be brought up by clicking on the inspected sewer pipe on our GIS map.
September 30: Giving Henderson The Tulsa Treatment
Well, enough time has gone by since the Republican Rally in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas, NV, on September 13, to look at the subsequent case-counts for Clark County, Nevada, which includes Henderson, Las Vegas, other suburbs, and most of the people who would likely have gone to the rally: a population of over 2 million. The barely-legible data page for it, from Johns Hopkins, at right, is a link to the full-size version. The graph at lower right on it, are the cases for the last 14 days, going back to September 16th, sixty hours after the rally, and the first day a subsequent case could have been reported.
The figure "25,000" keeps coming up about the Nevada rally, but that was mostly outside; estimates run about the same as Tulsa, inside: five or six thousand. The fact that the exact number is not known, along with party-contact information and seating assignments, is damning in itself, of course. We should know exactly whom contracted the virus at the rally, by now, from reports and contact-tracing. Instead, we're making do with the chart at left, which is, for the red line at least, a duplicate of the analysis done for the Tulsa rally on July 9th. It doesn't predict numbers, just percentages of the number exposed that show symptoms and could become a "case".
September 29: BC Turning the Tide? Maybe not.
So late in the day, today, just off my usual schedule; I figured that at least now I have FOUR days of case-counts from BC. About 280 over the weekend is a little under a hundred a day. That's better than the past week or so? Are we turning the tide?
September 28: Hail, Africa, The Pandemic Slayer
I'm not sure if I owe any apologies or not for ignoring most of the world, here. The kick-off essay mentioned the "major league", of nations, meaning those with advanced health-care systems, thousands of ventilators, PPE stacked to the ceilings of our hospitals. I certainly wasn't about to mock Bangladesh, or Somalia, for not having good results.
Many nations of the continent are not providing good reporting, but most are. I should have looked more closely. My go-to, the worldometers site, has a button you can click to pick out a continent. Click on "Africa", and sort by "Deaths/1M pop", and you find the worst case in Africa, South Africa - has only just passed Canada's own 245 deaths/million. Egypt, with over 80 million people, has lost less than 6,000 of them.
September 27: Finally
Today, I was able to cheer up by reading a Fox News headline. Yes, you read that correctly. I'm sure other papers had this story, but Fox got it to me, they get the link.
September 26: Americans Killing Their Young
So I'm just cruising along on my weekend morning, reading a predictable article in the NYT about infections of the young then spreading to their elders - that the recent surges infections of younger adults are followed by a surge in the middle-aged a few weeks later, then a surge in the old a few weeks after that. The American CDC is confirming, basically, what everybody was already sure of, and it seemed thin material for a blog post.
Young adults are not immune to the virus themselves. Though older people make up the majority of deaths from the coronavirus, more than 5,000 younger adults between the ages of 25 and 44 have died of the virus, according to C.D.C. figures...
FIVE THOUSAND?? Stop the presses. They've lost more young-to-40ish adults than to the War on Terror when Bush left office? (Figure at left from when total losses were half of today's. They show almost exactly half the young deaths, so the rate is steady.)
Hastily, I look up the Canadian numbers.
September 25: Sigh. I Thought Too Highly of British Columbia
Back in my June 25 post, "Officers in Danger" I wrote that "The contrast to our own praise and adulation for Dr. Bonnie Henry and Dr. Deena Hinshaw in BC and Alberta, respectively, could hardly be more dramatic.", in comparison to the death threats faced by other public health officers.
September 24: See your 200,000 and raise you another 100,000...or more?
Well, the 200,000 milestone shows that they've quit doing headlines about the numbers themselves. They just started noting "nearly 200,000" some days ago, and switched to "over 200,000" yesterday. The numbers themselves are losing their ability to shock, which is to say, their ability to sell clicks.
September 23: Pandemic Patience
I'm always looking for good news on the climate front - which never comes from watching the weather, of course, I mean good news of scientific and engineering developments that provide hope for no-GHG industrial conversion.
That, in turn, is expected to be like when flat-screen monitors became cheaper than the foot-thick tubes, heavy with lead inside. The flat-screens are better in every other way: better colour, lightweight, no distortions; when they were also cheaper, tube monitors vanished in a year. Electric cars are quieter, smell better, have almost-scary acceleration, less maintenance, lower fuel costs.
September 22: Pandemelection: There Will Be Consequences
Very Small Ones, Probably
Well, I couldn't be more contemptuous. The promise not to do this. The costs of doing it in the pandemic: money costs, time-and-distraction costs, hell, there could be medical costs, infections in a voting line.
September 21: Dug Deep and Found Good News
Been busy lately, and I haven't done any analysis projects. I'm not sure what's left to do. We pretty much know what to do now, it's just sticking with it that's been hard.
September 20: Johns Hopkins Catches Up to 200 000 - Tomorrow
I've had some distractions today and have no post of substance. So, instead, just a quick note to follow up on September 17, about the newspapers going with Johns Hopkins for the count of American dead. Worldometers is already past 204,000, but Hopkins finished up yesterday at 199,259. Counts are low on the weekends, so today will not take them past the round number. The papers get to start off the week with the 200,000 milestone. Lucky for them, as there are only so many times you can re-read about the death of a judge, or the overwhelming importance of the next one.
September 19: Test Positivity Going Up, Will Get Worse
So there's this government of Canada page at:
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/2019-novel-coronavirus-infection.html that was the main source of information when the pandemic started, and it gives the nationwide summary of total tests done, and total positive:
Since May 29, when the broad asymptomatic testing was introduced, the province completed about 233,000 such tests, with only 0.07 per cent returning positive - about 163 cases.
The asymptomatic-testing program was to get an idea of the prevalence in the general population, and it was diluting the positivity rate. Across the country, it's the generally rising case-rate that's going to bring it up. People in Ontario are waiting several hours for a test already; that's going to cut it down to people with real exposure to worry about.
September 18: One Step of Progress on Testing
It's not often a blog can do "breaking news", but I dropped reading up on how Australia crushed a second curve the moment it hit the wires that BC has a new test, aimed now at "school-age children".
September 17: Newsies Go With Johns Hopkins
The big controversy about counting COVID-19 deaths is really how many we've missed. The numbers for excess deaths are still high, indicating that a lot of people who die of heart attacks and so on are not being tested for whether the virus pushed them into the attack.
But, the news is ever-cautious, and although Worldometers.info was cited in some early journalism, it's ignored now in favour of the Johns Hopkins Mortality Analyses page that keeps a global count of cases and fatalities.
How can I be sure what data source dozens of news organs are using? Nobody has mentioned the USA cracking 200,000 dead yesterday. They really did, as worldometers is pretty careful in adding up all the news announcements, via volunteers. Those announcements are just some days ahead of the "proper, through channels" data-gathering of Johns Hopkins and the health bureaucracy.
September 16: Australia Completes a Second Wave
Look at that classic shape. If you were trying to illustrate an exponential function that rapidly changed from growing to shrinking on August 5th, you couldn't do better than Australia's second wave, at left.
So, we can't criticize. Indeed, too-close behaviour was something that their previous successes made them vulnerable to: everybody seems to need their noses rubbed very directly in the fact that "it can happen here, too".
September 15: New York City vs Madrid
I keep thinking I'll skip a day on this blog, but stuff keeps coming up. The easiest ones are what most blogs do, just provide the blogger's friends with a favourite link of the day, "read this one". That's today.
Indoor dining in Madrid was OPEN at 60% capacity in June.
Bar service opened too.
Protocols weren't aggressively enforced.
Since June it has been easy to find crowded bars and tables. The contrast with NY was striking as anyone spending time in both places can tell you.
This allows me to refer back to my own photoessay below about The "passaggiata" culture, the thick crowds of Madrid. Madrid culture was inherently at risk for spreading respiratory disease, just look at those photographs again. Whether they are again gathering outdoors like that, they're definitely crowding into bars and restaurants too much.
September 14: Smoke Cloud With a Silver Lining?
I did some running yesterday, worrying family somewhat, I guess it's actually not a great idea in all this smoke. Today, the smoke is distinctly thicker, and I believe I'll mostly stay in.
September 13: For Some, the Worst Vaccine Would be Better Than None
The New York Times has a wild article on DIY vaccine scientists. They note that Jonas Salk tested his polio vaccine on himself and his family, to show confidence in its safety.
I couldn't help contrast the caution of the public health system about this, with the other recent story, in the Post, at left. Because the health regulators are, as usual, siding with the industry, and ignoring the deaths of its low-paid workers, we might see another 200 of them die before they get a properly vetted, safe-for-sure vaccine to stop it.
September 12: Bad, But Not Exponential
As we all await indications of whether the long weekend caused another infection "bump" from parties, and whether the school year is leading to just a few isolations, or a lot of outbreaks, I'm just reading those embarrassing, worst-in-Canada case counts in Alberta and BC, and fighting depression. (The shroud of smoke over the city isn't helping.)
The Alberta graph isn't even a steady increase. They actually did this one giant leap in case-counts a few weeks ago and have leveled off, since; the problem being they aren't dropping, either.
September 11: Overall Planetary Case Mortality-Rate Dropping
I noted on August 26, "Human Race Starting to Win This" that the overall planetary death-rate was falling. What's become clearer over a few more weeks, is that the infection rate peaked - and stayed there, so far. It's not declining, just the death rate, which is continuing down.
September 10: I Found The "COVID Panic": Turns Out It's Public Health Measures
Attempting (pointlessly, since nobody believed) to downplay health dangers from COVID to avoid creating "panic"? What panic? Did any other nation than the United States "panic" at any point?
Well, I found it, just a few search terms away. It explains everything. The Mises Institute promotes the ideas of Ludwig von Mises, which is to say, that government is Always Wrong, whereas Rich People Are Always Right. (I'm summarizing; they'd claim that "the market" is what's always right, but we know that comes to the same thing in practice these days, what with a few oligopolies running most markets.)
Those in favor of lockdowns and impoverishing millions insist that there is no other way. Unless we outlaw employment for millions, we are told, the death toll will be unacceptable. Of course, when pressed for what death toll is "acceptable," no answer is given. Is it six hundred thousand (the number who die from cancer in the US each year)? Sixty thousand (the number who typically die in the US from flu and pneumonia each year)? Some lesser number? One? This figure remains a great mystery. We are only told that human rights are null and void until the "experts" decide otherwise.
Actually, by May 5, it was two weeks after British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson had changed the Bush/Johnson strategies of "herd immunity" to "lockdown necessary" with one presentation, which calculated that the USA would lose 2.2 million people and 510,000 in the UK. Even those politicians were not ready to champion paying that price, so they flipped their decision overnight.
September 9: Since Mom Is Grounding Us, Consider a Restaurant with More Than Face Shields
When the lockdown started, there was an explainer on TV that showed, not just a curve being crushed, but a succession of waves, the cases coming back and multiple lockdowns needed to crush them. I couldn't believe it. Why would people let it come back? It's like dieting until you decide you have to binge on ice cream and fries. For a week. Then back to another harsh diet? If most dieters aren't that bad, why would a whole society?
Kudos to "Prince George Matters" and cartoonist Geoff Coates for the message at left, which, alas, dates to July 24...but remains true as ever. While it picks on stoned hipsters, those who read the news know that the rolling-eyeball idiots are the ones who presumably spent wedding parties yelling drunkenly at each other from short distances, crowded into bars, and generally forgot the simplest things during gatherings.
September 8: Get My Flu Shot - When?
The news is full of articles about flu season, the redoubled importance of getting your flu shot, and the increased ordering of the vaccine by the health systems.
<=+2>
September 7: Labour Day Brings Expected (Statistical) Pile of Dead Bodies
Well, the day's about over - the rigors of hosting kept me from my morning writing habit - so I won't attempt much of a post today.
September 6: Canada as America's Yardstick
Well, the Covid Cup Concept is finally coming around to American politics. They are famously loath to bring in comparisons to other countries to their political discussions. There's a ritual nod to every other country having universal healthcare, and another to all other rich countries have less military spending, put together - then they eject the rest of the world from the discussion again.
September 5: All Risk Is Additive (and Subtractive!)
There's a fine article up at The New York Times: "When It Comes to COVID-19, Most of Us Have Risk Exactly Backward", by physician Aaron E. Carroll. I spent much of a career managing risk, and his view is very valuable.
September 4: Degrees of "Precipice"?
My first instinct, on seeing the headline "B.C. on 'a precipice,' provincial health officer warns, as 89 new COVID-19 cases confirmed" this morning, was skepticism.
September 3: A Little Space
Frankly, I could use a break. I've been railing about tests, and stupid public health-care bureaucracies and stupid education bureaucracies, and tests, and bureaucracies, for a few weeks now, and every news organ is on about it, making additional efforts pointless.
September 2: Perish Forbid A Small Class (in Cities)
I got some editorial advice about yesterday's "Prasad's Law" post, and was at least reassured I was right to look for help - I'd written it upside-down, getting around to schools at the end, when they're the topic. I just really like "Prasad's Law", it explains much of the world to me, so I tend to get diverted on to all the examples of it.
Prasad's Law says that schools will always try to pack the maximum number of kids they can into any classroom, and that goes back for a century. At left, the BC government records for class sizes the other year; they really hate to have classes of under 27.
September 1: Prasad's Law Applies to Schools
Vinay Prasad is a smart guy. He's an oncologist, a hematologist, a professor, and a podcaster that does journalism on health delivery.
Dr Ray Poses, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University, has consolidated this into "Prasad's Law": "Medical goods and services that concentrate wealth can be paid for; medical goods and services that disperse wealth are 'unaffordable.'" ...
August 31: School: Trepidation, Disappointment, Fatalism
The "trepidation" is the parents. The "disappointment" is in the two provincial health officers that have been held up as such heroes. And the "fatalism" seems to be the attitude of the health officers themselves.
There's disappointment that Dr. Bonnie Henry lent her image to this back-to-school ad. The ad offers the perception that there will be about 7 kids in a classroom; teachers fear that it will be more like 27. A few less at earlier grades, but up to 30 for high school. Distancing is obviously impossible.
August 30: Well, At Least Somebody Is School Testing (and it's 600,000 students)
Los Angeles United School District is "united" because it combines a number of municipalities in that exurban sprawl, so that 500,000 kids have the same school system. It's the second-largest in America, as large as all of BC and Alberta school districts put together.
August 29: The Plight of the Living Dead
So, the thing I didn't want to write, the thing I put off for months, is that I lost my Mom in a care-home, 17 years ago, and it was a relief when it came.
The care-homes have a "grad class" into the mortuaries every year, and respiratory illnesses are probably responsible for half of it. Perhaps nobody is leaving windows open, but it's normal to let it happen in care-homes. Protecting them with all that PPE and protocol was never done in any flu season, was it? So, they weren't set up for it. Zero PPE, zero training.
August 28: In Which I Do Simple Divisions To Obtain An Obvious Result
First, let me get the operands of my divisions lined up.
For my numerator:
Two Billion Dollars From
Mr. Popular.
For the denominator:
Five Million People in Schools (don't forget the teachers)
Then divide that by:
There are now tests for about $5. Or less. This one.
Paul Hebert has one, Ginkgo Bioworks has one.
August 27: Trudeau Looks Good By Comparison
Call it the "GOP Effect". Not only has this blog sworn a holy oath to give its readers a break from a certain Name, but anything about the American governance really is the fault of the whole party. It's not just all that "enabling"; their current policies are simply the culmination of anti-governance, anti-science, anti-fact trends in that party for decades.
You wouldn't know we'd only done pretty well from the public's reaction. We, meaning Trudeau and his WE-seiged Liberals, apparently nearly sweep the field at making citizens satisfied. It's not surprising that Australia and Denmark beat us, but baffling that we beat Germany and South Korea. That one I put down to the GOP Effect. Germany and South Korea are not as inundated with American news as we are; we know just how bad we might have had it, how people who look and talk just like us, were made to suffer...pointlessly. Or at least, made to suffer so that somebody else could "look good", when six weeks later, they looked very bad indeed. People are willing to suffer for something, but not for nothing.
Canadian Conservatives shouldn't entirely rage at the injustice of it all; they've had a win, too. Canadaland just put out a new "Wag The Doug" podcast (link from the image) which is saying that Doug Ford, spiralling downwards five months ago, is now broadly popular.
August 26: Human Race Starting To Win This
COVID, Whole Planet
It's 22 days since I wrote "Looking for Good News", that there were signs the overall case-load for the whole planet had peaked, or at least stopped increasing exponentially.
August 25: Where's OUR 150-person Gatherings?
Look, journalists, I get it: family funerals are radioactive. Any political criticism of them, near them, is verboten. Simply Not Done, old chap; execrable taste.
just yesterday.
August 24: Talk about Toxic Mask-ulinity...
I'll just jump in with the links to read, as this story is well-covered already. Salon writes about the "alpha male" image that keeps men from wearing masks (20% don't, vs 8% of women), because they fear "looking weak". Vox calls it "performative masculinity". It's the same phenomenon: face right up to every opponent, don't back down, show no fear.
Their leader might be Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones. Remember how he didn't want to take any medical treatment for having a chunk of skin the size of his hand flap down over his chest? Stayed strong-looking and tough, until the bacterial infection made him fall off his horse, his tribe abandoning him to die a few hours later. But, damn, he went down looking tough, didn't he? Let's all give him a hand, folks! Then bury him, he's starting to smell. So is his philosophy.
August 23: The Virus Is Beating the US With Guerilla Warfare
I'm being very successful at avoiding a post about care-homes and how they get neglected - it's painful, because I lost my Mom in one 17 years back. Other topics, mercifully, keep coming up.
The Enemy camps, We harass;
The Enemy tires, We attack;
The Enemy retreats, We pursue
August 22: Time to at least THREATEN Drastic Measures?
Naturally, I'm depressed by this week's case-load news from both BC and Alberta; oddly enough, the ravings here at CCCC have failed to successfully get the public to stop giving each other a sometimes-deadly disease. Up and up, the case-load has gone. While still trivial by international standards, Alberta is now worse than Quebec; a state that Albertans are unfamiliar with, and should be ashamed of.
August 21: Calgary Board of Education Prepares for Failure
I asked the friends I have with kids in K-12, if they had heard anything about the school testing I'm so in favour of. Nothing. Of course. What they have gotten is an update from the CBE, which includes the interesting preparation:
In the event of increased absence by teachers due to COVID-19, we are increasing the number of teachers on our substitute roster by approximately 33 per cent from 1,200 to 1,600.
August 20: Schools and Science
The teacher's union wants masks and smaller class sizes, and that's just common sense. But it's not science, not in the sense that we know the infection rates with and without those things. The teacher's requests will reduce infections, again that's just common sense. But the really relevant question is can anything reduce infections enough to make schooling work for more than a few weeks?
"...1448 close contacts were identified. Nearly half of these close contacts were tested virologically or serologically, yet only 18 secondary cases were identified. These very low rates of infection need to be interpreted with caution, because mitigation measures were in place: most educational facilities were closed briefly after case identification, and close contacts were expected to home quarantine for 14 days. "
August 19: Why Real Estate is OK
So, it's the greatest economic collapse ever; everybody's broke and in bread lines, who paid for all those "More Canadian homes sold in July than any other month in the past 40 years"?
The papers have been all focused on the economic bad news, except perhaps for the more clear-eyed view here at CCCC. That May 11 post preceded Paul Krugman at The Times noting similar points about the combination of the Depression and WW2 keeping productive workers out of the economy even deeper, and for much longer. Now, Dr. K has sent his e-mail fans, if not been given space in his column for, this graph at left.
August 18: Testing, Testing, One, Two Three...
I never let go of that story of Dr. Paul Hebert, the biologist with the remarkable DNA "barcoding" technology that can be adapted to process huge numbers of COVID-19 tests for a fraction of current costs and time. I came back to it later in May, again in June, and then last week.
August 17: Waiting
I want to write some more about care-homes and how we fix them, but the recent history there is a sad topic, I've been avoiding it. I've got a major post I want to do on testing, and I'll get to work on it today. But for this quiet Monday morning, I'm just...waiting.
August 16: Nobody Drops Around At Work Any More
I'm three years away from the office, but still in touch with many of the Old Gang. Reactions to a full-telework life are mixed, but most say it's harder work. I don't think there will be much trouble bringing most people back, when they can.
August 15: The Canadian App is Safe (Like All Your "Free" Tools are Not)
As a follow-up to yesterday, the American CDC ups my guess on Labour Day by 10,000. Here at CCCC, we make only conservative predictions. They, of course, had the time to run predictions for all 50 states, whereas I did the top five, then doubled that. I'm glad it turned out conservative. If school then starts and causes spikes across the land, they could see a full quarter-million by that Election Day... I've given up guessing what that means; lots of people just harden their loyalty when it's tested.
But for some reason, despite all the evidence that it's costly in other ways to let private business surveil you; despite the fact that the surveillance means you're being surveilled by the government, too, just one supoena (or polite request, even) removed...people are afraid of the government app.
August 14: 190,000 American Dead by Labour Day
Six days back, I claimed that the passing of peaks in the FATC states allowed a fair guess at each state's case-fatality rate (a function not of the disease, really, when the hospital services and demographics are comparable, but the likelyhood of an infection becoming a "case" in the stats). This number is useful for one thing: short term predictions (before the rate changes) of the next few weeks of dying, from the last few weeks of case-loads.
Arizona is our success story, here: Dr. Bonnie would be proud of them. They've spent the last 20 days heroically accelerating a drop from their peak from about 2500/day down to 1000/day.
Texas, on the other hand, has had two bad weeks, hovering around 8500/day, and one good one where they've at least gotten it down to 7000. So we'll average them up to 7500/day.
California, of course, just had to be contrary. Having taken four months to finally build up a curve, they're already starting on a second. They seemed to be over their peak and heading down, then came August and cases went right back up the last ten days. I guess I can pick the number 7000, and remind everybody again this is very rough work.
August 13: For Once, Media Images Reflect the Truth: Please Tattle on Parties
The media are always trying to find a visual language to communicate with. To dramatize the words, they look for images. Alas, the images often tell a different story, one that's simpler, clearer, and wrong.
August 12: The Number I Didn't Think We'd See
As the number of US dead from COVID-19 soared past their losses in Vietnam, I found the United States Military Casualties of War page on Wikipedia, made a spreadsheet of it, and pushed around the numbers. I thus had a post ready when the death toll hit 102,636, the total losses since WW2: Korea, Vietnam, all the little ones. At the time, the curve was already bending, and there was certainly hope it would be the only one, so I hoped it would never hit 167,013: the total US losses in war, save the three big ones: WW1, WW2, and their Civil War.
How dumb are they? Well, we've come to the "Roy reads the morning news and rants" section, but I'll be brief. At left, the headline that made me spit-take, when I realized that "this is no longer a debate" wasn't about requiring masks, but banning them.
Over in Georgia, Cherokee County is closing Etowah High School, going remote. Hardly surprising, really, at right is their opening-day Senior class photograph, from August 3rd.
August 11: Massive Testing Needed for School, but Canadian Tests Ignored?
I don't need to expend many words to emphasize how more-possible the desperately-needed school openings would be, given the availablility of massive testing. Ideally, every kid would be tested every day before walking in, the result available before they are settled into a seat; that would be the dream. Second best would be testing during the day, results available before the kids return in the morning.
Spartan Bioscience Cube, an automated testing device that was going to be a "game changer". Notice the story is from April. The last mention I could find in the news was about the agony of Spartan investors, way out on a financial limb and all their sales on hold while they work out glitches, that, as near as I can tell, involve the swab stick being too short. Were their users all out of popsicle sticks and rubber bands?
, which left town over a month ago for the boonies: if you don't mine silver and gold, you're unlikely to see these tests. The CEO say that his market is a test that "...could be used outside hospitals, in remote areas where getting tested is not so practical." That's a good description of schools, too: you can't send the kid to school, and a separate clinic visit every day; school tests have to be done on-site. It's not happening from these products because they're too expensive, and we can't do millions of them, even if we had that much money.
August 10: Today Is Just an Ad for CTV
Maybe I'm being lazy, but today I just have the one recommend-and-link. I've relied a lot on CTV for its fine Canada dashboard of COVID-19 cases, and just the other day, I had nothing but CTV stories when they were all bad for BC/Alberta.
But the CTV rating chart for USA and Canada is not about the CCCC metric of "deaths per million", but just "cases", noted just yesterday as a slippery construct, but hardly useless, especially in fairly similar medical systems. (Afghanistan probably has more bodies than "cases", for lack of doctors.)
August 9: New US Wave Has Peaked?
As much discussed here, the "curves" of cases for federal states like Canada and the USA are the sum of very different curves across the country: some having a first-wave much later, making a second-wave for the country as a whole.
A good illustration is looking at the four states that have done most of the dying the last month, at left. I wrote the above before creating the graph, and now I can see, the case-to-fatality intervals hasn't really shortened much from three weeks. California alone looks like two weeks, hinting that I'm wrong seeing the death-rate having peaked there; another week of higher death rates to go?
August 8: How The West Was Lost
Well, it's not quite lost yet, but traitors in our ranks are doing their damnedest. That fingernail-chewing I've been doing for a week about whether our infections would go up or down is at least over. And if it weren't for bad news, we'd have no news at all in BC and Alberta. Get a load of what hit me on my phone this morning, one story after another. They're in the same order as on CTV's mobile pages for phones.
I'm attempting to make a virtue of my 1990s HTML primitives; this text is dodging left and right down the page to avoid these stories, the way my brain is trying to dodge the obvious conclusion they lead me to, from looking at all the other places that have behaved like this a month ago, in Australia, Vietnam, and of course, the Infected States of America.
The outbreaks - don't forget that "outbreak" means they haven't and can't contact-trace where it came from, it's gotten away from them - are mostly in care facilities, but the fact they can happen at all means there's more of it in the community than is safe for visiting. The police catching it on the job says the same, and that these parties they're breaking up are indeed the serious problem. Hence my use of "traitors": those who help the enemy in war.
I stepped into a bar - not on Davie, on Hastings, just the other day. It looked OK at first; the chairs were spaced way out, and there were spacing marks at the till for lineups. But in 20 minutes, there were too many people for the overall atmosphere in there; almost none had masks on, they were talking and laughing into each other's faces; the staff behind the bar didn't have masks on as they talked to customers a metre or so away. I shrank away. People are not taking this seriously enough, and the policing of it isn't stern enough yet. I call for crackdowns.
And all of it leads to the last story on my phone queue, which summed it all up, at left. The guy's right, of course. We're all "infectious disease modellers" these days, in the sense of saying to oneself "this sounds like Florida in June".
August 7: School Dazed
Normally a tiny blog should look for the stories others aren't noticing,but today I'll join half the news sites on the continent, with the photo of the crowded Georgia school.
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.
The really dumbfounding part of the story for me, was the explanation for the crowd:
- Following the Equator; Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Mark Twain
"Class changes at the high school level are a challenge when maintaining a specific schedule.
In short, they haven't changed their schedule. At all. Every student in the entire school, of every grade, is in the hallways for five minutes after every class, hurrying to the next. That's why the crowd.
... Students are in this hallway environment for just a brief period as they move to their next class."
...
Watters said the time to move from one class to another only lasts about five minutes...
Wearing a mask is a personal choice, and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them.
August 6: Why Not Just Admit That Schools Are Day-Cares?
Lots of individual kids have come back from missing a year of school to illness, or had a year of poor schooling because of travel. Most kids can get over this loss.
The improvised schooling could be looked at: use every church, every community centre, theatres, every mall, especially - plus of course those unused hotels and conference centres.
Calgary has 25% of its office space empty; am I the only one to wonder if that's a good thing just now?
As a follow-up to yesterday's pride in being Canadian, a dry but very complimentary article on how superior Canada's economic pandemic response has been.
August 5: This Is Not Actually Hard
It's important to read Canadian news to counteract the gaslighting of American news. Americans, frankly, are crazy compared to us, and you can be drawn into the craziness, if you read only their news.
The need for being at this "centre", even if between facts and fiction, is on display today in the headline at left. This "dispute" doesn't exist in Canada, twice over. First, we didn't put an expiry date on benefits that clearly need to last as long as the emergency does. It's like tossing lifeboats overboard, but with special valves that will deflate them in an hour, so that the captain can review whether the people in the lifeboat still need to float, or not. The boats need to float until the people in them can touch the shore, was that too hard for you?
August 4: Looking for Good News
I've finally pulled the retired person screwup: I missed an entire statutory holiday. "Every day is Saturday" for the retired, but we normally notice society's breaks and festivals, honest. I'm just home alone, with the wife visiting Calgary at last, and spent most of it hiding from the heat and doing chores. I just realized it today. There was still no news, from BC or Alberta, on the case statistics - the ones that would tell us if we're starting to clearly push the curve back down, or still have a re-starting epidemic. Last week was ups and downs, but too many ups.
Until last week. It's just a little thing, and I'm probably grasping at a straw, but look at it. (Blowup at far right.) There are some other level stretches on that graph, over a week long, back in May, when daily-case counts did not increase; but this is the first time it's levelled off in three months.
August 3: Can Vietnam Ride That Tiger?
Two more nations I'd meant to offer a backpat to, were the commies: Vietnam and Cuba. Both have controlled the virus to an exemplary degree, and both, admittedly, have had great success with tyranny.
August 2: Riding the Tiger...and Falling Off
I'm fortunate that I never got around to posts I'd thought of doing to praise South Africa in particular, for controlling the pandemic without even having money or a good medical system; I was also thinking of praising Australia for a great response to their first wave, clamped down upon with great success.
Australia is a now a classic example of second wave...worse than the first. Was I saying yesterday that this wasn't happening even in the fumbling, self-harming USA? Well, Australia managed, as the chart at left shows, their second wave is now higher than their first.
"Controlling" the pandemic is like riding a tiger: you're never really more than one slip away from falling off and into the tiger's jaws. It's always trying to squirm away, get out from underneath. Cavalier behaviour, confidence, these are your worst enemies. You can't ever rest easy.
South Africa, on the other hand, is just having a first wave. They have already gotten past the crest, (see declining cases for two weeks at left), but of course the dying will now follow for the next month, and it's bad. With South Africa, of course, there's also an economy that was never that far from starvation for half the population, and now there are very long lines for direct food handouts, like Times Square in 1932.
August 1: Those "First Wave" States Are The Worst
On July 20, I pulled the case-charts for all 50 US states, and categorized the worst-hit into three types of growth. The American "Second Wave" was really the "first wave" in the places it was mostly happening: states that had not had many cases in the spring were finally having that exponential increase. Eleven days ago, I estimated it was 70% of the dying on July 17th, in those "first wave" states.
Well, by yesterday, it was up to about 80% of America's 1465 deaths per day, the last three days. All the states with over 50 dead per day are "first wave" cases. The worst of the "second wavers", Ohio, Virginia, Louisiana, with about a hundred dead/day between them, have already passed their crest for new cases, and their death-rates are crested or even past. Their deaths/day are about static; the "first wave" states have doubled their death-rates from 620 to over 1200/day.
July 31: Texas About To Provide The New Case-Fatality Rate
Well, the crest is probably here, most sharply for Texas. Texas, with its daily case-load shown at left, is one of the "second wave is the first wave for us" states that I categorized back on July 20th. It clearly crested about July 15 and is headed back down. As Dr. Henry kept repeating to us in the spring, you only see the crest in the rear-view; it takes a week to be sure it's even happening, another to confirm your hopes. (I am still awaiting that second week of Alberta/BC declines, to breathe out again, on our "mini-wave" being wrestled down.)
The average time-to-termination can change as the infected population changes. Again, my theory is that by just protecting care-homes, and by at least much of the retired population that can stay in, continuing to do so post re-opening, the demographics will now be younger and have a case-fatality rate a fraction of those in the spring.
July 30: Is 300/day Canada's "Steady State"?
There's a victory lap being claimed, if not by France, then by an American living there, in a Washinton Post article today. Ex-pat Timothy Searchinger writes:
"Over the past six weeks, I've eaten out at restaurants five times, attended two concerts, visited a large, busy indoor mall three times, had two haircuts, and repeatedly watched school kids run around the schoolyard. But that's all been responsible behavior - because instead of being locked down in my house in the D.C. area, I've been in France, where life and the economy are now carrying on close to normal."
...
[History of France having a terrible spring, fought successfully with a draconian lockdown while they built up a massive tracing/testing capability]
...
"Almost exactly two months later, France mostly reopened. And for the last two and a half months, the country has functioned in a primarily open status with around 500 new cases per day and only about 450 deaths in the last month."
Searchinger is describing a "steady state", there: the virus is always attempting to break out, but every case is traced, every outbreak fought back down. The "around" 500 new cases per day goes up and down, but never keeps going up, always suppressed after a week or so.
That, alas, is an imponderable without a lot more information that I'm sure public health officials are not chatty about. "Testing and tracing capability" will be measured only by the results. Getting this crest back down a bit is encouraging. But every time I think that BC is back down to 20/day, we have a day with 30 or 40; Alberta is the greatest worry in Canada, just now, the most active cases, and still at double its mid-July numbers.
July 29: More Number Games
worldometers.info
To repeat, the CCCC blog gets its numbers, as a rule, from "Worldometers.info", a previously-little-known site that mainly had population clocks. Now its case-clocks and death-clocks, as it were, get a lot of clicks.
..such that worldometers is about to hit 153,000 American dead, whereas JH has not yet touched that 150,000 round number, though it will today. So today will probably bring the spate of headlines about "150,000 deaths" in America.
July 28: "Our World in Data" has a Nice "Coronavirus Data Explorer"
Coronavirus "dashboards" with the latest stats are becoming quite the industry; there's a bunch of them. I stick with "worldometers.info" for consistency with my earlier data, but there are other very good ones. Today, a recommend for "outworldindata.org".
At left, a half-size snapshot of the "Coronavirus Data Explorer", as tuned to show the EU, Germany, Canada, and the USA. The metric is one I hadn't thought of for some reason, though CCCC is built on the notion that "deaths per million" for each nation would be the measure of their pandemic success: this graph tracks the "deaths per million" per day, so it goes up and down with the death rate in each nation, but normalized to its size.
July 27: Small Children, Large Numbers
Here's the problem with small fractions: sufficient viral exponentials still multiply them out to real numbers.
Dismissing the virus turns on the need for the deaths to be statistics, not tragedies. (By the way, Lenin probably didn't say that, and nobody's really sure who did.) The deaths have to be numbers, not names.
Alas for this narrative, those teeny, tiny fractions of a percent of coronavirus cases in children that become deadly are now being multiplied by large numbers. The FAT states: Florida, Arizona, Texas - are just about to hit one million cases between them. If 20% of infectees are children, and a twentieth of one percent of those die, that's ten dead children. A nine-year-old with no underlying health issues just died in Florida, the fifth child death so far. Just in Florida.
July 26: Tweaks
Bonnie Henry and Deena Henshaw, and their work teams, obviously, have earned a lot of credibility. Maybe more than any other public health officers this side of South Korea and Germany. So I'm going to trust them, trust that they have this situation so well in hand, that we're down to the tweaks.
July 25: Can Canadians Trust The Instruments and Fly IFR?
Doing this blog has involved a lot of reading of various "dashboards" and reading the comments from epidemiologists who crunch statistics all day. I felt a genuine sense of alarm when I saw the Alberta/BC numbers turn upward over a week ago. It alarmed me to go out on the street and see that most people were not in masks, and even in the grocery store, barely half.
"In some ways, we're a victim of our own success. We have controlled the spread in Alberta relatively well, which means that a lot of people haven't directly experienced the impact of having a loved one with COVID who's become very ill," Hinshaw said in a recent interview.
The pandemic requires that everybody act on advice that comes from outside their daily life. You have to react to threats you cannot see.
July 24: I Rip Out the Pound of Flesh Nearest My Heart To Give Credit Where Due
Born and lived in Alberta, whole family still there, retired to BC five years ago: they're all one territory to my family. They're more similar to each other, this pandemic, than to any other provinces, too; similar case-rates and problems. That extended to this month, when both developed the new problem of infection rates abruptly heading upward, after months of progress.
July 23: Also, We Need "Roadside Markers", Only For Bars
Yesterday's "Alert Colours", for daily public warnings, allow an active response to news of increased cases. Today's suggestion is fully automatic: the warnings build up by themselves, as cases are traced.
July 22: NOW We Need Those Stupid Terror Colours
Most remember the remarkable stupidity of the Bush-Era "War On Terror" colour alert system. It was SO stupid, telling people to be afraid without giving them any information that might help them deal with it. What were we supposed to do when they elevated it to Orange, when it was rarely below Yellow? Jump at shadows and loud noises? Commit a few hate crimes against unrelated ethnic groups from Peru? They never did say.
But they popped back into my head, the last few days, as I read all the extremely alarming news from both Alberta and BC, the last week, of soaring case-counts and worried public health officials. I was reflecting that our problems are minor compared to the horrorshow in the southern USA; but, but we need people to feel alarm anyway, because we have to turn it around now. This is the time to change behaviour, while it's cheap and quick. If you were in debt, and the interest was 70% per week(!)... you'd pay it off IMMEDIATELY, no?
July 21: After Monday Comes Punday
It's tough for dentists, this year. They're dealing with a lot of PPE, sweating under three layers of masks, and have greatly reduced workloads and incomes.
We all know that most dental visits are not for emergencies or even badly-needed fillings and crowns; their basic, daily, bread-and-butter are the routine cleanings and scalings, which have almost all been canceled, and people probably wouldn't come if they did try to schedule them.
"A Journal of the Plaque Year".
July 20: Most of the US "Second Wave" are the "First Wave", For Their States
The image at left is a link to the full grid of the state categorizations, as done by me, looking at the blue line for a moment. (It's not a complex analysis.)
Nearly All The Dying Is In "Late First Wave" States
The very short version is that states just now hitting their own "first wave", that have been very low case-rates until the last month, were 619 of the deaths on July 17, 2020. The states that had a first-wave, crushed it, and have now started their own local second-wave, were just 149 deaths that day. It was only a little larger than the 101 deaths contributed by states like New York and New Jersey, that had terrible first waves, crushed them, but are still losing tens of citizens per day, just from the ongoing residuals of their first wave.
Actual Second Wave: 17%
Early First Wave Ongoing: 13%
July 19: An Easy Sunday Read, Just Compare the Gross World Figures
I'm working on a major post that's taken hours of work: a deep-dive into how much of the USA is in a "second wave" of viral cases, how much is just finally having a "first wave", long-delayed, how many states are actually still OK, with a crushed curve, no new increases.
July 18: Antidote to Yesterday: Big CBC Article on the "Key Metric"
This link from CCCC to CBC is hardly needed, as the CBC news article is on the top of their page, and the top of the Google-news recommendations this morning. It's about the "key metric", that infectious disease experts recommend one look at. It can predict whether Canada is going to slip down into the COVID death pit that the United States has dug itself into. (A pit they will be a month of restrictions climbing out of, IF they do...)
Still.
July 17: I Prefer Our Problems, But, Exponentially Speaking, They're Just as Bad
I love that line in Tom Sawyer where Tom has given offense beyond measure, and just before the retribution falls upon him, Twain ends the chapter with "Let us draw the curtain of charity over this scene."
Let's draw the curtain of charity over Florida and Texas today; every other news medium is staring at the car-wreck, let us go to the real, true Happiest Place On Earth: BC and Alberta. In the middle of our summer, the pandemic largely banished down to a few cases per day, re-opening businesses, fun in the sun.
Alberta has gone from a seven day average of 17 cases/day at the start of June, to 45 cases per day on July 9th, to 85 cases/day yesterday, a week later.
July 16: The Second Wave
Today's just a link to a good article, and a comment or two upon it. At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal has an excellent article out about the "Second Wave".
July 15: The Provincialism of Plague
There's a nice compliment to Canada in this morning's Washington Post. It re-states what Trudeau said in an interview recently: we may have made mistakes and had failures, but our "coronavirus performance" (or "COVID Cup Standings" as we say here at CCCC) has been far better than theirs.
First, "It has less than one-ninth the United States' population...no city here is as densely populated as, say, New York City." True, and not relevant. America's warning outbreak was in low-density Washington state, from which BC took warning, and New York did not. Yes, Toronto has half of New York's population density. Athens, Greece has nearly TWICE New York's population density. Look it up: Athens crowds 664,000 people into just 15 square miles. New York would have 14 million, not 8, were it as packed. Greece has had 19 deaths per million so far, to Canada's 233 and America's 410. It's not density.
I have to admit, that's a persistent theme running through preparations for pandemic. "It's just in China, where they have wet markets and gross habits"..."It's just in Italy, where they kiss each other on the cheeks all the time"..."It's just in Toronto where....well, they're foreign and different, so it's just them."
July 14: Your Thought For the Day
Sometimes I write well over my 500-word target. Why not, now and then, utter one interesting fact, and let my audience get on with their day? I just found out yesterday I have another reader! I'm starting to run out of fingers on the one hand; if I count family, I might have to use the thumb! This is getting serious, so I have to be responsible.
At its most severe, the lockdown seems to have reduced G.D.P. by a little over 10 percent. During World War II, America spent more than 30 percent of G.D.P. on defense, for more than three years. Why couldn't we absorb a much smaller cost for a few months?
Now, in the States, it's fashionable to point to the sheer size of the debt, an incomprehensible number, and jump to the statement that "There's no money left", something they also never say in the middle of a war, no matter how pointless, illegal, and immediately stoppable. Once again, they don't have the humility needed to navigate this humbling world.
July 13: From the "Well, So Much For That Theory" Dept.
Well, as it turns out, BOTH of these two stories hit the wires on the same day - yesterday.
July 12: Brazil, Worst-Case Scenario?
Posts to CCCC may be spotty this week; we're hosting a young lady getting some in-Canada vacation away from her two annoying brothers, and will be keeping busy.
July 11: "Open the Border"? U kidding? Build a Wall!
I was amused to see images like this from the Johns Hopkins University GIS system in a few news stories the other day. It's a terrific example of one of those "higher truths" that show up in the media. That is, it's not very truthful at all, but it conveys to your audience the alarm they are supposed to feel about the actual truth.
There, without all that nasty red sending warning signals to your hindbrain, we can relax a bit and measure our real risk, taking this "incidence rate" number as related to risk (which "total cases in history" is certainly not). The yellow dots have some proportionality to the fraction of all the people whose path you cross, on the street, or at a checkout counter, who might breathe virus into your air. Each dot size is about a 50% increase in incidence rate from the size below. The Quebec dot, at top right, is two sizes larger than Ontario's, meaning about double. (It's a little less than that; each size is a wide band of numbers).
July 10: We Need Event Contact-Tracing to Judge Events
The post below is really yesterday's, improved, I hope, but today I had planned to just bring up an associated topic: contact tracing, and telling the public the results.
Contact-tracing of infections two months ago were summarized today as coming from family members (40%), indoor work (20%), indoor socializing with friends (25%), outdoor socializing (5%), outdoor work (5%), and other (5%).
July 9: Blame Imputed to Tulsa Rally Through Statistical Neglect
This post is a re-write of yesterday's, after professional editor pointed out writing flaws and rhetorical overreach - if no data inaccuracies. Yes, re-writes are against the Blogging Code. So sue me.
There's no moral to the story because it's not a story! It's just a bunch of stuff that happened!
--Homer Simpson
(Season 2, Ep. 22 I'm told; I turned on the last scene. It's not an exact quote, but better summarizes this post than the accurate one, so I'm leaving it. Sue me again.)
News is just a bunch of stuff that happened. The media, on the other hand, are storytellers, and they love to tell stories, preferably with cause and effect clarified, heroes and villains, and a moral, like all good stories. When the sequence of events is not a neat story, sometimes the stretch their telling of it.
President Donald Trump's campaign rally in late June, as well as the accompanying counterprotests, likely contributed to the area's recent spike in coronavirus cases, Tulsa City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said Wednesday.
What I take from that, is that Dr. Dart would like to discourage ALL gatherings of any kind. That's not surprising; it's his job at the moment. He surely has an interest in pinning down which kind of events are worst and least-bad, but cases will be minimized if he just discourages everything. So he wasn't being coy about "significant events" and winking that he meant the rally, or the protests, or anything else. He was spreading the blame as thinly as possible. He's also against large barbeques, of which there have probably been a hundred. The media definitely wanted to "connect the dots" back to the rally alone. Just replace "rally", in those headlines, with "rally, other events", and then they accurately reflect his comments. None do.
Fitting the log-normal model to all cases, we estimated the media incubation period of COVID-19 to be 5.1 days (CI, 4.5 to 5.8 days) (Figure 2). We estimated that fewer than 2.5% of infected persons will show symptoms within 2.2 days (CI, 1.8 to 2.9 days) of exposure, and symptom onset will occur within 11.5 days (CI, 8.2 to 15.6 days) for 97.5% of infected persons. The estimate of the dispersion parameter was 1.52 (CI, 1.32 to 1.72), and the estimated mean incubation period was 5.5 days.
This is a cumulative graph of a bunch of numbers I invented, in an effort to duplicate their base statistics. It's just shown here to display that it looks a lot like their graph, providing some gross indication that my estimates are on the right track.
The numbers I invented (don't call them "data", they are an estimate of what AIM's source data must have been) which produced both the incubation model at left, and the cumulative version of it above, are reproduced below.
It's kind of a fun game: pick a set of 13 numbers that satisfy five criteria: 2.5% symptomatic by day 2, 97.5% by day 11, average days to symptoms 5.5, and median days to symptoms 5.1. The media is shown where the cumulative hits 50 in yellow, the other two limits in orange and pink, and the average shown at bottom. It was a set of numbers that fit, and the fifth criterion, of course, is to have the cumulative look a lot like the graph in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Unfortunately, the two spikes since the rally are a couple of days too soon (June 23-24) and a full week too late, to fit the best-known model of incubation. You have to assume that not only were a good 200 rally-goers infected, but that nearly all took 13 days to show symptoms (when AIM says that's after 99% are already infected), then took at least two more days to get to the doctor - and most of them took a day or two after that.
July 8: If Provinces Were Countries, They'd Be All Over the Map
The current news focus on the self-torture of the United States, is of course about the southern United States, and not all of those. Treating either American states, or Canadian provinces, as mere parts of an aggregate makes the pandemic harder to study: both countries are so large and diverse, with their own separate public health officers, laws, and medical systems, that it's like providing one number for "all of Europe".
July 7: Well of Course the Death Rate Really is Down. Duh.
Observers are starting to puzzle at the continued decline in deaths per day in the USA, while everybody marvels (in a bad way) about the case-counts, again rising exponentially.
July 6: Grand Unified Theory of Pandemic Politics: Humility
I've been doing some pretty easy posts, lately; I keep thinking that there will be something to write about from all the testing we've been promised, but it's not coming.
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
...We do what we please, we control the news about it, might is right.
July 5: Essential Workers Lives Not Essential?
As I mentioned, my maternal grandfather died coal mining. He wasn't treated like a human being, but a work-unit; they stopped his pay at the time of the cave-in. No insurance, or any compensation. Replaced with another work-unit the next day. Their lives really, really didn't matter.
July 4: Escape the Pandemic
Well, sorry, I mean the news about the pandemic. Writing this blog has me reading too much of the stuff. Which is easy, as every news organ is just pumping it out. The American news has ticked up again this week, as their infection rate soars in multiple states.
Canada, however, is enjoying a holiday weekend, in a nation with very low risks, a safety hard-won. So if you don't want the Corona Virus harshing the mellow of your Kelowna Virus recovery, try reading The National Observer.
July 3: Belated O Canada
Maybe a bad idea to spend my Canada Day post on a "quarterly report", a time to take stock. I confused it with a New Year's tradition. I should have gone for a shout of patriotism. Well, that's today.
Or, in short, things are looking up all over - in Canada.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
July 2: Tulsa Trendline
The Post has had a few stories that reference the Tulsa Rally, the last few days. I tossed in a comment about my check that showed little evidence it caused any "superspreading", and particularly my disgust that everybody lost interest in Tulsa itself as soon as Washington left (both articles were about Washington people that went there).
Replies sharply reminded me that several campaign staff and Secret Service were infected. That's not actually relevant to my topic; it's quite understandable that people rushing about for a week, talking to others to rent things, buy things and services, making arrangements, might get infected. That's all on them for how distantly they worked, wore masks, etc - and one can imagine campaign staff doing none of that. The question was whether those who attended a two-hour event in a sports arena paid for it with infection, full stop. That's the epidemiologically interesting question, the one about Tulsans, not about Washington zingers landing on political opponents.
Meanwhile, Tulsa County saw record-setting spikes of coronavirus cases in the days after the ... rally - with the discovery of roughly 200 to 250 new cases each day.
Overall, fewer than 2.5 percent of infected people started showing symptoms within 2.2 days, and 97.5 percent had developed symptoms within 11.5 days.
It's really not likely that rallygoers are part of the 250, only somewhat likely they're part of the 200 the day after that. By the next day, the median symptom-display time at 5 days, the case-rate is back to 150/day, same as June 20 itself.
Canada Day: Quarterly Report
I started the blog on April Fool's, so this is the first quarter of CCCC. It's already possible to have nostalgia for the bar chart at left, the first day of spring, at the start of our curve.
June 30: Tulsa Rally Shows Arena Rallies are Possible?
June 29: Seven O'Clock Applause Dying Out
I walked an hour to Canadian Tire yesterday and bought a new bike; replaced the one stolen a few months back. (Even in pandemic, some businesses go on - like stealing.)
June 28: They Run Towards Danger, Die For Us on the Job
Yes, that's true of police. Their supporters have been sharply reminding us of that in recent weeks. I was able to find this report from 2018 on their risks of injury and death on the job, and it notes some 45 fatalities from 2006-2015, about 4.5 per year; a fatality rate of 0.007% per year on the job. Also, about 3%-4% of them per year have lost-time injury claims.
But, mainly, I was thinking of nurses and personal care workers. Turns out that Canada has lost sixteen nurses, orderlies, personal support workers, from COVID-19. So that's just the last few months, sixteen dead. You can be sure at least twice as many again have permanent organ injury from it. When COVID-19 came to kill those they protect, they faced the danger; most were provided with poor protection, enhancing their danger. Nurses are not well-paid for what they do; personal care workers and orderlies are not well-paid for stocking shelves, much less for saving lives.
June 27: Officers in Danger
Public health officers, that is.
Dr. Nichole Quick
Orange County Health Care, Chief
Death Threat
Resigned
Dr. Amy Acton
Health Director, Ohio
Protest with guns outside her home
Resigned
Dr. Kathleen Toomey
Commissioner, Georgia Public Health
Multiple threats
Has police protective detail
Dr. Barbara Ferrer
Shooting her suggested live on Facebook
Police Investigating Multiple Threats
Still on the job
June 26: BC Opens For Vacation Travel: Millions Immediately Contract Virus
BC Premier John Horgan finally opened the province to "Phase 3", most dramatically including non-essential intra-provincial travel. This was in no way related to the imminent end of school, being merely a gigantic coincidence.
June 25: Number Games
Just a paragraph to note that the USA crossed a death-toll number the other day that I mentioned on May 22: 125,325 dead in all the wars between the Civil War and WW2. They passed the 116K of WW1 alone, early last week.
June 25: Yesterday's News
What's always a little funny about the news - even very unfunny news - is when it goes from a great area of concern and fear to...oblivion. Some news just vanishes, making you wonder, "Did the news just take advantage of a mental fad, a short-lived little panic?" The answer is almost always yes.
June 24: Will a Lower Death Rate Allow America to Sleep?
There's a lot of focus on the "case fatality rate": if you aren't a lucky asymptomatic or mild-symptoms-only infectee who becomes a "case", what are your odds?
The thing I fear - especially for the United States - is that the previous fatality numbers will have inured them to accept several hundred dead per day, from familiarity. Car accidents are about 100 Americans a day; murder and suicide, another hundred. Neither statistic ever occasions any serious action.
June 23: America, Object of Pity
Since I follow all this daily, I was surprised to be surprised by the graph at right in the Washington Post today. It was clearly done to highlight the topic of the story, which was that the USA is doing badly compared to others, and "Americans, if not their leaders, are starting to notice".
June 22: Travel is Not Locked-Down, it's Suggested-Down
A very late start today, and I want to do some work on posts that get into data (as they all should), so today is just a quick little rumination.
My post yesterday, about the Tulsa rally having poor attendance because even most of that crowd genuinely fear the disease enough to be cautious, suggests to me how smart Dr. B. Henry has been to manage the BC lockdown with nothing more than suggestions and warnings. We haven't had a heavy hand; not many tickets or other legal consequences have been implemented to force us to isolate.
Canadians' trust for government has spiked dramatically during the COVID pandemic, with 70% of the poll's respondents (1,200 members - 18 and older - from the general population) saying they trust government during the outbreak.
... But the most important reason ... may be that both Ottawa and the provinces have deferred decision-making to health officers like Theresa Tam and Bonnie Henry, and basing the policy decisions on science has resulted in mass buy-in.
I'm not going to look up how American's trust in government has been affected lately. I can only spare so much time for them, and especially their government.
June 21: Tulsa Turning Point?
I'm pretty sure it wasn't just pranking teens - and certainly not mythical protester roadblocks - that limited the Tulsa turn-out last night. There were messages sent out in the last hour or so before the speech began, that there was "still space". Nobody jumped in their cars. (Also, nobody was complaining yesterday that they'd been unable to get a ticket because of said teenagers, or showing up in the parking lot for the overflow. It wasn't the prank.)
The photograph above is meant to show all those empty (blue) seats, but to me, it adds another piece of information: anybody could sit anywhere, there was no reason for the crowd to not spread out over the whole arena, two empty seats for every full one. Note that Mr. Lonely in the foreground is also wearing a mask. I found a few other photos of the upper areas with some blue spaces between people, and they also have some small but significant numbers of mask-wearers, whereas the front-seats (right) had almost none.
This is fantastic news, statistically. There were at most 5,000 people, out of about 50,000 in Tulsa that voted in the Republican primary, that were really willing to come to a rally and act as if infection risk were nothing to avoid. So many are cheering today out of pure political schadenfreude - hooray, the other team had a bad day. But, a focus on pandemic rather than politics can only be happy that nearly everybody, even MAGA-hat-wearing "enemies", do indeed believe they have a risk, and want to reduce it.
June 20: Protests That Don't Spread Infection
I learned about Vancouver's big march yesterday from the news, long after it had started, but the march ended at Sunset Park, hardly 3 km from our house, so I strolled over and caught a half-hour of the speeches (and concert!) before supper.
It was well-run and financed as an event: a row of portapotties, sound and video equipment, a huge screen so that close-ups of speakers could be seen 100m away; and easily the most well-behaved protest I've ever seen; more like a neighbourhood BBQ with talk instead of food.
I'm further frustrated now that I didn't catch her name, and the news stories neglected to mention it. I want albums; she was awesome.
June 18: Pleasant Surprise: Few Infections at Protest Marches
The prevailing theory continues that the coronavirus is not spread by many sufferers, and the 2-to-3 R-nought comes from a small number of "superspreader" events where one victim infects many. The protest marches and rallies looked tailor-made for superspreading, and the medical system was braced.
I'd been noting the complete lack of a "spike" of cases in New York State, following the huge protests there at the end of May, and there was no sign of it. I hated to jump on it before I was sure, and wasn't the first. Yesterday, both Slate.com and The Guardian ran stories about the lack of case "spikes" even more than two weeks after protests.
Nobody knew this going in, of course, a serious risk was accepted as the price, and those who took it (and also, especially, their parents) were lucky.
June 15: The Uselessness of Billionaires
After taking on all capitalism (in under 1000 words) yesterday, I should give it a rest, today. However, I've been meaning to write something about the last book I finished, Anand Giridharadas' "Winners Take All". It's about not so much the rise of billionaires, as undercutting the excuse often given for them to be admired and supported, their fine charity work; that billionaires are Changing the World. Very, very briefly, Giridharadas shows, not. At best, they are alleviating a little of the worst harms done by the system that keeps making them richer.
June 14: Pandemic v. Capitalism
It's ludicrous for me to even touch such an oversized topic. I will surely ramble much longer than my normal 500-word limit. (It's Sunday.) I thought I'd google up a few links on it, and they're overwhelming. The very-capitalist Forbes on how it could fix capitalism, the socialists at Jacobin on how capitalism kills during pandemics, Noam Chomsky on how the pandemic has exposed capitalism's suicidal tendencies.
One of the chief problems with free market capitalism - or, for that matter, the global economic system in general - is that it depends on constant consumption in order to sustain itself. If that consumption is disrupted even for a brief period, the entire system grinds to a halt, with people losing their employment and poverty skyrocketing.
Yeah. In emergencies, we all just need food, clothing, shelter, a few other necessities, those "essential jobs". It's weird, when you stop to think of it, that we need movie theatres, because the staff need the job to eat.
June 13: Finally, Interprovincial Bubble Proposed
Here's the CBC link, but half a dozen other media are running stories on the value of a "Maritime Bubble", allowing travel through the four Maritimes as if they were one big province.
The images link to the excellent Wikipedia article tracking the pandemic in Canada, with a shout-out to Alan Beairsto for putting me on to it. Having to be told about the Wikipedia is certainly a "duh moment"; those volunteers never cease to amaze with their hard work and diligence. For free.
Mostly, we need Log scales to chart pandemic stories because of the differences across time are exponential. From 10 to 20 in a week, then, from 10,000 to 20,000 in a week, a month later. But, here, we need log scales because the pandemic in different regions is so much worse that you can't see the "Rest of Canada" with Quebec in the chart.
June 12: Meaningless Milestones
There's a few round, or historical, numbers being hit today. I think that people are numb from all such stories, the news knows it, and we won't be seeing so many any more.
June 11: My Birthday Wishlist Books Are Non-Pandemic
Yes, I've long since hit the age where I have too much stuff already, and want mostly books and movies for presents. You'd think I'd be wanting a pandemic-related topic next month for my birthday.
Reilly wound up applying "Indigenous legal principles" in his work, and speaking out, and for it got put under supervision, accused of having "lost his objectivity", or what imperial British administrators called, "going native". (This question is asked about Lawrence of Arabia, early in the movie.)
Not to say that Reilly adopted a view of settlers-are-evil, Indigenous-are-good. Reilly's harshest criticisms were leveled at Nakoda chief John Snow; I believe that "Bad Medicine" compared some communities to little "third worlds" with one or two families always trading off the governing jobs, handing out patronage and bribes to supporters. I think his term for Snow was "most evil man I have ever encountered".
June 10: Sigh. Getting Testy.
Well, I found other topics for eleven whole days, but I finally typed in the testing counts from canada.ca. And the bar graph is barely worth the space at left. I could have just said, "they have gradually ramped up twenty percent in ten days, mostly". We're at about 33,000 tests per day now, barely over half what the epidemiologists say we need to keep the genie stuffed back in the bottle every time he pops out.
June 9: All Praise Our Dear Leader
In the next few months, Dr. Henry would prove to be one of the most effective public health officials in the world, with lessons for nations struggling to emerge from lockdowns.
-New York Times Profile on Dr. Bonnie Henry
Well, the secret is out. The warm and fulsome profile of Dr. Bonnie in the New York Times the other day has let millions know that we have it very, very good here in BC.
...even when pushed to ramp up police enforcement of social distancing in parks and protests - as she was empowered to do - she staunchly refused.
June 8: Demonstrations as Data
If intelligence services thought the protests represented some great danger to "National Security", they'd be all over the protests with still and motion cameras, sweeping up all that they could about them. As we worry about whether they will cause disease and death in a few weeks, it has to be admitted that they are a priceless natural "experiment" in determining what spreads the virus and what doesn't.
June 7: Correction: There Are Increases A Few Days After Protests Started
This is basically a correction, especially about Texas. I was looking again at the stats, and America as a whole has increasing daily cases the last week and more. The leading states are California, which as mentioned is just staying high, not spiking, and newcomers Texas, Virginia, and Arizona.
Texas, I dealt with by pointing out the increase recently just followed a gradual rise from before the protests. But reviewing Texas again with the "7 day average" turned on to smooth out the ups and downs, it looks a lot like a new increase rate starting about May 27, definitely getting going by May 29, which really fits. That it's two ways of looking at the same graph highlights how easy it is to see what you want to see.
The Virgina numbres are reassuring: they were falling until June, then holding about even. Bad, but no new spike. Arizona, more alarming. The first numbers, in the 200's, are actually a dip; it was in the 300s and 400s a few days before. It's not the jump from the 200s to the 400s by May 27 that concerns, it's the increase after May 31. It's up from 400s to 1200 in a week, and when you look at the photos of their tightly-packed protests, it's easy to make a connection. It's especially aggravating that the link shows cops virtuously joining the crowd in kneeling...half of them with masks off. They should be showing some leadership, part of the job.
June 7: No Early Signs of a Protest "Spike" From America's Open-Air Labs of Pandemic Democracy
Many are the articles worry about a spike in COVID-19 cases from the protests, and zero are the articles that claim the slightest idea what will actually happen. There's a nice summary of the arguments at Slate, by Molly Armstead, going over the good and bad things about the gatherings so far. My impression from the TV coverage is that distancing is increasing as the protesters become more experienced, and I'm seeing more masks. Vancouver's, yesterday, was hearteningly space-out and masked.
It strikes me that we should already be seeing something if this was going to cause a "spike". You can't say "spike" except for dramatic, sudden increases, and the protests are well into their second week at this point: enough for infections from the first three days, to have shown up as cases in the medical system.
Nope. Minnesota, case load is about steady since May 28. New York, New Jersey, still falling from their massive load of a few weeks back. The bad news is from Texas, where cases continue to rise, as they have since weeks before Floyd, it's been a ragged, but long-term steady, rise since a brief levelling-off in late April. California is hardly better: they had an increase hit around May 20, a few days before Floyd was killed, and it's holding about even at the slightly-higher rate. It looks more like a slight, steady increase from re-opening, but not a "spike".
June 6: All Politics is Local
Pretty difficult to hook the DC protests into a pandemic topic, as I've already put out the points that protestors can and should take all (possible) precautions during the event, and to consider themselves disease vectors to their older family members for two weeks afterwards. Not distancing from grandma is to hold her life cheaply. And now I've repeated that.
The lowest level of government, municipal, has the least money, the least power. They can't print money, or change criminal law.
And having done so, they could then buy 10,000 more masks and go on a blitz through our Downtown East Side, not just handing out masks, but asking how people are doing and recommending services. (Yes, they do some of this, now. I'm talking about a special blitz, a "Caring Crackdown on COVID".)
June 5: Canada Should Be Two Solitudes, Not Ten
Weeks ago, Maria, my niece, in Spain, explained the carefully thought-out re-opening strategy for that very hard-hit country. That Madrid, with most of the cases, was a "zone 1" area, where re-opening would allow travel, but only inside that region, no exporting their troubles to less-infected areas. Other provinces were "zone 2", where their re-opening allowed travel across provinces...just not any provinces in "zone 1" status, of course. Effectively, the worst areas are in quarantine from the rest of Spain.
To clarify that we currently live in a country with just the two epidemiological zones - that these are the real borders, the others meaningless to cross - let me do the simplest bar-chart of the 7-day average "new cases" number, divided by the population in millions.
June 4: Pretend You See A Black Spot
See? Special effects don't have to be expensive.
And, after reading Cory Doctrow's "Little Brother" a few years back, I have to recommend this one at OpenMedia, which has pandemic-related safety advice, but also cyber safety advice, like removal of all sensitive data from your phone. After you're arrested, it's their phone.
June 3: Marchers Need To Do The Right Thing
Our photo today links to a Smithsonian article on a parade in Philadelphia that filled all its hospital beds three days later and killed about 4,500 during the 1918 pandemic. There have been many articles about how transmission won't be so bad, out-of-doors, perhaps the marches won't cause a new wave. The 1918 experience with various victory marches suggests not. It's probably as much about whether people out-of-doors have more space, than more airflow.
So, demonstrations like Vancouver's, right, may have caused transmissions, but certainly fewer, perhaps, here's that word again, exponentially fewer, than a gathering with a third the distance.
The one in Houston looked
indeed like Philadelphia 1918.
But, the one in Minneapolis itself, from TIME, looked not too packed:
June 2: The Pareto Pandemic
CCCC is now two months old, having started on April Fool's Day. In all that time, there's been only one bit of really directly useful news for anybody wishing to reduce the dreaded R-nought, "R0" (initial "R") the number infected in turn, per infectee...which still has no more accurate guess than "2.8" from Wuhan in February. Everybody, of course, is trying to mess with "R0". We reduce R0 to a lower "Rt" (R at later time) with distance and hand-washing. A month ago, the one bit of news was that non-medical masks do work to reduce tranmission probability by about half, when you can't distance.
June 1: Coffee Closer?
Those who wanted some other news than the pandemic, should have been careful what they wished for. Aside from hoping older people stay home, and younger people distance themselves from their elders for the next few weeks, there seems little to be done. Pandemics aren't the only things that just have to burn themselves out.
March 20 May 4 
This is hardly scientific, but I do get a feeling that the whole business of "re-opening" in the news, and various businesses re-starting, is also giving people a feeling that the problem is over and they can go back to acting "normally".
May 18 May 30 
May 31: Follow Canadian News
Well, what a great time for a wave of protests. The media note there have already been a few dead; but they can only wonder how many lives will be lost, a few weeks from now, from all the close contact. Probably parents and grandparents of participants. Perhaps some participants will stay very distant from their families for a few weeks, if they think their elder's lives matter. One can only hope.
May 30: The Exquisite Boredom of a Canadian Contact Tester
The news from the States makes me want to retreat into considerations of pure epidemiological mathematics. In Canada. Or at least, simple arithmetic. In Canada. Let's review just how few tests Canada is doing, still:
(1,596,373 - 1,401,564) / 7 = 27,829 tests/day
May 29: Testing Plan Watch: Something at last. Also, flour
I just did the Safeway trip for the week, to find the store very quiet, no lineup; people have presumably adjusted to making fewer trips, or picking more odd hours. I couldn't find an aisle with empty shelves; all those "pandemic groceries" like pasta, are in full supply. Even the last thing to be filled in, the shelves of flour, are full...and they've added in these huge 20-kg bags to handle all the "pandemic baking".
May 28: How Can They Look Away? Practice, Practice, Practice...
It reads as naive to me, when stories wonder how somebody in authority can not notice, or deliberately ignore, ongoing death counts. Heck, most powers-that-be systematically ignore more deaths than they address. When a novel new way to die appears, Power's first instinct is to ignore it as best as possible, since addressing it costs more than getting us to turn our eyes away.
Of course, it's a right-wing politician. Lefties often go along with this stuff- they can't prioritize every single issue (even deadly ones) when they get into power, either. But it usually starts on the right. The easiest way to minimize government, is to minimize its problems.
May 27: Belated Headlines
Well, finally. So they did have "100k" stories planned, they just don't use Worldometers.info after all; they use some more conservative report summaries that took another day or so to be sure. Commendable!
The NYT story has an odd construction in it, that it's more deaths than every conflict "since the Korean War" - it's actually just a few thousand short of including the whole Korean War, as my "102,636" below indicates. But no matter; it's all, obviously, a story about nothing but an otherwise-meaningless round number statistic. Which is many percent short of accuracy, as the "excess deaths" numbers strongly hint.
May 27: New News
This is the "news" for spring 2020: the news is that nobody died of COVID-19 in BC yesterday. It's the first such day in a long time, so now the lack of dying is news.
May 25-May 26: Worldometer Watch
I'm just testing my theory that journalists are generally watching "worldometers.info" for their cue to start doing stories about "100,000 dead". Now, they've been doing stories that have some other topic, like "golfing as the US approaches 100,000 dead", for some days now. But the slightly-comical business of all the Vietnam-themed headlines hitting the wires in minutes of each other, has me wondering if it'll happen again today. So, I will hit REFRESH on both worldometers, and the google news search on "100,000 dead" this afternoon.
This is weird; only 454 deaths reported by now; the reports from the USA dropped all weekend, from 1300 to 1000 to 617 yesterday, easily attributed to paperwork staff not working the long weekend. Today, their Memorial Day, even more must be off work than on Sunday? It's not the nature of this statistic to suddenly drop by half. (Ask Italy.) Tomorrow and Wednesday should produce a "spike" in reports, delayed.
15:37 PM PDT: Worldometers.info: 99,771. News: unchanged.
Maybe not today! There are so few deaths being reported that it won't get to 100,000, at this rate, today - and I'd thought it would be late yesterday. I dare not hope the deaths are actually dropping that much in one weekend; it's more likely late reporting. Which will make for a spike tomorrow morning that'll carry it over 100,000 in time for the morning news. It's already too late today to catch the 6PM news out east.
Reporting Stops Overnight
08:58 AM PDT: Worldometers.info 99,930. News: unchanged.
Good grief, it seems I can start again this morning. Worldometers has started up again, and it didn't immediately take it past the round number, so the newsies can again start the watch during publication hours. All of the stories run the "As US approaches" phrase, probably using up the story they had pre-written for the occasion. The contrast with the golfing and so forth is the usual hook.
The google search "twitched" a bit - a few new stories. But none saying the number had been passed. At the very least, there is no source of US statistics that journalists use, that is "ahead" of worldometers in the reports. And with the number about to come up, I confess this is a dumb way to pass time. It's just curiousity about how journalists work; this is nothing to do with the actual pandemic. Everybody knows we hit 100,000 days, even weeks ago, but can't confirm the count officially.
OK, worldometers changed. If it's like Vietnam, the google search should start changing in the next half hour or so. I'd be glad to be proven wrong, of course, but pre-written journalism is definitely a Thing.
I'm pleased to find my assumption was wrong. Perhaps even the Vietnam publication times were a coincidence, that the number was hit when they were going to publish anyway. Or, perhaps, they just "used up" all those stories by putting "approaches" in the lede and headline and got off for Memorial Day. It's nice to have your worst assumptions about lazy journalism debunked.
May 25: Where's My Test?
It hit me a few days ago, when I got a haircut: your own "end of lockdown" is whenever you can do the thing YOU want. If you're upset you can't do "X", then getting "X" is your end. Some of us have little interest in hitting a bar or restaurant, but want their symphony nights back. My need for a haircut was getting serious when the barbershop re-opened, had buzzed me in 15 minutes, and my lockdown was over. Lining up at the grocery isn't annoying enough to qualify: let's face it, retirees are lightly touched by a lockdown.
This is another check-in with the "canada testing plan" google. Today finds that Ontario, perhaps galvanized by rising case count as they re-open, has put out an aggressive one, including rules that would let just about anybody willing to claim "they've been exposed" to get one.
But an actual test, some days into that, would be a comfort. It would also be testing somebody with odds of 0.1% or less being positive, exactly what they didn't want to waste tests upon. It would be physical medical resources spent on mental health, on anxiety. The state would probably have to do a couple of hundred thousand of them to save a single life. The value is in providing people with the courage to do their personal definition of "re-open": see Mom. It would expend millions of test-kits if my concern is as widespread as I suspect. But, it's a valid national value, although the epidemiologists will have to grit their teeth at the "waste" the psychologists approve of. Waste? We have a rich civilization. It spent $500M on fidget spinners in 2017.
May 24: Why The Right Loves These Miracle Cures
Sigh. We thought we'd disposed of chloroquine.
Study after
study showed it offers little help to compensate for side effects. Including death. As for offering prophylaxis, where taking it prevents getting sick to start with, a lupus patient that's been taking it for years just went positive. So much for that.
It all doesn't sit right. Conspiracy theories can catch on with the left, as well; the Kennedy Assassination went on for decades. Michael Moore's new movie may have commmitted some major sins, but it was dead right about one basic fact. Many on the environmental left have accepted various miracle cure ideas for the environment; "cures" that don't remotely meet the test of cost-benefit ratios that would allow them to power a civilization. (Not for debate in a COVID-19 blog; read your Vaclav Smil.)
The hope that there's a hard-to-get miracle cure that will save them speaks directly to the poisonous social Darwinism that guides modern conservatism. It reflects deep hostility to the very concept of a shared public good and a fierce attachment to a racialized ideology of individualism that treats public goods such as health care as things to be hoarded by those with the privilege, money and status to do so.
That totally rings a bell with all the most unpleasant conversations I've had with right-wing viewpoints over the years. I wrote in my "Christian Virus" post, below, about all standing equal before the "judgement" of COVID-19. The phrase chosen, because I've never thought the extreme end of the right-wing was fond of us all standing equal before God's judgement, either - they often lean to churches that promise special treatment in that regard for their members alone.
May 23: The Automatic News Cycle
More of a followup to yesterday's, I could have included this in the same topic.We've become used to "news" having a "news cycle", which is relentlessly gamed by everybody seeking our attention. Half of our news is staged events, in one way or another: timed announcements, opening ceremonies, demonstrations. Even the Iraq War was timed for the news cycle, the White House advertising campaign to sell it with lies delayed to September because "You don't introduce new products in August".
Watching Ferguson's Presentation:
Surprise!
To a degree, it's all "fake news", however truthful: the presentation has been staged for maximum effect. News items that have no thoughtful presenters remain almost unknown. For instance: the factoid that "Wage Theft is Bigger Than All Other Theft" (like bank robberies, store and gas stations, etc, all combined). News to most people.
May 22: 102,636
I might as well get this bet laid down today, while my worldometer is still at 96,683 confirmed dead. (worldometers.info is the offical "scorekeeper" for this blog. Other sources will be ignored to preserve my sanity.)
In the spirit of Wanna Bet, I will bet, not on the pandemic but on the journalism. I bet I am not the only person to note the number 102,636. There's another place that reporters go for quick, reasonably impartial factoids, the Wikipedia. I went there to United States Military Casualties of War. (That's a count with a long history of disputes, as the survivors fight to ensure their lost are included. So, below, I note "58,320" as the count on the Vietnam Wall. That wikipedia page actually lists 58,209. But waving aside a quarter of a percent disputed, I'll go with wikipedia.)
Whatever the alternate source reporters use, it'll be within a few hundred, and occur next Tuesday, most likely. So I'm betting on a story or two with headlines or opening paragraphs like 'The US has now lost more citizens to the pandemic than to all the wars since World War Two.'
May 21: Name Change: Covid Cup Colour Commentary
I never liked the pun "Covid Up", which depends on pronouncing it with a soft "O"...which nobody does. Also, it was gross. Since I started this by getting mesmerized by the Worldometers web site, and since that worthy has now ascended to global fame , allowing everybody to follow along on my original "Covid Cup" essay's proposal to judge nations by their deaths-per-capita, I have decided to push the grim sports metaphor to the limit and call this "Colour Commentary", as the sportscasters say. And the name is "CCCC" for short.
May 21: Testing Plan Update #1
I've given the "canada test plan" google a week off from mention here. It's really time to check in, because I saw the barbershop open yesterday. One barber had a mask, the other not, as if this were a fashion choice. (It crossed my mind that I should get a cut immediately, before he became positive. I'll go back today and see if somebody tuned him up about the mask.)
But Saskatchewan, who hardly had any cases to start with, has a plan! Which takes care of less than 10% of the country. I can only report the google search did not come up with stories from Alberta, Manitoba, the Maritimes.
Which brings us to Ontario. Google can bring up dozens of stories, of course, but the summarization here was about all the reading I could stand. Their case loads actually just went up. They aren't near the testing they want. And Doug Ford, who of course cannot do COVID-19 tests, is reduced to beating his breast and screaming at the people who can, and aren't.
He's going to need a lot of cheering up later, I suspect. He's not going to be able to blame the health care people for this.
May 20: No Soap
As we consider our many grave problems, take a moment to reflect on how others have it. I was purusing 
this Guardian article about the plague in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their system is so poor, they probably don't know how many cases they have, really - there are only 50 confirmed deaths, all in the capital, Kinshasa. Interviewing a local volunteer whose husband had just died of it (no ventilator), this set me back:
When we had discussed coronavirus, she said the disease is caused by not washing your hands with soap and water. She wasn't surprised that she and her husband contracted it, as they have no clean water in the house and used charcoal ash instead of soap, which she could not afford.
At the start, prisoners in America were simply told they could get soap at marked-up prices in the commissary; no free soap. Then, the infamous worst of the lot, Riker's, handed everybody a free bar of soap! But more were apparently not forthcoming. Soap is again scarce at Riker's. Why? Too much money?
May 19: Little Will Change Permanently, Unless It Was Already
I'm getting a little tired of all these articles about what will change permanently. Most of them strike me as wishful thinking. I already covered that my own wishful thinking - I'd be one of those fuzzy do-gooders that wishes we had a society more equal and kind - shows no signs of happening, in my April 29 post, "Inertia". Sorry, fellow commies, but Jagmeet Singh is not burning up the polls, and "Inertia" noted that the first weeks of pandemic did not save the campaign of Bernie Sanders, nor has subsequent economic catastrophe triggered calls to revive it.
The pandemic will hustle the change along, but every teleworker I know (and I did months of it, the year before retirement) finds it more difficult than having personal access to co-workers. A lot of people will gladly flock back to the office. Above all, you can bump into the boss at the office and get some facetime. You cannot "bump into" him online. That alone is enough.
Some of the "spiritual" changes noted in the Politico article I just linked strike me as low comedy, however. "Less polarization"? "A Return to Faith in Experts"? "Less Individualism"? Oh, man, the author must be so young. When oldsters were that young, we thought that Baby Boomers were a whole new species of humanity, raised in the shadow of the Bomb, all educated to high school and many past that for the first time...our generation was going to eliminate war. And all injustice. Now, we're the demographic heart of the Tea Party, who sent our kids off to Iraq by the million.
May 18: Science That's Politically Incorrect
I haven't brooked the term "political correctness" since I read the masterful take-down of the very concept by Moria Weigel at The Guardian. Wiegel gives the whole history of where the term came from, and how well-funded lecturers and writers have been promoting the concept since about 1990. They usually give examples from the Ivy League universities they themselves come from, of comically tortured word-usage that never caught on. They carefully never point out that most of "PC" has been to make casual racist insults, like the "N-word", into obscenities that are treated like "F-word", when people used to say them all the time.
The anti-PC dare not complain, however, that it's cultural. They can't say "I'd say Black people are lazy, but that's culturally offensive these days"; that's an admission of guilt, as "culturally offensive" means most (decent) people agree on it. But ending with "...but that's politically incorrect these days", is an accusation that everybody knows it's really true, they're just forcing you to repeat the lie that it isn't. Weigel notes that it's a wonderfully compact insult, claiming two lies with just two words. The second implicit claim, that a political, not cultural, agenda is being prosecuted, is usually unsupported; there's no regulation, public spending, or law, at issue.
May 17: The Decision To Use Politics
I brought up the notion of betting on pandemic outcomes yesterday to introduce a little-known science fiction author. Marc Stiegler kept a career going in IT as he wrote several SF books over the last four decades, promoting a very libertarian point of view in most of them. One of his libertarian ideas from his 1999 book, "Earthweb", concerned using what we'd now call "crowdsourced opinions" in the form of bets. His "castpoints" were web sites where political solutions would be bet upon, and authorities used the bets to decide policy.
Stiegler's most-radical idea, for me, however, was in his earlier book, "David's Sling" which imagined a war with Russia (caused, of course, by weak liberals not showing enough military resolution...yes, just low comedy today). Stiegler solved this with the ultimate "smart weapons", which look a lot like our modern drones. His were the ultimate "smart weapons", not needing outside direction, pure automatons that decide whom to bomb by algorithm. As we found out, even human-directed drones with careful rules of engagement kill innocents nearly half the time; so, another bad prediction.
Democracy has meaning only when the army can't take over any time, as in Egypt recently. With warriors in the thrones, we were left hoping for "good kings", like Don Corleone, who ended the mob war, but often got "bad kings", like Sonny, who tried solving everything with another hit. Democracies, where the generals obey the civilian masters invariably, are far more stable, and ultimately, prosperous.
We need a better set of "norms", that's all. We need every politician to be humble about his expertise on every science, to gladly turn to advisory bodies that serve many politicians across their careers, bodies chosen for their own humility as well as expertise. Many countries have this. Most of the provinces of Canada included...once the pandemic started. Before it started, scientific examinations of care-homes (a topic I'll be back to) recommended their improvement over and over and over, for decades, and were ignored. Our "norms" on respect for science are still not high enough. Just ask any climatologist! If they were in charge, we'd have done a lot more about carbon long ago.
May 16: Wanna Bet?
There seems to be one every day, but today's is the "question" of whether a vaccine will take several months, or at least a year.
Only an idiot would believe in an amateur over an expert, the way only an idiot would bet on an amateur sportsman, over a professional. Betting on the politicians here is like betting on the star of your office pick-up basketball team to dunk on LeBron James.
May 15: Testing So Bad, Hail Marys are Being Suggested
It's usually in movie scripts that some brilliant but unconventional science is pulled out, late in the third act, to save the day - only when all conventional approaches have failed.
May 14: Raw Data Humbly Submitted: Where the Heck Are the Tests?
I tried punching "canada testing plan" into Google this morning, and the top link was the same one as it has been for three solid weeks: "Canada could soon conduct 60,000 COVID-19 tests per day" in the National Post for April 23rd.
May 13: An Experiment With a C-SPAN Transcript
I admit I didn't watch live, but when I heard that this was an interesting exchange, I watched on YouTube. My internal monologue didn't have as many words, but these are the ideas that crossed my mind while watching.
YouTube Time Stamp Senator Rand Paul My Internal Monologue, Watching 00:23 Between 18 and 45, the mortality in New York was,
The mortality in the United States on 9/11 was just ONE per 100,000.
Eighty of them were police. Speaking of whom, the NYPD now has 37 cops dead. 00:26 uh, 10 out of 100,000. 00:28 So, really, we do need to be thinking about that. 00:29 We need to, uh, 00:32 observe with an open mind what went on in Sweden 00:33 where the kids kept going to school. 00:36 The mortality per capita in Sweden
To be specific, the mortality per capita in Sweden is 343 per million, so far; while lower than all those other countries, it's higher than in the United States, at 254 per million (but rising at 4 per day).
00:38 is actually less than France, less than Italy, 00:40 less than Spain, less than Belgium, 00:43 less than the Netherlands, about the same as Switzerland. 00:45 But basically I don't think there's anybody arguing 00:49 that what happened in Sweden is an unacceptable result. 00:50 I think people are intrigued by it, and we should be.
01:40 And the power needs to be dispersed 01:43 because people make wrong predictions. 01:45 And, really, the history of this, when we look back,
There's a problem with crapping on scientists for their inability to make correct predictions, from insufficient information, on-the-fly. You're not really hurting them; you're admitting it's a hard problem even for them.
01:47 will be of wrong prediction 01:48 after wrong prediction after wrong prediction, 01:51 starting with, uh, Ferguson in England. 01:54 So I think we oughta have a -- a little bit of humility in -- 01:57 in our, um, belief that we know what's best for the economy. 01:59 And as much as I respect you, Doctor Fauci, 02:01 I don't think you're the end-all,
May 12: "Bringing China To Heel"
I wondered if that was too sharp a headline, implying I still have the 19th-century mentality towards China shown in the cartoon at left. But, a quick google found it had already been used, by delusional Canadian conservative Diane Francis in the Financial Post a week back. The delusion being that Canada, with the market power of 38 million consumers, nearly a half-percent of the world, can "stand up to China", if only it had a conservative Prime Minister. Like Stephen Harper, here being crapped on by Diane Francis for submissiveness to China in 2014. Maybe not.
This dynamic assumes that our "economy" is a Red Queen's Race from Alice in Wonderland, that our businesses must always be running at top speed to just stay in place. Lose income for a few months, default on your debts, a business goes under, a rich man somewhere is ruined. It's the same assumption that has the same businessmen screaming "the economy", now, despite lives at stake.
May 11: On the Upside - "The Economy" Has Survived Much Worse
25% unemployment means that three-quarters of the population is still at work. World War Two promptly dropped the US Depression level of unemployment - some 25%, with over 11 million out of work - down to 10% (5.3 million). But if you regard "in the war" as "unemployed" from the point of view of producing anything useful to consumers, the war itself was as bad as the Depression: 11.6 million in the US forces by 1944, producing zero food, clothing, shelter or manufactured goods.
Happy Mother's Day
I don't actually have a COVID-19 hook for this topic, except, obviously, mothers are very, very cautious about risking the precious lives they've brought into the world, so perhaps we need their opinions on pandemic risks.
May 9: America Disgraced: But, Hey, They Don't Care
I cracked up laughing, I'm afraid, in the middle of an anguished article by Timothy Egan in the NY Times this morning: "The World is Taking Pity on Us: Will American prestige ever recover?". It hit me that the question was absurd: his audience doesn't care. American liberals might pretend to care about "world opinion", but only for making a rhetorical point against their domestic political opponent; but, the point made, they'd go back to their utter lack of interest.
May 8: OK, "noose" was a joke, but where's BoJo's Resignation?
At the time I lionized Neil Ferguson on April 30th (and compared him to Boris Johnson, with astonishment that Englishmen don't want him hanged), I had no idea that Ferguson was suffering character assassination from the tabloids. For extra icky-ness, they had to harm the woman Ferguson was seeing.
May 7: The Dead Speak. Well, They Get One Word in Edgewise
The mortality rates across different parts of society have an inverse relationship to how much they are listened to, how often their voices are heard in our public sphere.
The awfulness of work in packing plants has been shown but not well-known, for a long time. Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, both the book and the movie, showed how dangerous and stressed a job it is; how only immigrants will work there. We mostly shrugged and turned the page. More recent articles have been about how rough it is to be a warehouse worker.
May 6: Nothing Succeeds Like Excess
The best thing I've read about "re-opening" showed up the other day in the Washington Post: The metric that could tell us when it's safe to reemerge, by medical school instructors Jeremy Samuel Faust, and Carlos del Rio.
I'd wondered about what the exact criteria would be for knowing the right time to risk more human contacts, but had no idea what to write about it; I didn't know, either. It's so complex. The good doctors here touch my engineer's soul by making it simple: just measure "excess deaths".
May 5: Happy Cinco de Mayo! Enjoy the Food.
There's a nice little love letter from Mexico's Ambassador to Canada at ipolitics.ca from the other day. The note celebrates that the need to close borders exempted Canada's temporary foreign worker system, albeit with various protections from transmission. It contrasts well, obviously, with nations whose metaphorical heads are exploding with the dilemma of wanting to hate immigrants, but also being dependent on them.
May 4: May The Fourth...Bring Wish Fulfillment. But not likely.
It's become impossible to type "May the Fourth" without mentally finishing "...be with you", and whether it seems arrogant, or not, for Disney to declare this "Star Wars Day" to enrich their corporate property, the pun is too compelling to resist. Star Wars Day, it is. (The actual franchise may have run its course, actually, which is fine with me; make some room for new, innovative SF.)
Not a little of our enjoyment of SF is wish-fulfillment: SF heroes generally enjoy Nice Things like magical medical devices that emit some kind of "healing ray" out of 1930s pulps: the audience gets to watch wounds simply vanish, the injury basically shown in reverse-motion video, healing up into unblemished skin before our eyes.
May 3: If We're So Rich, Why Ain't We Smart?
I can't say enough about the fine data visualization tools at the "ourworldindata.org" web site, click on the graph below to jump there. Note that this is "per million", so compares small and large nations fairly, and is a LOG scale, so that it is showing the USA doing twice as bad as Canada, and Spain ten times worse..but also Greece doing ten times better, and South Africa ten times better again than Greece.
Some of the best responses to the pandemic have been from countries that are startlingly poor. Portugal and especially Greece, the sickest sick men of Europe since the financial crisis, have exemplary results compared to Italy, Spain, UK, France, Belgium and Switzerland. Heck, Greece is way better than wealthiest European, Germany, run by a scientist. They cancelled everything before even one death had been recorded.
Countries had little choice but to act early. Nigeria was already screening airport passengers in February. Rwanda closed its frontiers on March 19. South Africa locked down before it had suffered a single death. In the absence of money, ingenuity rushed in: solar-powered oxygen units in Uganda, rapid tests in Senegal, mask-making textile factories in Kenya.
I'll elaborate on something from April 15: we in rich countries feel invulnerable to most of life's ills, and nobody feels more invulnerable than Americans. The lockdown protesters still don't believe it can really happen to them. Invulnerability lets you get away with being stupid, like being so militarily powerful you don't fear land war in Asia. They came up against hard lessons there, twice, and will get more now.
May 2: The Lives Being Saved by the Pandemic
The thing about living is, it kills you. People voluntarily take crazy risks all the time, just for a thrill. But far more, people take risks to earn a living, or to get to that job on time. We lose thousands of people per year to motor accidents, many caused by hurry.
That's 27,000 right there, for the USA at least, with its higher rates of crime, injuries, and every other bad thing, versus Canada. I'm sure a little thought about all the ways that being out in the world can get you killed would let me round up to 30,000. Time for the big conclusion with the italics and boldface:
May 1: The Value of my Face Mask
Just back from the store, where I wore a "mask" inside, or, rather, a thin silk scarf folded over a few times. It's worthless as as mask, technically. I'm sure aerosols and indeed droplets could saunter right through it, either direction.
April 30: Where is Neil Ferguson's Knighthood? (And BoJo's Noose?)
This is mostly a "best example" for my previous post about society having too much inertia to change dramatically, even from a pandemic. One would think that Boris Johnson of the UK would currently be hanging from a lamppost; and Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College would be taking a minute from his workaholic schedule to preen over his knighthood. One man nearly got half a million Britons killed; the other saved them.
Britain does not have a meaningful regional level of government, like American states and our provinces; their pandemic response is entirely national. America was stumbling into a disaster at their federal level, but the states would have asserted lockdowns and testing, as they have mostly had to anyway, even if their feds had not seen Ferguson's model. (It was also was applied to America. It was Ferguson's team that predicted that famous 2.2 million deaths possible, not Americans; but the presentation turned the Americans around the same night. Surely "The PowerPoint that saved 2.5 million" will be coming to Netflix documentaries next year.)
April 29: Inertia
If you've wanted to see change for a long time and are impatient for it, crises seem like this big opportunity for change (Scientific American). Some of my own writing below, about visible statistics, exceptional inequality, and Christianity, all reflect a hope that the societal failures spotlighted by death will be remedied.
April 28: Man, Totally Called That One
After my "Vietnam Headline" prediction, for today, the US death rate, at least as quoted by "worldometers.info" promptly dropped from nearly 2000/day down to about 1200; this was a statistically surprising drop, leaving me shaking my head that I should ever try to predict a pandemic even a few days ahead. I could hardly "cheer on" American patients to get back to dying just so that I could make an accurate prediction, obviously.
April 27: Foxnewspeak
In "1984", George Orwell invented "newspeak", the intentionally-limited language ("doubleplusgood" instead of "excellent") that was supposed to lose words every year, constricting possible topics ever more tightly.
Well, several new words have been "vapourized", as Orwell would say, today, including:
The term "briefing" appears only the once, as part of their standard template, where one web page section is called "The Daily Briefing". The word "briefing" does not appear on any copy. Those White House Briefings that had better ratings than Monday Night Football... have been vapourized.
April 27: The Obvious Next Tesla Ad
Even with my nonexistent skills and only the most basic image editor, this didn't take five minutes:
Seriously, if we, who live in relatively clean-air cities, find these images a devastating sell for electric vehicles, how is it playing in cities where the air is actually that bad? How long before these cities start pushing for laws to charge you $100 per month to run an internal-combustion engine, versus nothing for an EV? The case for it couldn't be stronger: the internal-combustion engines are as obviously making the city dirty as somebody who throws their trash out the window.
April 26: R>G - How Convenient. Thanks for Saving That Up. We'll Just Take It, Now. Thanks.
'r>g' was the terse final statement from a huge study by Thomas Piketty a few years back, "Capital in the 21st Century" that the overall returns from major investments (r) was greater than the overall growth of the economy (g). In this age where nearly everybody finally gets exponential functions, it should mean something devastating. Since both r and g are growth exponents, so is "r-g", the exponentially-increasing rate at which stored piles of money come to take over the economy, until the money-piles pretty much own everything. Including the politicians.
April 25: Everybody Takes A Hit But The Banks?
I'm just writing my provincial and federal representatives to ask about whether they will save 70,000 animals at the Vancouver Aquarium, which, despite laying off all staff but the ones keeping them alive, and $600K in recent donations, is weeks away from destitution. In part, the aquarium just put all memberships into a "time machine", where your renewal date is extended by a day for every day they remain closed.
April 24: Coming Tuesday: The Vietnam War Headline
I knew this headline was coming last night, with the April 23 total coming in well over 49,000. The death rate, for a few days at a time, is predictable enough that I can write the next one, due Monday, or Tuesday: "U.S. Death Toll Surpasses Vietnam War". There are 58,320 names on The Vietnam Memorial Wall. At over 2000 per day, the US will have 52,000 tonight, over 56,000 Sunday night, and "hit the wall" (number) late Monday or early Tuesday.
April 24: Pandemic == Year Zero?
I somewhat enjoyed a web-broadcast talk between Linda Wood of the National Observer and Noam Chomsky yesterday. Dr. Chomsky was in his usual form, quietly pointing out that bailout money was going to airlines that recently profited by exactly the same amount, and handed it all to their stock owners in buybacks; meanwhile, little guys with little power were being tossed into destitution. Yes, the world is a fallen place, only somewhat improved from the days when Game of Thrones was a documentary, and it needs a lot of major changes to be fair and fully productive. But now?
The old 1930's strategy of infrastructure building during depression, this time with green energy infrastructure, is certainly time-tested! Imagine how enthused a civil engineer is over the prospect of finally fixing all the damn roads and broken pipes, getting that smart supergrid, and pouring a new terawatt or six of green power into it.
April 23: The Relevant Statistics
A question from a reader the other day set me aback; mostly because, wait, I have readers? Plural? But also, because he asked about whether it was not more relevant to track hospitalizations and ICU crowding levels, rather than merely "cases" that can mean very little...since so many cases have few symptoms. ("Case counts" in Italy, with its old population, means something more dire than in India, where most cases hit people under 35, see below.)
April 22: Chloroquine? What's That?
Day two of being able to go to the Fox News web site, hit "CTRL-F" on my browser to search the text on the page, type "chloroquine", and get "zero results". Following a study in Brazil that was terminated when 11 patients died, and then a French study finding more deaths and no benefit, the word simply vanished from their front page. A search on it found a mention in one story the other day, and the basic story from the day before that about the lack of benefits, then silence.
(a) came from a position of high authority,
(b) fit a much-desired narrative of having power over a problem, and
(c) seized upon slender evidence while ignoring red flags.
April 21: Public and Private Servants
What's the difference between Amazon and a Post Office? The Post Office is there for you. They serve the public trust, have no other agenda. Amazon exists to produce returns on its stock, full stop.
April 20: T.I.C. (This is Canada. We're better. (Much))
As Canada scratches its collective head over the baffling mass-murder yesterday, which wiped other news from the page, a topic-focused blog can do what we do, duly note news that others missed about covid. Vancouver had one of those protests about lockdown. It was very reassuring. Out of 2.5 million people in the lower mainland, about 25 showed up, one Canadian in 100,000 ... and were courteously escorted by police.
April 19: T.I.A. (This Is America)
The pandemic has had me recently breaking an effort to improve my mental health, the way it's been making people over-bake and over-eat carbs. I've been following American news a lot. The awful exponential mathematics, applied to their large population and sped along by incompetent response, are piling up eye-popping death rates.
April 18: A Confession of Trolling
I claim I blog to halt my terrible habit of newspaper comments. The old "write a big essay" blogging on the brander.ca main page did not do that, but this write-something-short-every-day approach is working. Mostly.
Postscript: Failure and "Success"
The C19-related post was an utter trolling failure. I over-did my argument, I guess, no right-wing nutbars took the bait; I ended up with a few more thumbs-up.
April 17: Canada Place, Five Blocks West, Same Day
A contrast to yesterday's pictures of the Downtown East Side. Just blocks away, where "those people" would probably be hassled by police if they bothered anybody for spare change, the place is properly deserted, when it is normally a throng of tourists and restaurant customers.
April 16: A Careful Walk Through Vancouver's Downtown East Side
The Downtown East Side, the DTES, home of Canada's best "poverty porn", where journalists can easily snap photos of human sorrow and pain. I passed through it the other day, hoping the Army/Navy store was still open where I could pick up a few things (nope). Crazily, I checked whether the door in the alley was still open..which involved going down an alley where in the space of 45 seconds I passed one guy sleeping in an alley, another relieving himself on the dumpster across from it, and a third guy behind the next dumpster, just pushing the plunger home on the hypo in his arm. This is pretty normal for half a dozen alleys in the DTES.
And then these last shots are just Hastings street in those longitudes, busy with foot traffic.
April 15: Could We Get Used To This?
A week ago, in a post about "visible statistics" I passed on my brother's credit to Dr. Peter M. Sandman for the observation that if statistics like "smoking killing 300,000 per year in the US" were made visible by happening all in one day in one city, they'd be intolerable. Bruce took a course based on Sandman's work. He offered a corallary that set me back for a few days, but I've got to accept it: these visible statistics become invisible again, become an accepted part of life, if they stop being novel. If another plague came every year and killed a few hundred thousand people, we'd eventually shrug that life has risks and try to get on with it.
April 14: "Never in living memory?" Ahem.
Admittedly, not in my memory, at age 61; true enough, nobody under 65 does remember. My older brothers do, though the younger, just barely. He was four going on five during the terrible polio summer of 1956. The same closed theatres and swimming pools. The terror for parents was great: unlike COVID-19, which barely touches children, polio actually preferred them. It was also called "infantile paralysis"; not that older people (like President FDR, decades earlier) were spared.
April 13: Playful Distancing
I'm on my run, and burst out of Stanley Park to the English Bay beach, the bike and pedestrian pathways so much in the news lately when patient photographers capture moments when people are too close together (which they mostly are not).
April 12: New Hand-washing Song
Na na na, nah,
It actually runs a little long, but nobody will mind. People love singing this song to the Opposition. Mostly, adults don't need this stuff; but I think kids, the bloodthirsty little Fortnight Fans, will love it.
Na na na, naaaah,
Coronavirus
Goodbye.
Your oily coating
Without protection
You will die, Die, DIE!
Na na na, naaaah,
Coronavirus
Goodbye.
April 12: The China Virus Warning
There's this obvious logical flaw in the complaint that the rest of the world was not kept well-informed by China about the new virus problem.
April 11: The Christian Virus
The hurricane blows, brings a hard rain
-Springsteen
When the blue sky breaks
It feels like the world's gonna change
And we'll start caring for each other
Like Jesus said that we might
I'm a jack of all trades, we'll be all right
Good Friday, April 10: America The Exceptional
Before I started putting all my C19 posts in one long file, I did a separate post as The Covid Cup: America Will Finish At Bottom of the Major League.
April 9: Of Course, Everything is NOT Different Now
We heard all this "everything is different now" after 9/11. But the USA doubled down on all the things that caused 9/11, if you ask me. If the USA had conducted itself so that it was now loved and respected across the Middle East, man, that would have been different.
April 8: Visible Statistics
COVID-19 continues to highlight all the things we were already doing wrong. From stressed medical systems, to stressed finances for the huge number that were not ready for a $400 expense. Solid statistics have shown for decades that air pollution costs millions of lives around the globe (sound familiar?), except every year. Coal smoke alone was fingered for 100,000, as much as 24,000 in the USA. The stats were solid because death rates "from asthma", from "heart attack", "from COPD" were significantly higher downwind of coal plants, fingering the smoke as an assistant killer.
April 7: A Little Corrective to Overdoing The Predictions
There's lots of predictive effort going on right now, and I'm guiltier than most. In all my theorizing about India or the USA, it's important to remember that this problem is sufficiently complex to be another dismal science like economics: frustratingly close to predictable sometimes, but more often surprising because of some factor not accounted for. When you want science, go to New Scientist magazine, it's always had neutral, measured takes on politicized questions like climate.
April 6: Demographics is Pandemic Destiny
Continuing with my apparently-ongoing theme of the age-related mortality of COVID-19, it's valuable to understand that this presumably means the demographic profile of a nation will have a huge effect on its sufferings from the pandemic.
. Look at Italy's last month, and then consider India, with 1.3 billion people and the lowest ratio of doctors, almost nobody about to get a ventilator or even oxygen, much greater difficulty "locking down". You'd tend to conclude they are going to lose at least ten million people, probably more.
(California is wealthy because of liberalism AND Texas is doing well because of conservatism? Both are just young.)
April 5: Perhaps Italy Has Already Told Us That It's "Underlying Conditions"
I missed this two weeks ago, when Bloomberg reported that 99% of the dead in Italy had those "underlying conditions", indeed, multiple ones in most cases.
In a California study of the 2009 influenza pandemic, people with obesity were twice as likely to be hospitalized compared with the state population. Among those who were hospitalized, the risk of dying was significantly increased for people with severe obesity.
If this describes you, the shut-in is your perfect time for a diet, not comfort food.
April 4: Why Are The Old At More Risk? The South May Tell
I graphed how case mortality for COVID-19 increases exponentially with age, with soothing numbers for 20-somethings. But WHY does this happen? We're told that the immune system gets weaker with age. However, it is also weak for the first five years of life, and children are barely touched by c19. So, is it mostly that age brings ever more of those "underlying conditions"? Heartening news for an 80-something with good health! (Bad for a 40-something without it.)
In Louisiana, people ages 40 to 59 account for 22 percent of all deaths. The same age range in Georgia accounts for 17 percent of all deaths. By comparison, the same age group accounts for only about 10 percent of all deaths in Colorado, and 6 percent of all deaths in Washington State.
The article takes dead aim at underlying conditions for the young in those states for the explanation. "Due to high rates of conditions like lung disease and heart disease and obesity, the people living in these states are at risk if they get the virus," says the head of the Kaiser Family Foundation. The article concludes that "These differences are not innate to southerners; they are the result of policy. Health disparities tend to track both race and poverty... Georgia, and Louisiana all spend less than $25 per person on public health a year, compared with $84 per person in New York."
April 3: A Modest Suggestion to Explain Spain and Italy
As I write, the agonies of Spain and Italy continue into their second month. France may fare little better. There has been some wonder how they got so bad so fast. I've been traveling to Spain every year or three now for 40 years, and I have a few pictures that may be a partial explanation.
(These link to larger versions of the photo)
(Map from openstreetmap.org. Conversion of dull grey to a mix of safety-orange and "hot zone" red by GIMP software)
April 2: GOP Resists Torture
In his book, My Life in Court, the great lawsuit lawyer Louis Nizer commented on one of the most-wrong things about courtroom dramas. (I'm unable to find his exact words, sorry).
Telepaths Fail to Warn President In 2017
New York, April 2, 2020
A group of New York Psychics admitted failure yesterday, having attempted to send a message back through time.
April 1: Apparently, Blue Lives Don't Matter (to the GOP)
Do you think sacrificing a small number of people - say, those over 70 or with breathing or immunological problems - is a fair trade for rescuing "worthier" people and the economy?
April 1: Your Chance of Dying Grows Exponentially with Age
There was a funny fact about the new mortality figures per decade of age published the other day by the Lancet. The researchers found a sharp age efffect on odds of their case dying from COVID-19.
Age Case Mortality 25 0.03% 35 0.08% 45 0.16% 55 0.60% 65 1.90% 75 4.30% 85 7.80%
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