Nik said:
Significantly Insignificant said:
Just to be clear, I'm not against the lockdowns in the sense that I don't think they are important in controlling the spread. My frustration is just that it feels that if the return to normal is through the vaccine, and the vaccine isn't effective, then the last two years have been wasted because a backup plan hasn't been worked on or thought out. If we go into a lockdown, I'll continue to follow the rules that are outlined.
I'm still not really following. By most accounts the vaccine was effective at what it was asked to do which was protect people from the virus it was designed for. Expecting it to last forever and be as effective against any possible variants was not particularly realistic. Saying that there should have been "a plan" for a new variant that reduced the vaccine's effectiveness means what effectively? Whose plan? What should the plan have been? As you point out, there were efforts at looking into treatments as well as vaccinations so I'm not entirely sure who you think has been negligent here.
And likewise, the last two years weren't "wasted" because it's not like we were accumulating good will by locking down, we were mitigating stress on the health care system. If we hadn't had those lockdowns it's basically a certainty that we would have seen much, much higher amounts of sickness and death. Likewise, any future lockdown won't be about solving the problem forever and ever but minimizing damage.
Again, I get being frustrated but the chance that there may not be a simple and easy end to this pandemic is pretty real and is probably something to account for. There are a lot of unvaccinated people, there doesn't seem to be the political will in the province to do something about that and that has left us where we are. We might not get to go back to the old normal for sometime and as frustrating as that is, just being frustrated in and of itself doesn't mean that there ever was an option to make that happen outside of some pretty extreme measures.
Okay, maybe I'm not explaining myself well, which happens as sometimes I can't articulate what is in my head. Let me share three stories that I have bouncing around in my noggin that are kinda driving my thoughts on this.
Story 1
If you read my post in this forum from a couple of weeks ago, you know that my family went through the contact tracing process for two of my kids. I have three kids. Two are fully vaccinated, and one got his first shot two weeks ago.
The weekend where we started to get the contact notifications, my middle son was supposed to have two hockey games. My parents were going to come down to watch him play his Sunday game. On Saturday, we got notice an hour before his game that his game on Saturday was canceled, and his game on Sunday may be canceled. This is because the prior week, 7 days ago, he played against someone who had Covid. The key point here is that it has been 7 days and this is the first we are hearing about it.
While that is going on, we are already dealing with contact information for my youngest son. On the Thursday before that weekend, we received an email that there was an outbreak in his school and that we would be notified in 24 hours if he was a primary contact.
So I phone my parents on Saturday and tell them the situation. My dad says that even if the game is canceled, they'll come down and we'll go out for dinner. I ask if he is sure about that, and we go over the information that we have provided, and at this point, because we have not gotten a call from my youngest sons school, and because the information from my middle kids' hockey team says we don't have to self isolate that we should be fine to go out for dinner.
My parents come down the next day, and we went out to dinner. While at dinner, we got a call from OPH for my youngest son. He was a primary contact and we had to get him tested. This occurred 48 hours after the timeline they gave us for notifying us.
Two days later after that, so on Tuesday, we got a call from OPH for my middle kid, notifying us that he had to be tested because of his hockey contact. This is now 11 days after the initial contact we are being notified that we have to be tested.
When we asked why it had taken so long to notify us the response was "Sorry we are just slammed right now with notifications."
Story 2
Last September, my wife wanted to get my two oldest boy's passports renewed. I know what you are thinking, Why? That is a great question, but for those of you who are married, and have been quarantining here and there with that person you are married too, you eventually come to this point where you know you don't ask questions like that and you just roll with it.
Anyways, we filled out the information and we go to the Service Ontario office. When we get there the line is enormous. There is no way we are going to make it through the line that day in time. The security guard comes over to us and asks why we are there, and we say to renew our passports. He says to go around the corner and talk to the security guard there. We go around the corner and the security guard says "Are you just getting passports done" We say yes and he takes our name. We get called into an office a little while later and we start going through the paperwork for my two sons. The guy doing the paperwork makes a mistake and apologizes saying that he doesn't usually deal with these forms. I ask what he normally does and he says that he normally works at the DMV but he has been pulled over to handle passports when needed.
Story 3
Back in March of 2020, My wife and I both think that we actually got Covid. It was the sickest that we have been in a while, and I had the brain fog for like two months after recovering. We don't know for sure though because we never got tested. When we got sick we phone Telehealth, which is what you were supposed to do at the time. They would assess you and tell you if you had to be tested. I phoned, and they said to leave a message, so I did. They phone back two days later at 2:00 AM. The nurse apologized profusely for phoning so late but explained that they were working around the clock and this was when my callback time had come up. We talked through the process, and at that point, she told me that we didn't need to be tested because we felt better and if we had no symptoms then it was okay to return to normal activity. At the time I didn't know about the brain fog, because it was just the weird thing that I couldn't put my finger on, so I didn't really bring it up. That's probably on me.
I guess my frustration is with whoever is overseeing this process of fighting Covid. The same problems that were there two years ago are still there. The system can become bogged down and they have not been successful in improving the system to where it doesn't become bogged down. It is not a well-oiled machine, and after two years, you would think that they would have improved upon it.
If they need people to make phone calls to notify people, why not use the DMV people? If they can do passports, why can't they call to notify people they need to be tested? You don't need a medical background to tell someone to go get tested. You just need to know who to call and what to say. Could we go into every medical program that is being run in every post-secondary school in Ontario and just say "Guess what you are all in a co-op program now and you are going to the front lines"? Have they already done that? I don't know. What about retired medical professionals. My mom is a retired nurse. What about contacting her to see if she can help out in some way shape or form? It's not like she's doing much of anything else. Could she not call people?
This is just one area where the inefficiency is biting us. Because my family went to that restaurant thinking we were in the clear. What if we hadn't been? We have now potentially passed it on to the restaurant and my parents who live in another city. We followed the instructions given to us. If they had said "Don't go anywhere, stay at home, see no one" we would have. But the messaging was "If you don't get this message by such and such a time, you are fine", so we made a decision based on that information.
You brought up Japan, and that is a really interesting case. They have the best testing and tracing system right now in the world, and part of the reason they have that is that they legally couldn't do lockdowns at the start, so they had to come up with some other way. So they can selectively shut down areas proactively because they are able to trace where the virus is expanding in their country. With the technology, resources, and education that Canada has, why can't we do that?
When China first went into lockdown mode, the WHO was leery of it. They called it "new to science" and they were worried about the long-term ramifications of using it as a control method. They thought that there might be a better way, but other countries started adopting it as the only way to control the spread. What if you can predict where the virus is going to go through testing and tracing, and you can get in front of it and notify the people that need to lockdown selectively so that you can prevent a province-wide lockdown? Should we not be trying to get to that point?
It's frustrating to me because it seems that lockdowns have become the crutch that is used because we lack the desire to look at other areas to control the spread of Covid. I think that Canada should be able to do better. I think that the powers that be that are making the decisions using lockdowns in case of widespread outbreaks are content with making that decision because they believe that the vaccine will be the thing that eventually removes the need for lockdowns. What if it isn't? If in 5 years, we still have a province-wide lockdown every couple of months, should we not be looking for a potentially different solution? If people say yes, in 5 years, we should have a better system in place, then I say, well my timeline is just shorter than that. It shouldn't take 5 years to explore a better system than province-wide lockdowns.
Or maybe I am just entering the Don Cherry angry old-man phase of my life and I am screaming at the Leafs to "JUST FIX YOUR PENALTY KILL" and yelling at the moon because my soup is cold.
If you would kindly get off my lawn, and inform me of where I get those pants that go up to my nipples, we can all get on with our isolated days.
