I think the timing is bad. They could have forced vaccinations a long time ago in truckers but did not. Well I do think mandates are beneficial, the vaccination rates of truckers mirror the general population. Inflation and supply chains and difficulty finding drivers are real problems. I do not know the ideal solution. Given the many voices coming from groups, one gets the impression things could have been handled better. I am not suggesting finding good solutions for these things is easy.
I’ve been wondering about the timing myself. For almost two years after all this started and the border was closed to all but commercial traffic, truckers have gone back and forth, as they needed to. The vaccines came along, and they continued to, vaccinated or not. Why order this now, instead of last spring?
It seems to me that somebody in government said, “We haven’t done something for a while, so what can we do? I know! Let’s mandate vaccinations for cross-border truckers. It probably won’t do any good, but that way, we’ll continue to be seen as doing something.”
I think the fundamental problem is, we had too much faith in people’s common sense. A year ago it would have been almost inconceivable to me that so many people would just flatly refuse the vaccine, particularly among professions like truckers who have an inherently higher risk of exposure. We never thought we’d have to force people to get vaccinated.
Remember back when the big fear was, we wouldn’t be able to get enough vaccine for everyone who wanted it? It looked like people were chomping at the bit to get vaccinated as soon as possible, but then it went off the rails when the anti-vaxx BS became mainstream.
A nice article explaining differences (graphically) between Delta and Omicron.
Opposition to the mandates don’t surprise me at all.
Try to put yourself in the mind of these two groups:
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Pregnant young women. The vaccine was never tested on pregnant women. Young women are not particularly at risk of dying from Covid, and especially not from Omicron. There have been side effects of the vaccine reported such as irregular menstrual periods that could affect fertility. Are you going to take the vaccine? Some will, some won’t. But I’d have hard time telling a woman trying to get pregnant that she’s some kind of monster because she won’t take a vaccine that has never been tested for effects on children in the womb or on fertility.
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Minorities. This is another large group in the U.S. with many refusing to be vaccinated. These are also the prople that have a cultural belief that they have been used as test subjects for experimental vaccines for a long time, and that their own intuitions about health and medicine are just as valid.
It seems to me that peoole have actually been behaving fairly rationally about vaccines. The uptake in the highest risk groups is very high, no matter what their political affiliation or minority status. The real opposition starts appearing in the younger cohorts, which makes sense as their risk/benefit looks very different than for someone in their 70’s with diabetes.
Also, it became clear early on that vaccine hesitancy is incredibly strong in some people - strong enough that they are willing to lose their careers over it. In that case, a mandate is an extremely harsh imposition on those people.
I would feel different if the disease was much more deadly, such that an unvaccinated person risked the lives of everyone around. But with Omicron and the success of the vaccines at minimizing serious illness and death, it would appear that the the real risk from unvaccinated people is accrued by other unvaccinated people.
That being the case, dump the mandates and let them deal with the consequences of their actions. I’m not sure the mandates even moved the needle on vaccinations much, and they turned the issue from pandemic health issue into a civil rights issue, hardening positions and making it harder to convince the unvaxxed.
Plus, the economic damage is becoming hard to ignore.
Getting back to Canada, according to covid tracker we are really on the downslope of the Omicron wave, with the 7-day moving average dropping from 46,000 on Jan 10 to 20,000 now, and Friday’s numbers were 5,000 below the 7-day moving average.
In Alberta, the 7-day average over the same period has dropped from 7300 to 4300 as of Friday, and Friday’s cases coming in under the average at 3500.
Hispitalizations and deaths will likely continue to climb a bit more, as they lag these trends by more than 10 days, but we should start seeing declines there next week.
I’ve moved from watching numbers to watching the serious case count and the deaths. New Brunswick has limited PCR tests to 50 and over with anyone else using rapid tests that are not officially counted in our numbers. I believe NS is undercounting as well. I haven’t paid attention to other provinces but that is enough for me to distrust the rapidly dwindling numbers on the national case count.
Just to complete this though, it’s not quite a dichotomy. The choices are atutally:
- Potentially expose fetus to vaccine
- Potentially expose fetus to covid
- Luck out and expose fetus to none of the above.
You present it as if it’s a choice between #1 & #3 only, but #2 is certainly in the mix. So of the three options, which poses least harm? #3, obviously, but since you can’t make that a certainty, you must choose between #1 & #2. Which poses less risk to the mother, and which to the fetus? I’m not sure the avoiding the vaccine in favour of the virus is the best choice there.
Also “telling a woman trying to get pregnant that she’s some kind of monster”: I don’t think anyone is claiming this is a monstrous position to take, just a foolish one.
I’m in agreement with you, but put yourself in the head of someone without the kind of education you have, with no trust in the media or in the politicians asking them to take the vaccine (look at the polls) but trying to use ‘logic’. They’ve been told all their lives that vaccines must be tested for many years before approval. They hear crazy conspiracy theories that have just enough truth in them to make them wonder.
I have used your argument against my own family members who won’t get vaccinated. Their response is along the lines of, 'the vaccine is engineered by humans, the virus is natural. I don’t trust the science, and will take my chances with nature."
This is not much different than opposition to ‘chemicals’ in food, GMO rice, foods that aren’t ‘organic’, pesticides, nuclear power or other scientific breakthroughs that make our lives better but which face strong opposition from people who think what’s natural is always safer than something made in a lab.
The consequences of their actions are that my local hospitals have cancelled surgeries for other patients, and if I need emergency services, they are currently compromised by the wards full of antivaxxer fools.
Their bad decisions are having a serious negative impact on the rest of us.
Easier said than done when hospitals are overwhelmed, especially by unvaccinated patients, and other surgeries and procedures have to be cancelled because of the over representation of CoVid patients. The system will hold together for so long and medical professionals are burning out.
So, based on Worldometer numbers Canada is quickly closing in on the highest 7 day moving average of deaths that we’ve seen during the pandemic (currently at 163 with highest at 176). We are tied with the previous second highest day. It interests me that the UK has seen such a small bump in deaths especially as people are talking about Great Briton opening up and using it as an example of why we should as well.
I’m REALLY hoping we’ll see that figure dropping soon, as our 7day average case rate is heading down fairly significantly.
I wonder if the death rate is influenced by those provinces in the maritimes, who had not seen high rates of infection until now… In other words, are the older, more susceptible folks there getting hit hard NOW?
The Covid tracking data is all good news for Canada right now. Cases are droppjng rapidly. Hospitalizations are mostly flat, and deaths are still rising a bit.
This is exactly what you would predict on the downslope of a wave. We should see declines in hospitalization, then declines in deaths over the next two weeks.
Here in Alberta, the 7-day moving average for new cases has dropped from 7300 on Jan 10th to 1856 today.
Are they? We’ve been hearing for two years how overwhelmed hospitals are around the corner but the disaster never seems to come. I mean, maybe they are, but we are never really given solid info on this. Indeed, my understanding is they don’t have super clear information at all; the province of Ontario, certainly, has conflicting numbers all over the place.
CTV site has Alberta at a 7 day average new cases at 3168 as of yesterday, with no data yet for Jan 26.
Official Alberta govt site has 22,696 cases in Alberta from Jan 18 - Jan 25, for a 7 day average of 3242
Johns Hopkins university site has Alberta at a 7 day average of 3169 as of Jan 25.
Where are you getting your information from? Your 7 day average of 1856 “as of today” seems to be very different from the three other places I referenced.
It was right on the Google page when I choose ‘covid tracker’ in search. Howver, they have now updated the graph with the number you posted. Perhaps they had a zero in there earlier when I looked.
Actually, I see the error they made. They have zero cases for yesterday, but over 11,000 for today. Looks like they didn’t update the numbers for the weekend and Monday until today. The seven-day average for yesterday is just over 2,000 as a result. My number would have been before today’s number was posted.
I don’t think that’s it. I’m in NB myself and we just haven’t seen that many daily deaths to contribute.
I just looked up and the 7 day daily average is
NS - 1
NB - 3
PE - 1
NL - 0
Our hospital use is up but average deaths aren’t too bad