What no one seems ready to talk (specially in Government) about is the fact that this pandemic exposed the incredible fragility of our health care system, at least here in Quebec. Every winter we hear reports from hospitals completely overwhelmed by the flu, people on stretchers in hallways because there are no spaces, ICUs full etc. AND the shortage of nurses !!! All of this has been known for at least a decade... and here we are...
Jen, I so hear you. I live in Germany and we just had to trash all our Christmas plans. We haven’t seen our family since the beginning of the pandemic. Two years and 100,000 dead and the government is finally beginning to do what Canada did at the very beginning. Mandates and restrictions, another dark dreary ruined Christmas!
The difference between the spread of Omicron and the start of the pandemic is that we know much more about how COVID spreads and how to mitigate it. It's an aerosol transmission, which takes mitigation into the world of mechanical engineering: provide adequate ventilation, and provide filtration to knock virus particles out of the air, and you've got a substantial degree of mitigation. You're basically trying to reduce the probability that people absorb a sufficient dose of viral particles to become infected. Lockdowns accomplished this by just keeping people separated, but that's blunt approach analogous to amputating a foot because of an infected ingrown toenail. Capacity limits on stores just provide more ventilation per person and reduce the probability that you're exposed to an infected person. Masks work by reducing the amount of virus-laden droplet emitted by infected people, and reducing the amount of droplets or aerosols inhaled by the wearer. Next steps would be to start making changes to buildings where you increase ventilation rates and add filtration to accomplish these things on a bigger scale.
What doesn't help is that many public health authorities can't wrap their heads around the reality of aerosol transmission. They're clinging to outdated and erroneous theories of fomite transmission and large droplet transmission for tuberculosis, and are alarmed when the mitigations they base on a mistaken understanding don't work. They look at what seemed to work (lockdowns) and don't understand why they worked, and don't consider that the negative consequences of those mitigations are unacceptable on a sustained basis. Couple this with a lot of people who dislike wearing masks and dislike any changes to their lifestyle, and you have a perfect storm of stupidity that keeps everybody else from carrying on.
"We're flirting with a serious inflationary cycle, both due to COVID-induced supply chain problems and — possibly — due to the monetary measures we had to introduce to keep everyone fed and functional during the pandemic" - The problem with the monetary supply started long long before the Pandemic. We are looking at the cumulative effect of Q/E and MMT. This is the end result. It's not "transitory". It wasn't caused just by the CERB. It's a bubble that was going to burst and take everybody down, at some point. COVID just lanced the boil.
I'd like to make two points if I may to brighten your day. One, generally a virus will mutate to become more transmissible BUT less harmful, that has been the past history. Two, renown economist Sherry Cooper once commissioned a study on a history of world disasters. The synopsis was that the worst outcome almost never happens. Just saying....
Another scenario to consider....Omicron presents with very mild symptoms (as SA Dr's have stated) and is not a serious health issue and so could be left to spread. People can develop natural immunity which will bring us closer to herd immunity and into an endemic phase. BUT, too many governments, and most of the mainstream media, have a sizeable portion of the population too terrified of Covid to even consider this as a possibility. Fear is a powerful tool.
"A sizeable portion of the population has either tuned out, or worse, no longer trusts authorities enough to listen to warnings of imminent danger. " - This right here. I fall smack dab in the middle of this. Add to that, I am not just tuned out - I simply don't care. I vaccinated, I wear a mask and I am still being forced to wear a mask thanks to the AB gov't and their pandering. I am so over it at this point that I just don't care how many more waves or variants there are.
Get a grip. 90% of the harm from Covid has caused by panicked overreaction, from unnecessary ventilation and the NYC nursing home massacre at the start, through poor country starvation due to lockdowns, to years of life lost by whole populations in the rich world. Panicking even more makes no sense. There is no such thing as perfect safety and never was. So what? You could be killed in a car crash tomorrow. You journalists should work out your absurd anxiety with your therapists, not your readers.
I arrived in Cuba yesterday for a two week vacation and, at the moment, am feeling pretty chill, what with everyone being vaxxed, boosted and masked, and no Americans. But I absolutely think your concerns are real, and I wouldn't be booking a trip for any later.
What if we had a Spanish flu pandemic? Then I think the virus would feel more real and there'd be far less denial and more cooperation. Failing that, there'd be wider, deeper political support for serious crackdowns on anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. Further, if bodies were dropping at that scale, I also think, of necessity, there'd be large tent hospitals for Covid patients who'd essentially be on their own with priority in hospitals going to regular cancer, stroke, heart and transplant patients. Which would also focus minds.
My personal paranoia is solar flares. We're due for one and I can't imagine the chaos if all our systems went down at once.
We’ll said, I also (perhaps too hopefully) expect Omicron not to be as bad as the current FUD has it seeming. But I think, some of that optimism comes from not wanting to think about what it would mean if it is worse than I expect.
Our social fabric is fraying, and no longer just around the edges. We have an official opposition who doubt both climate change and vaccines, calling into question basic evidence based science. and we have crazy people taking it out on health care workers. It’s quite possible that we’re just not up for another round.
While uncertainty always fuels a mix of despair and hope (mostly despair), beyond the initial very raw data from South Africa showing vaccinated individuals developing mild symptoms but not ending in ICU, we have two pills (one from Merck, one from Pfizer) that if taken within 5 days of developing Covid-19 symptoms will also keep people out of the hospital.
If we benchmark successful efforts to manage the pandemic without harsh shut-downs, it seems that what Canada is missing is a nation-wide effort to have rapid tests available at little to no cost. So if you are going to a party or an event, on top of wearing a 3-layered mask when not eating and making sure everyone attended is fully vaccinated (2 or 3 doses now), imagine if we could to a rapid test? If negative, you go, if positive, you self isolate.
Someone should do a deep dive into rapid tests and how it can cut down transmission when combined with the other health measures in place.
What no one seems ready to talk (specially in Government) about is the fact that this pandemic exposed the incredible fragility of our health care system, at least here in Quebec. Every winter we hear reports from hospitals completely overwhelmed by the flu, people on stretchers in hallways because there are no spaces, ICUs full etc. AND the shortage of nurses !!! All of this has been known for at least a decade... and here we are...
Jen, I so hear you. I live in Germany and we just had to trash all our Christmas plans. We haven’t seen our family since the beginning of the pandemic. Two years and 100,000 dead and the government is finally beginning to do what Canada did at the very beginning. Mandates and restrictions, another dark dreary ruined Christmas!
Yes I’m in a mood too.
The difference between the spread of Omicron and the start of the pandemic is that we know much more about how COVID spreads and how to mitigate it. It's an aerosol transmission, which takes mitigation into the world of mechanical engineering: provide adequate ventilation, and provide filtration to knock virus particles out of the air, and you've got a substantial degree of mitigation. You're basically trying to reduce the probability that people absorb a sufficient dose of viral particles to become infected. Lockdowns accomplished this by just keeping people separated, but that's blunt approach analogous to amputating a foot because of an infected ingrown toenail. Capacity limits on stores just provide more ventilation per person and reduce the probability that you're exposed to an infected person. Masks work by reducing the amount of virus-laden droplet emitted by infected people, and reducing the amount of droplets or aerosols inhaled by the wearer. Next steps would be to start making changes to buildings where you increase ventilation rates and add filtration to accomplish these things on a bigger scale.
What doesn't help is that many public health authorities can't wrap their heads around the reality of aerosol transmission. They're clinging to outdated and erroneous theories of fomite transmission and large droplet transmission for tuberculosis, and are alarmed when the mitigations they base on a mistaken understanding don't work. They look at what seemed to work (lockdowns) and don't understand why they worked, and don't consider that the negative consequences of those mitigations are unacceptable on a sustained basis. Couple this with a lot of people who dislike wearing masks and dislike any changes to their lifestyle, and you have a perfect storm of stupidity that keeps everybody else from carrying on.
"We're flirting with a serious inflationary cycle, both due to COVID-induced supply chain problems and — possibly — due to the monetary measures we had to introduce to keep everyone fed and functional during the pandemic" - The problem with the monetary supply started long long before the Pandemic. We are looking at the cumulative effect of Q/E and MMT. This is the end result. It's not "transitory". It wasn't caused just by the CERB. It's a bubble that was going to burst and take everybody down, at some point. COVID just lanced the boil.
I'd like to make two points if I may to brighten your day. One, generally a virus will mutate to become more transmissible BUT less harmful, that has been the past history. Two, renown economist Sherry Cooper once commissioned a study on a history of world disasters. The synopsis was that the worst outcome almost never happens. Just saying....
Another scenario to consider....Omicron presents with very mild symptoms (as SA Dr's have stated) and is not a serious health issue and so could be left to spread. People can develop natural immunity which will bring us closer to herd immunity and into an endemic phase. BUT, too many governments, and most of the mainstream media, have a sizeable portion of the population too terrified of Covid to even consider this as a possibility. Fear is a powerful tool.
"A sizeable portion of the population has either tuned out, or worse, no longer trusts authorities enough to listen to warnings of imminent danger. " - This right here. I fall smack dab in the middle of this. Add to that, I am not just tuned out - I simply don't care. I vaccinated, I wear a mask and I am still being forced to wear a mask thanks to the AB gov't and their pandering. I am so over it at this point that I just don't care how many more waves or variants there are.
Get a grip. 90% of the harm from Covid has caused by panicked overreaction, from unnecessary ventilation and the NYC nursing home massacre at the start, through poor country starvation due to lockdowns, to years of life lost by whole populations in the rich world. Panicking even more makes no sense. There is no such thing as perfect safety and never was. So what? You could be killed in a car crash tomorrow. You journalists should work out your absurd anxiety with your therapists, not your readers.
I arrived in Cuba yesterday for a two week vacation and, at the moment, am feeling pretty chill, what with everyone being vaxxed, boosted and masked, and no Americans. But I absolutely think your concerns are real, and I wouldn't be booking a trip for any later.
What if we had a Spanish flu pandemic? Then I think the virus would feel more real and there'd be far less denial and more cooperation. Failing that, there'd be wider, deeper political support for serious crackdowns on anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. Further, if bodies were dropping at that scale, I also think, of necessity, there'd be large tent hospitals for Covid patients who'd essentially be on their own with priority in hospitals going to regular cancer, stroke, heart and transplant patients. Which would also focus minds.
My personal paranoia is solar flares. We're due for one and I can't imagine the chaos if all our systems went down at once.
We’ll said, I also (perhaps too hopefully) expect Omicron not to be as bad as the current FUD has it seeming. But I think, some of that optimism comes from not wanting to think about what it would mean if it is worse than I expect.
Our social fabric is fraying, and no longer just around the edges. We have an official opposition who doubt both climate change and vaccines, calling into question basic evidence based science. and we have crazy people taking it out on health care workers. It’s quite possible that we’re just not up for another round.
While uncertainty always fuels a mix of despair and hope (mostly despair), beyond the initial very raw data from South Africa showing vaccinated individuals developing mild symptoms but not ending in ICU, we have two pills (one from Merck, one from Pfizer) that if taken within 5 days of developing Covid-19 symptoms will also keep people out of the hospital.
If we benchmark successful efforts to manage the pandemic without harsh shut-downs, it seems that what Canada is missing is a nation-wide effort to have rapid tests available at little to no cost. So if you are going to a party or an event, on top of wearing a 3-layered mask when not eating and making sure everyone attended is fully vaccinated (2 or 3 doses now), imagine if we could to a rapid test? If negative, you go, if positive, you self isolate.
Someone should do a deep dive into rapid tests and how it can cut down transmission when combined with the other health measures in place.