Eh, not really.. we're at around 90% vaccination rates... most truckers are annoyed/embarrassed by the whole situation, as it really has nothing to do with them.
This is as much about 'truckers' as 'joe the plumber' was about plumbers...
There's a minority government in Canada.. remaining in office requires the support of an opposition party.
There's continuous work to paint the political situation as incredibly fragile and mandates as highly divisive. Reality shows otherwise - we'd be talking about an election if this was an actual problem politically, and an election simply isn't in the cards.
Incubation period varies, and is probably best modelled as a Gaussian function.
Some cases will incubate nearly right away, and others will take more than the 2-3 weeks that are often used as quarantine periods. Getting to the 95th or 99th percentile is not the same thing as getting to the 100th percentile.
This is one of the reasons that a covid-zero strategy is effectively unimplementable.
"For comparison, today's human genome is 96% similar to our closest ancestor, the chimpanzee. Humans and chimpanzees are thought to have diverged approximately 6 million years ago."
This is disingenuous. I can't fathom why this comparison was chosen, it is incredibly damaging to the credibility of the claims made in the letter.
Opportunities for evolution occur once per generation. The lifespan of a human being is measured in decades. The lifespan of a virus and the number of mutations created in lungs is on an entirely different and much shorter timescale.
Different organisms evolve at different rates, and this comparison seems misleading at best. Saying that humans took 6 million years to diverge by 4% would reasonably be followed by "and this virus could be expected to do it in X"... and that's a MUCH smaller number than 6 million years.
In BC, secretly engaging in tracking would be both illegal and contrary to public policy. The system was reviewed by https://www.oipc.bc.ca/ as part of the rollout, and it's privacy-preserving properties were an essential part of the system being deemed acceptable.
There are multiple independent open source implementations of the SMART Health Card QR standard. It's really just some JSON + compression/encoding/digital signature.
The approach I have described is being used across Canada, and based on what has been indicated so far, this is in fact the intended direction of the federal government.
Vaccine passport checks are not conducted by government officials. They are conducted by the private businesses where the checks take place.
iOS 15 includes "app privacy report" functionality, and if the government were secretly submitting a different version to the app store than they claim they are (with secret reporting of scan data back to the mothership included in the app store builds), they would be trivially caught by anybody using this feature. It would show up in the network traffic logs that are available for anybody to inspect.
Mobile applications are also not that difficult to decompile to identify hidden functionality.
We can both be pretty sure that no tracking is taking place, and that it would be unrealistic for this system to be used for tracking purposes without that becoming a matter of public knowledge rather quickly.
Where is your data to support your extraordinary claim that "a lot of people have already had COVID and pose a lower risk than someone who is vaccinated"?
"The CDC researchers found that people previously infected but unvaccinated were 2.34 times more likely to get reinfected than people who were previously infected and fully vaccinated."
"The researchers saw even more variability when they looked at neutralizing antibodies—those known to bind to the virus and prevent it from infecting cells. Neutralizing antibody levels in recovered people varied over a range of 40,000-fold, and up to 20 percent of people didn't have any detectable level of neutralizing antibody."
For vaccines, we have data showing they are highly effective:
We have data showing reduction in transmission as a result of vaccination.
We don't have comparable data for people who have merely been previously infected, and in fact the data we do have seems to provide evidence that they pose higher risk. The immune system is not as reliable when it is having to fight off an infection while mounting its response vs when it is able to mount an immune response while not under attack from the virus.
We're quite happy here with our freedom to go to a restaurant or attend a festival without exposing ourselves to the risk of being around unvaccinated people.
Vaccine passports in Canada are implemented using the https://smarthealth.cards/ standard. The QR codes are verifiable offline using digital signatures.
Some BC hospitals are overwhelmed. Most of them are not. We want to keep it that way, and we also want to allow society to continue to re-open and move on from all this.
This vaccine card is how we preserve the liberty of the vaccinated majority from the tyranny of the unvaccinated minority.
While our average vaccine uptake is 83%, this is not at all evenly distributed. Most health areas have high uptake numbers. But there are local health areas in BC that are significantly lower than the rest of the province.
BC's most populated areas are Fraser Health and Vancouver Coastal Health. And yet, recently, the Interior Health region has been having more total cases than those two larger health regions combined.
In fact, one single Local Health Authority - Central Okanagan (a sub-unit of a Health Region) was responsible for 20% of cases in BC during Aug 13-19th. It's also a Local Health Authority that was lagging behind the rest of the province on vaccination rates. It's starting to catch up. These things are not co-incidences. Choices have consequences.
What is the end game? The end game is hopefully that this measure remains temporary -- currently it's set to expire at the end of January 2022.
It can remain temporary if enough people manage to move beyond the insane propaganda, accept reality, and realize that these vaccines are safe, effective, and necessary for life to be able to safely return to normal.
In the meantime, those of us that want to go about our lives and go to restaurants and concerts and sports events would like to be able to do so without taking needless risk.
We don't allow drunk drivers to operate motor vehicles, we don't allow people to wander the streets with hazardous highly active nuclear waste, now we will also cease allowing the presence of Typhoid Karen in discretionary/recreational settings.
We're done with unvaccinated people causing our businesses to need to shut down and we're done with them keeping us from safely enjoying all the things we used to safely enjoy in 2019.
COVID is done because we are done with allowing people to not be the ones bearing the consequences of their misinformation-driven poor choices.
People don't need to get vaccinated. And they don't need to sit in a restaurant next to everyone else either.
This makes it clear "nobody successfully proved" really means "I didn't bother to listen". The messaging on masks has long been "they reduce transmission by infected people", not "they prevent you from getting it".
(1) Best available evidence indicates pretty clearly that masks will prevent you from getting it sometimes. This is sharply different from early messaging that masks could increase your risk due to them somehow being viral-magnets and thus you risked infecting yourself.
(2) We have done many studies on many viruses and the consensus seems to be that the initial viral dose matters a great deal -- the lower the dose, the lower the severity. It's also fairly clearly established that, at their worst expected performance, masks will lower the dose you receive.
This is a disease in which the severity matters a great deal. We see wildly different ranges of outcomes/levels of severity.
And indeed, many of the worse outcomes are setting where it's reasonable to assume that there was a significant viral dose.
I think it's irresponsible to promote the idea that masks only help protect others from the wearer. While they clearly do that, the balance of probabilities of available data strongly indicates that they sometimes protect the wearer.
We've even had studies as specific as having examined masks with SARS-CoV-1 -- to pretend that none of our medical knowledge indicated that masks are helpful for SARS-CoV-2 is insane.
The "risk compensation" concern which was claimed as one of the reasons to pretend that masks weren't helpful has been thoroughly debunked as a false concern. Additionally, while they were busy talking about "lack of evidence", their "risk compensation" concerns were also completely lacking a foundation in evidence.
The whole situation disgusts me. "Doctor knows best" and "we can't tell people the truth because they might not respond the way we want" attitude has to stop -- it destroys the fabric of society and the credibility of health experts.
Why would people ever trust words of officials when it is obvious to anyone paying attention that their messaging was focused on avoiding blame for contingency planning failures instead of focused on providing true, accurate, not-misleading and helpful information.
Here's an example from the United States Surgeon General:
Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
You want people to believe that your plan is to use these ineffective masks to protect healthcare workers? Are the healthcare workers a different species than the general public?
When I've looked into it, I've found it difficult to assess the degree to which we are looking at "behavior changes between seasons" vs "the season matters".
Reasons the season might matter: Thicker air (higher humidity) may reduce particulate spread. Viral lifespan may be different under different temperatures.
Yet, in researching the issue, I tend to find things like "well, in animal models, this is what we've seen". Or "we think the heat reduces the effectiveness of a protective membrane that the flu uses".
Despite some effort, I've not found sources that both (1) seem reliable, and (2) provide a clear/concise understanding of what we know and why/how we think we know these things.
This is as much about 'truckers' as 'joe the plumber' was about plumbers...
There's a minority government in Canada.. remaining in office requires the support of an opposition party.
There's continuous work to paint the political situation as incredibly fragile and mandates as highly divisive. Reality shows otherwise - we'd be talking about an election if this was an actual problem politically, and an election simply isn't in the cards.