Things living rent free in my head - I hate this!

You know what I mean. Much like how your hands move to the nearby bowl of potato chips without thinking my brain cycles through unresolvable annoying topics.

This is year 3 of not being able to go on our tropical holiday and this winter has been brutal. A month-long spell of weather so cold that outdoor activities were out of the question. Like many, I am done with this pandemic. We've limited travel to heading out to the coast for family emergencies and running to Edmonton for service appointments then coming right back home. I need to put on my selfish hat (and mask🙄) and get out in the community and do things...except I really don't want to run into convoy supporters and if I do any kind of group activity, that's likely to happen.

And speaking of convoys - what the actual f*ck is their problem. Vaccines were mandated for Federally regulated industries ages ago and trucking got an exemption that expired. Still, they can work across Canada unless the companies they want to access require vaccination. This would be horribly discriminatory if the vaccines weren't widely tested before being provided for free from a bunch of places you don't have to have an appointment to get. Booster, whatever. I really don't like getting sick so I'll take it. Other countries want me to be vaccinated to visit - okay, it's your health system. I could be sympathetic to anti-maskers - it does feel awkward to be the one out of step - but I have yet to hear news reports of insisting people wear masks to the point of assault but I do see videos of non-mask wearers spitting on people and trying to remove masks from people wearing them. From the start  (in the mid 2020s) it's seemed like people being thwarted who are not used to being told no. 

This thing with Trudeau is just irrational. He's a leader in a recently elected minority government.  During a pandemic, as a responsible employer, the Feds are reducing health risks by requiring vaccines - just like a lot of large companies. He got a vaccine supply and distributed it. He's mostly followed the recommendations of PHAC (mostly because wildly changing test requirements is...wild and quarantining was lax) and really left provinces to themselves when doing their pandemic response and vaccination distribution. There's been no Federally mandated lockdowns - all there have been is essential travel recommendations with no questioning of what people decide is essential. No mass testing like Hong Kong no lockdowns like China, just gradual lessening of quarantine and testing on arrival. I know this is mentally difficult - see the third year of not traveling thing - but in spite of hyperbole, this is not forever.

Finally the Emergencies Act. From the start, the CPC and their provincial counterparts wanted to provoke the Feds into doing something that could be used in the next election and I think they wanted it to echo the FLQ crisis and G7 head bashing. But it didn't. After weeks of having their lives further interrupted by the squatters, Ottawans got to see overwhelming numbers of law enforcement move stoically to contain their tormenters. Yep, that's my take. I can't imagine having people from another town set up a block party in my neighbourhood while the police look the other way. The Act has a limited term and any actions will be scrutinized by people hostile to invoking the act.

One reason I'm writing this is to force myself to check into background elements to ensure I'm being fair. I have a CPC MLA. Other than donating to the convoy, which according to its memorandum had the secondary aim of overturning an election, and decrying gun control the last thing she wrote about was to defend fertilizer use by farmers as part of resisting climate change initiatives. I agree that there metrics have to be reasonably set but, we've seen under Conservative-led (CPC, UCP, PC) government, it's a lot of talk and encouragement of making things worse by kicking the can down the road.

Anyway, hopefully just writing it down will get everything out of my system. I think Canada's governmental COVID response was pretty good. Individuals got support, we had pretty decent movement and not huge swaths of deaths although there were some - it's a pandemic after all. I have to admit, I hope the Emergencies Act spawns some better financial laws that prevent money laundering and tax dodging so the Feds can focus on things like affordable housing in major centers and inflation.

COVID - how far we've come!

In 2020 as we were getting ready to cancel our trip I wondered how things would shake out. There's always a range of people and at far ends are the ones who will never comply with public health measures and the ones who never want the health measures lifted. How will our levels of government manage that? 

In many ways, the Feds have it the easiest. Timely vaccine and medication supplies, with backup personnel along with health mandates for Federally jurisdiction workers. The Federal government seemed to think something would be resolved by September 2020 so they could end the CERB program that gave almost anyone to applied $2K/mo to meet expenses along with a program for small businesses for the same purpose. At that time the virus had been identified and sequenced but weird public health things happening. Even though it seemed obvious to anyone who watched the news that this was an airborne thing...choirs, restaurant and cruise ship infection events...doctors seemed pretty intent on emphasizing surfaces. I always thought if a surface was that contaminated, no way would I touch that but mask for something that goes through the air - yep.

After one year - thanks to operation WarpSpeed we had vaccines available. Amazing what having enough money to explore multiple streams, while completing all the required documentation for ethical testing, can do to propel health🤔Even though the companies who brought the earliest vaccines to market didn't use those funds they did benefit with access to things that didn't work and a lot of science developed can be used for other vaccines. Feds did their job by ensuring vaccines supplies for Canadians.

After only two years we have several vaccine options, enough for boosters, 2 medications (also procured and available in Canada) for early stages of infections and the medical profession has established effective treatment protocols. The swiss cheese layers seem to be numerous enough that we need a strategy for lifting COVID restrictions. 

But should we?

Being tired of wearing a mask and showing you're vaccinated is not enough reason to abandon health care workers. Being angry because you can't go places because you don't want a vaccination is, again, not enough. I don't know why the idea of "bending the curve" became so onerous but I suspect it has something to do with politicians promoting vaccination as THE end rather than a tool to ending. Have you thought about what would make you feel safe to resume activities? Is there anything that makes you not want to get COVID?

Vaccines that get us to the point where even if most of us are exposed we are unlikely to get infected - even asymptomatically - is huge. I would look at publically available lagging indicators like hospitalizations. When hospitalization at the point all other hospital treatments are resuming and ICUs are at the 80% full level (80% is arbitrary as I don't know how full they were before) for 2 - 4 weeks. At that point attempts to reduce exposure have been effective enough.

As for getting it? Do not want. We don't talk enough about how long people suffer with symptoms after infection much less long-COVID and we don't know the long-term effects of a virus that damages the vascular system. I would not be surprised if we get a slew of unexpected strokes, aneurysms, and heart attacks from people who recovered from COVID (like Bob Sagat). A lot of people now have COVID as part of their medical history.

I just hope we don't move on without learning lessons. We really need to work on HVAC systems to ensure cleaner air for indoor spaces, whether by increased air exchange, sterilization, filters or a combination...and communicate those changes so everyone can understand what it means. More "pop up" facilities to handle overflow patients and perhaps even a corp of medical adjacent professionals that can keep up their skills monthly or annually and be pulled in for emergencies.

As for the pandemic/endemic thing? With the ability to travel widely, endemic viral disease is not small thing.