There are a lot of shifting pieces on the COVID board, has been since we’ve been a little more educated and seen the impacts of COVID - around 19 Months.
19 Months of:
Media and Medical Fear Porn;
Goalpost Shifting;
Ambiguity;
None of this makes sense to anybody and nobody can effectively explain the ‘Why’s’ behind it. We’ve locked up children and locked down seniors. We’ve restricted our own rights and freedoms, sacrificed careers, businesses, savings, families and home based dwellings lead by some of the most incompetent people on the planet.
Agree or not, right now, we assume that a piece of paper or an QR based app on your phone is going to save us from a respiratory virus.
As in, masks, lockdowns, vaccines, social distancing, limiting consumer retail capacity, shuttering holidays…fuck it, we’ve already covered it and you’ve been here with me for the last 19 months You know.
Where do we go from here?
This is the current billion dollar question as in the Federal Government of Canada has offered up a billion dollars to provinces who participate in the Vaccine Passport System.
The government loves to spend money, but would the set a billion dollars on fire if they saw an end to this by the end of 2021? 2022? 3? 5? 30?
Maybe…but let’s have a look at the actual situation and see if we can map this out.
The hardest part about, 14 days to flatten the curve, is the first 18 months.
Seemingly, the end run to COVID will be doing better that what we are now, taking into consideration our current blanketed stats say that we have a 99.09% survival rate:
This is without taking conditions or comorbidities into consideration and that a VERY SELECTIVE population of the province is even at risk.
You see, unless you have 3 or more conditions and are over the age of 60, your chances of survival are actually really good, but somehow still not good enough?
To escape other global pandemics, we have relied on ‘Herd Immunity’, which is what I assume will carry us out of COVID.
The idea behind vaccinations was so that we could achieve this end game with the most minimal losses, something we can all understand. The problem is, people who have been vaccinated, once or twice, within and outside of a 14 day window for the vaccines to kick in, are still getting, transmitting, being hospitalized for and dying from COVID. As in, the current vaccinations will not lead to Herd Immunity.
How do we know this?
The Provincial Government is telling us this in their updates:
This isn’t a pissing contest of who is doing better, vaccinated or unvaccinated. I will not engage in these conversations for the simple reason that this information is not unique to Alberta as a province, Canada as a country or North America as a continent. People who have been ‘fully vaccinated’ are still getting, transmitting being hospitalized for and dying from COVID in fairly substantial proportions.
New Cases: 25%
Active Cases: 23%
Currently Hospitalized: 21%
If you consider that only .91% (1:100), of the very select population is at risk and risk of being hospitalized with COVID after being fully vaccinated is 21%, (1:5), this whole vaccination thing seems to be really not doing that much.
If you factor in mortality from COVID, chances of survival with some level of vaccination are coin-toss-odds of survival - 50:50. 77 vaccinated died, 77 unvaccinated died.
This is not sufficient to qualify as herd immunity, which means, because neither the provincial nor federal governments are talking about “Natural Immunity”, our path forward is actually booster shots, passports and restricted freedoms until a better solution comes along, all while keeping in mind that it’s taken us 19 months to get here. And while the provincial government says that “everyone 12+ can book their first and second doses now”,
We’ve also already begun tracking 3rd doses:
Where do you think this is heading?
Vaccines don’t stop contracting/spreading/hospitalizations or death from COVID;
We aren’t even having ‘Natural Immunity’, conversations yet;
There are no other vaccination solutions provided that will lend to ‘Herd Immunity’; &
Our current path assumes that having a piece of paper in your wallet or app on your phone is going to do better.
What are we looking at here by way of timeline to get out of COVID world and back into normalcy?