[Surrealplaces]

Canada stopping all flights from India and Pakistan for 30 days.

Canada imposes ban on passenger flights from India, Pakistan for 30 days

The federal government is imposing a 30-day ban on all commercial and private flights from India and Pakistan effective Thursday at 11:30 p.m. EST, as COVID-19 infections continue to surge in those countries.

www.ctvnews.ca

It's too little, too late IMO.I think they need to close off all flights unless the travelers are willing to do a controlled 14 day quarantine. Right now we have flights also coming in from Turkey which is also a hotspot. This also only affects direct flights from India. If someone originates from India, but passes through London or Amsterdam, they still can arrive here.

The qualification of having a piece of paper when you arrive showing a negative covid test is kind of a joke. Everyone knows you can buy that kind of document in counties like India. IMO, they need to enforce a 14 day quarantine or no entrance to the country. Keep it simple.

 

[gsunnyg]

It's too little, too late IMO.I think they need to close off all flights unless the travelers are willing to do a controlled 14 day quarantine. Right now we have flights also coming in from Turkey which is also a hotspot. This also only affects direct flights from India. If someone originates from India, but passes through London or Amsterdam, they still can arrive here.

The qualification of having a piece of paper when you arrive showing a negative covid test is kind of a joke. Everyone knows you can buy that kind of document in counties like India. IMO, they need to enforce a 14 day quarantine or no entrance to the country. Keep it simple.

Agreed. Mandatory 14-day quarantine at a government-approved hotel on arrival should be a must, with no exceptions.

Just read about the triple mutant variant emerging in India alongside the double mutant variant. At this point, I don't think we'll be out of this mess this year. I have a feeling that until vaccine producers can consistently supply variant booster shots every few months or so to at least the developed countries, we'll be in and out of restrictions. Boris Johnson has already stated that another wave could possibly hit the UK even after achieving herd immunity and that medication focused on treatment should be looked at and mass-produced.

Basically, it ain't looking so good. Either that or this whole thing has made me into a full-time pessimist...well, at least we're all in this together, misery loves company.

 

[Sambo]

Really sorry to hear about the your covid case. I hope you recover and your family is safe.

I haven't had covid myself, but I understand the anger and frustration you must have. Not just toward our provincial government, but also our federal government. I'm reading today that India is the worst place on the planet right now for covid, and we still have daily flights coming in from India. I'm no rocket scientist, but it seems pretty stupid and unnecessary to me. And of course you have all those selfish people who have been taking vacations overseas. Selfish people exist and there's no way to get away from them, which as you said is where governance has failed. The Kenny administration has been a complete joke through all of this.

On another note, I see BC is again considering blocking the borders. I hope they do it, and I hope other provinces follow suit.

So ,in your opinion, the provincial government has been a complete joke as well as the Federal government? Armchair quarterbacks, the worst kind.

 

[Just build it]

So ,in your opinion, the provincial government has been a complete joke as well as the Federal government? Armchair quarterbacks, the worst kind.

Both levels of government has done a poor job at controlling the virus. He really blew it in earlier stages, especially back in November when he had a chance to tackle it aggressively, but instead went against what the experts had been advocating and decided to keep the wild rose types happy. Also his messaging in his speech back then was terrible, mentioning that it was a mistake to lock down in March, and emphasizing people's freedoms. It only served to reinforce the mentality of the Wild Rose crowd. It's part of the reason we have idiots protesting mask wearing.
The federal government also needs to take blame as well. Trudeau has has been too soft and too slow when it has come to this virus. Not wanting to make anyone mad, he seems to do everything in half measures. Yesterday's announcement of banning direct flights from India is an example. It's all well and good, but it's too late, and is only targeting two countries. It's not even stopping people who originate from India.

Also, as an FYI, everyone in society is an armchair quarterback including yourself. The game plays out for real come election time.

 

[darwink]

Extending hotel quarantine to 7 days seems like a reasonable step.

I guess the question is, if there are more and more and more variants, can we ever let the guard down?

I am really hoping the vaccines, or at least one of them, reduces the impact of the variants from crazy to mere annoyances (like this report from Germany https://www.thelocal.de/20210208/va...-residents-test-positive-for-british-variant/

TLDR:

Vaccinated German care home residents test positive for British coronavirus variant
None of the elderly people have had serious symptoms, however, which could indicate that the vaccination has effectively protected them from serious illness caused by the new strain.​

 

[Surrealplaces]

There are still lots of questions about the vaccines, but one recurring bit that has come back from the science side of it is that the vaccine helps fight the virus even if it's a new variant. To what extent is still not 100% known, but I just saw someone on the news say that it with the new variants the vaccines will be the difference between getting sick and dying.

 

[JonnyCanuck]

I know it is early yet as far as studies go but it is looking more and more like the variants may become like the common flu ....to people who have been vaccinated. This still poses a risk to seniors given that common flu can lead to death. That has always been a possible outcome, pandemic or no pandemic. However, for the general populace who have been vaccinated, it should not pose the same risk and therefore not require these draconian measures of isolation in the future.
As far as the 'blame game' goes, I have to say the biggest failure is this pandemic is Canada not manufacturing vaccines in this country. We have had a year to galvanize the health and drug community into being ready for when vaccines were available. Trudeau stated (or ignored the possibility) that Canada did not have manufacturing capability or capacity. That is false, we already do manufacture vaccines for other viruses/diseases. Two or three companies that I know of (one here in Calgary) had approached the federal government with a plan to ramp up manufacturing when needed. Several drug company executives have gone on the record stating that manufacturing in Canada was always possible had we got working on it in the early days of the pandemic. I don't think most Canadians are aware of this failure.

 

[darwink]

Two or three companies that I know of (one here in Calgary) had approached the federal government with a plan to ramp up manufacturing when needed.

Well, yes and no. I think this Q&A is really good and goes a bit deeper into the issues: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/joanne-langley-task-force-covid-coronavirus-vaccine-1.5910452

The Calgary companies it is fair to call them office park pharmaceutical companies at best - they have some Phds for sure, but they have no ability to produce anything themselves. The problem in this pandemic is not the intellectual property exclusively (though the Australian candidate failed because it relied on reversetranscriptase and caused all their trial patients to test positive for HIV despite not having HIV) - it is production capacity. Their timelines would have had the possibility of meeting an 18-24 month turn around. Which at the start of the pandemic seemed reasonable, but wouldn't have helped us at all it turns out. Plus, the machines needed to produce this stuff, it isn't like Canada produces them! And the raw materials to feed the processes. Quite the asusmption to make to assume we could have bought machines in a short amount of time, and bought precursors (India is complaining loudly the USA won't sell vaccine ingredients, even ones that aren't in short supply in the USA).

Plus running a pharmaceutical manufacturing operation is like running a swiss watch but each gear and spring is a precisely tuned biological process and each process has to go right or the entire thing goes wrong. Even if we had the intellectual property, and the facility, without the highly qualified people to actually run it, it would just sit there.

For moving from table top to mass manufacturing, I really liked this paraphrase:
'Say that you were invited to dinner and you spent the entire day making this dinner for your two friends and you salted it perfectly and the right amount of turmeric, all these things. You know, it was in the oven for three minutes, not four, and after the meal, they say, "OK, this is just perfect. Can you make exactly the same thing for a thousand people two days from now?"' (from the Q&A linked above)

Several drug company executives have gone on the record stating that manufacturing in Canada was always possible had we got working on it in the early days of the pandemic.

Who?

 

[JonnyCanuck]

Well, yes and no. I think this Q&A is really good and goes a bit deeper into the issues: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/joanne-langley-task-force-covid-coronavirus-vaccine-1.5910452

The Calgary companies it is fair to call them office park pharmaceutical companies at best - they have some Phds for sure, but they have no ability to produce anything themselves. The problem in this pandemic is not the intellectual property exclusively (though the Australian candidate failed because it relied on reversetranscriptase and caused all their trial patients to test positive for HIV despite not having HIV) - it is production capacity. Their timelines would have had the possibility of meeting an 18-24 month turn around. Which at the start of the pandemic seemed reasonable, but wouldn't have helped us at all it turns out. Plus, the machines needed to produce this stuff, it isn't like Canada produces them! And the raw materials to feed the processes. Quite the asusmption to make to assume we could have bought machines in a short amount of time, and bought precursors (India is complaining loudly the USA won't sell vaccine ingredients, even ones that aren't in short supply in the USA).

Plus running a pharmaceutical manufacturing operation is like running a swiss watch but each gear and spring is a precisely tuned biological process and each process has to go right or the entire thing goes wrong. Even if we had the intellectual property, and the facility, without the highly qualified people to actually run it, it would just sit there.

For moving from table top to mass manufacturing, I really liked this paraphrase:
'Say that you were invited to dinner and you spent the entire day making this dinner for your two friends and you salted it perfectly and the right amount of turmeric, all these things. You know, it was in the oven for three minutes, not four, and after the meal, they say, "OK, this is just perfect. Can you make exactly the same thing for a thousand people two days from now?"' (from the Q&A linked above)

Who?

The former Canadian head of Smith, Glaxo & Kline for one. Unless you come from the drug industry, I prefer to believe his assessment of Canada's capability than I do yours. The point is that manufacturing in Canada was dismissed outright from the beginning. I don't know if that decision came from serious research and analysis or the fed's preference to sign sales contracts with other countries. All I know is that I have heard industry professionals and people from the medical community say manufacturing in Canada could have been done. It would not be unlike making munitions in Canada during WW2. We were not manufacturing them at the time but government and business, in collaboration, found a way to get it done.

 

[CBBarnett]

I think we all forget how big of a panic there was and the degree of uncertainty there was a year ago.

In April 2020, no one was talking vaccines by the end of 2020. Most best guesses by smart people at all levels of every government and pharmaceutical companies around the world were thinking a few years away for a functioning vaccine. A global arms race to secure PPE and vital medical supplies was underway and most countries tried to spool up their domestic production as much as possible as global trade was in freefall. Also importantly to Canada's and Alberta's response, the Americans were absolutely floundering with an anti-science administration just causing chaos at all levels (can I interest anyone in an injection of hydroxychloroquine btw?), with wild politicization starting immediately that undermined every health measure as the US was dealing with the largest outbreak in the world at that time. As usual, the hyper-politicization of their system infected public discourse in Canada distorting our response to the crisis.

With this background, lots of decisions that were made in that crazy environment from March - July 2020 and have now played out and we can see which were the good decisions, which were bad. Some decisions were not knowable whether they were good decisions or not, only time revealed them to be one way or another. These are different than bad decision that were made against best evidence and theory at the time - and continue to be made - that now reveals them to still be bad decisions. These knowingly bad decisions motivated by political points, selfishness and lies should be put in a separate bucket and people should be hammered hard for making them.


Decisions that were predicted to be good ones at the time and proved to be good decisions in reality.
The countries that followed the best practices on how to battle a pandemic as was widely known in March 2020, unsurprisingly were proven most successful - Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia and a handful of others are the only countries that really nailed it. Strong border controls, strong and actual lockdowns with strong contact tracing to crush case counts to nothing, then allow the economy to reopen fully. Good decision in March 2020, good decision in March 2021 and best of all didn't rely on the uncertainty of vaccines to be successful (either on the original timeline expectation of vaccines or the much faster, but supply-constrained reality).

Other good ideas proven right is public masking and vaccines in general (obvious in 2020 as it is today). They both are now victim to hesitancy and conspiracy-laden nonsense but were always a good idea and always worth the "cost" which is negligible inconvenience and expense compared to the devastation to lives and economic activity of an unconstrained pandemic. Easy good decision.

Good or bad decision? Maybe?
Producing vaccines domestically is one of these decisions that fit the grey area on if it's a good one or not - having our own production is a great thing, but it's turning out so far that by global standards our "diversified portfolio" approach to procuring vaccines is actually outperforming most countries to get our population vaccinated except those that produced successful vaccines and banned exports to others (US, UK).

Had we not purchased any vaccines and relied on our own domestic capacity only in March 2020, who knows how that could have turned out - we might still be waiting for a successful trial to conclude. We might have production problems scaling up as others have had. Add another layer to analyze if this was the right decision is that most of the more material decisions to have a domestic production of vaccines were made years and decades ago during boring funding and research budget changes that eroded our capacity in non-pandemic years. All these parts of the decision slipped uneventfully by governments and their critics alike for decades. Were they good or bad decisions then? Probably, but we are really back in the coulda-woulda-shoulda timeline to assign specific blame.

In summary, could Canada have done better on vaccines? Maybe - but it's a murky grey area that's hard to say definitively if we chose a different path of the options that we had in March 2020. Many other countries are struggling more or flopped in another way that might be more material in the end - US has 3x the deaths per capita despite getting their vaccine machine in order because they failed so hard on other elements of their pandemic response.

The level and approach to public stimulus funding is another one of these grey area decisions. Some level of funding was critical and needed, very few will disagree in that. But like clockwork, now that the panic has subsided politics came back and the deficit police are out to score political points. Political critics would have done this if it was $10B, $100B or $500B spent. More and more stories will keep coming about how companies took advantage of the stimulus they didn't need and lots of graft and misuse occurred. This was entirely predictable, given the "speed over accuracy" approach the crises necessitated.

With all these problems, was deficit stimulus spending a good decision in the end? Yeah I think so - but good luck finding a consensus as the stimulus programs were so large and complex, everyone will have an example or two to pick from about why it was too large, too small or too corrupt to be a clearly 100% good decision executed perfectly.

Knowingly bad decisions that proved to be just as bad as expected:
One of these decisions is the seemingly inability to stop international non-essential travel to the degree that is required. Perhaps there is a degree of wishful thinking to how travel was handled badly in an integrated, trade-dependent nation like ours. This is a federal responsibility so the blame can lie there - but it's not all about trade - a quarter of the UCP government went to Hawaii against public health orders on non-essential vacations during the peak of the 2nd wave, FFS. Kenney practically lobbied for Westjet daily at press conferences while the pandemic raged around him, while certain Federal MPs travelled back and forth to Oklahoma and all over.

With leadership like this, thousands of snowbirds went back and forth still from Alberta somehow - rallying against Trudeau failing to protect Canadians out of one side of their mouth and bemoaning how hard isolation requirements are out of the other side. All of these decisions were bad - bad decision to give too many exceptions and loopholes for travelers by the Ottawa, bad decisions to travel by politicians and set such a poor example that undermined the public health response, and bad decisions for spoiled snowbirds who just "needed" a vacation to travel anyways.

In general, the worst decision that performed as predictably poorly as expected is the choice by many to politicize the public health response to a pandemic. Pandemics are beatable if we don't get in our own way. So much of our pandemic response was ruined from conspiracy-laden garbage propagated by leaders and the general public (anti-mask, anti-vaccine), trying to blame and score points on each other while not doing what's within your control (province v. Ottawa finger pointing), or presenting false dichotomies to promote their own agenda (lives or the economy, freedom v. lockdowns). All this politicization cost many, many lives and countless dollars - and it was entirely the bad decisions of politicians that led to it.

 

[Cowtown]

Extending hotel quarantine to 7 days seems like a reasonable step.

I guess the question is, if there are more and more and more variants, can we ever let the guard down?

I am really hoping the vaccines, or at least one of them, reduces the impact of the variants from crazy to mere annoyances (like this report from Germany https://www.thelocal.de/20210208/va...-residents-test-positive-for-british-variant/

TLDR:

Vaccinated German care home residents test positive for British coronavirus variant​

None of the elderly people have had serious symptoms, however, which could indicate that the vaccination has effectively protected them from serious illness caused by the new strain.​

Why not make it 10 days, or a full two weeks?

I read a story about how the virus has skyrocketed out of control in India so soon after the country and the nation's leader was kind of celebrating victory over it. Several officials including India's prime minister had proclaimed they had beaten the virus, and in many ways it appeared they did. Part of it was large election rallies, and some large religious festivals, but at the end of the day they let their guard down, and now it's an apocalypse.

If there's one thing we've learned is that you can't really let your guard down at all, unless you are NZ or Australia, where there are almost no cases at all. Even then, having a stadium filled with 78000 spectators seems irresponsible, unless there are 0 cases for at least a week or two.

 

[ByeByeBaby]

Knowingly bad decisions that proved to be just as bad as expected

You missed one, and that's the wait-and-see, gee-I-don't-want-to-use-my-powers, somebody-else-be-responsible approach that Kenney (and others) have taken in terms of managing public restrictions. There were weeks that passed in October and November when health experts were sounding the alarm at rising cases and the government did nothing. Imagine a province where instead of this:

we had something more like this:

Not only do those red areas represent hundreds of lives lost unnecessarily, but the strictest restriction periods are shorter (and might have permitted limited gatherings at Christmas). But, you know, a handful of rural MLAs and conspiracy theorists were kept happy for three weeks in October instead.

 

[Atticus]

The more I see this virus play out, the more I realize how much decisions and attitudes affects the outcome. Nova Scotia was very good at dealing with the virus through most of the pandemic, but the backed off on the enforcement allowing crowds to gather - example, there was a music festival with crowds a while back - and now the cases are rising sharply. Yesterday 96 cases, which doesn't seem like much, but the way it's rising is a concern. It's way more than they have in the past. Other countries like Germany and India looked to be doing very well, and are not problematic. Especially India. We have to put our foot down and not let up if we are going to keep this under control in Alberta.

 

[JonnyCanuck]

The U.S. has 60 million doses in storage of AZ vaccine they are going to give up to other countries. Canada, Mexico and India are on the list. They are just waiting for sign off from the health authorities that the doses were prepared properly. So it looks like we could be in for boost of AZ although it makes me wonder why the U.S is willing to part with it. They still have a long way to go for herd immunity.

 

[CBBarnett]

The more I see this virus play out, the more I realize how much decisions and attitudes affects the outcome. Nova Scotia was very good at dealing with the virus through most of the pandemic, but the backed off on the enforcement allowing crowds to gather - example, there was a music festival with crowds a while back - and now the cases are rising sharply. Yesterday 96 cases, which doesn't seem like much, but the way it's rising is a concern. It's way more than they have in the past. Other countries like Germany and India looked to be doing very well, and are not problematic. Especially India. We have to put our foot down and not let up if we are going to keep this under control in Alberta.

Misunderstanding what COVID's biological exponential growth characteristics actually means has tricked people and decision-makers over and over, because it's hard to understand for many people (1) and many people are really incentivized to not understand it for selfish reasons (2). Witting and unwitting ignorance - exactly what science and statistics can help us with so we humans stand a better chance than animals during a pandemic.

Given the transmissibility and characteristics of the virus, if your case count is growing, you are inevitably going to fail. There is no "safe level" of COVID spread when it can balloon on you in a matter of weeks and herd immunity is not an option - it's too far away and the consequences of pursuing a natural immunity is a collapse of your health system, economy and the trauma of tens of thousand of dead in your society. This was all known by about February 2020 and remains true for this and all past and future highly transmissible, deadly diseases.

Exponential case growth is a biological certainty without social intervention. The right time to act is always sooner than you think - it will always be cheaper and less disruptive in the short and long term costs. The past year has proven that over and over again in small and big ways.

For example, with 10 cases you could contact trace them with a team of people each and have a health support person standing outside every one of their doors for two weeks to guarantee quarantine.

This approach would have seemed costly, harsh and an over-reaction to those that don't get/ don't want to understand exponential growth. But it's a fraction of the cost of a year of disruptions from months-at-a-time partial shutdowns throughout the economy with all the trauma of thousands of dead.