I wrote a blog post recently (The Experiment) about how the UK is planning to fully ‘open up’ just as a new highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus starts to wreak havoc. Boris and co are getting twitchy. They don’t really know what to do at this point. This is understandable. There are forecasts, but the margins of error are wide. Has anything changed since I wrote that post? Yes, but it’s not for the better…
Whether restrictions are removed on June 21st or two weeks later or two months later, it seems a certainty* they will be removed. The final wave, which is clearly already underway, will be allowed to run through the population. The burning questions of today will then be answered. How many hospitalisations? Will the vaccination campaign cause the virus to runs out of puff? How many people will die?
I’ve become reasonably convinced** that the entire population is going to be either vaccinated or infected. One way or the other, the nation as a whole will be immunised. Yes, the vaccines prevent a lot of infection. They prevent perhaps 50% of onward transmission when the lurgy does get into a jabbed person. But this virus is so infectious. At some point, and it’ll be this year, restrictions will be removed and the virus will be given a free run to go through the unprotected proportion of the population.
The antivax community and those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons will likely bear the brunt of it. If sufficient numbers of them are hospitalised, a moral dilemma will arise. Varying degrees of rationing of medical care has happened in every country over the last year, including the UK and US. Younger, fitter Covid patients with a greater chance of survival have taken beds in ICUs whilst elderly, sickly patients have been denied that level of care and subsequently died.
Should doctors continue to work on that basis? Or should priority be given to those who have been/cannot be vaccinated, over those who chose to decline the opportunity? I’m strongly minded to favour the latter policy. People who declined vaccination decided at the time to opt out of the social program and to take their chances.
* It seems a certainty, in a world where nothing is certain.
** And yet, I’m not terribly convinced by anything anymore.
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The Mexile 
We too are beginning to open gradually, we have booked a concert tentatively for January. Originally it was to held mid September but was changed within the last week. We are able to travel within the province however our biggest problem is our southern border with Washington State. Infections are still rife on the other side and they aren’t getting a handle on it.
Fun times, on the other hand over 60% of British Columbia has been vaccinated with the first dose and less than 10% with the second with the hope most of us will be fully vaccinated by September. Trudeau is considering easing border restrictions to travellers who have been fully vaccinated against the virus but that may change of course.
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Canada seems to have fared well in comparison to its southern neighbour. The US has a death rate four or five times higher. Both have fared well compared to the nation directly below them, Mexico. If one goes by the figures AMLOs govt pumps out, then they’ve done ok. But you have to be pretty dim witted to swallow the official line. A bit thick, even. They are burning and burying bodies at twice the rate the US or UK are. Mrs P spoke to her BFF in CDMX recently. There were four covid deaths on her short street alone.
I like to be positive, so I’m calling this third wave, the final wave. The drama should be over for us in the UK shortly. You guys too, if a little further down the line. That’s not going to be the case for large chunks of the rest of the world. The pandemic has a good couple of years to run, and it’s entirely possible that the worst is yet to come for some places.
It’s probably right to let double vaccinated people greater freedoms. For a whole load of valid reasons. I don’t know about Canada, but there’s some pushback in British society against this. And it’s largely down to vaccine jealousy. I’ve read more than one journalist complain about the possibility of old people being ‘freed’ months before the younger generations who were ‘forced’ to lockdown to protect them. Does this sentiment exist over there?
I put forced in quotes, because the lockdown here has been so lax. Yes, I’ve seen the international press labour on about all the rules and regulations. And yet, no one in the UK has ever been obliged to wear a face mask if they really don’t want to. No one has ever really been confined to their homes. We simply don’t have a police service capable of enforcing much of anything anymore. Essentially, the shops and pubs shut down for a few months.
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As you probably know, Canada has provinces much like the US has states, Quebec was the first province hit with the virus mainly as a French speaking majority their children came home from Europe from a spring break a month before the rest of the country. So they didn’t know what hit them in a sense. Most of our deceased initially came from there as it whizzed through retirement homes. Ontario got whacked as well but the outlying areas were less prone to it with very few deaths. The native population were catching it in droves and dying rapidly too!
We in BC being on the We’t coast saw it all unfold like carpet of fleas. Our health officer is an epidemiologist, an ex navy officer and diver to boot! She had seen and worked on the AIDS and Ebola virii so she knew what was coming down the line for us. So she was very quick to shut things down but of course there were “this doesn’t apply to me fools” and they were whacked with mighty fines. There was all sorts of lunacy but most us follow the science and many rose to the occasion fortunately. We have been able to move about but it was wiser just to stay put and ride it out, I retired a while back so it was easy to bide our time although many of our younger neighbours were very careless considering but “you can’t cure stupidity” as they say!
You may or may not have had all those bugs when you were growing up but I remember German measles, regular measles, TB and Polio and the numerous other infestations that people don’t remember these days because we were immunised at school with jabs and sugar cubes. The problem with the naysayers these days is that they haven’t experienced what we did. I remember a very active boy at school coming down with polio and walking with crutches afterwards. We as a family all contracted German measles and were sick as dogs. My parents burned all the bed sheets and our clothing once we recovered. When I came to Canada I was somewhat appalled at the attitude of many parents sending their otherwise healthy children in to mix with pox ridden kids to catch and possibly get immunity, small pox is quite horrifying. Some members of my extended family are of the misguided opinion, in my experience, of not getting vaccinations at all for their children however to attend school they must have proof of having them, they won’t take their word for it. Children are the bug carriers of the world and come back to school every September with lice, colds and flu followed by chicken pox.
So where were we? Yes, we are plagued with the inexperienced and uneducated, mindless and unobservant pedestrian and tedious members of society who do not think for themselves at all! They are the most likely to be the spreaders to the remaining outposts and wipe out the many unsuspecting recipients in the months ahead.
I read a while back that when George Vancouver and other seafarers came to map out this part of the world they came across whole villages of dead and skeletal remains having caught smallpox and it ran rapidly around the coast, that was May 1792. Smallpox arrived a mere ten years prior all it took was one sick person to wipe out a whole settlement and all it took was four nights.
Terrifying isn’t it?
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