The fact is this is serious, it really is but not in the way people think. The virus is basically a flu bug. We have all had it. And that is the reason why this one is different. no one has had it before. Every year we lose about 0.1% to complications of the flu. That is a lot of people. 6K in canada. So far we have lost >1500 people to covid. So the social distancing etc is working. It is acting like herd immunity until we have herd immunity but a vaccine or such.

Right now we have 77 000 beds across canada. 90% are used for normal things like accidents, heart attacks, broken legs  etc, so that leave us with 10 000 beds, maybe? So when that number is reached, too many people in intensive care, sick with covid, when that number  goes up too far we get collateral damage. People with normal injuries that normally, with treatment, can be save; won’t get because we will have no medical professionals to treat them.

So when you get Covid, and like all of us, you will. 50% will show no symptoms. Nothing. Your body just gets it and the antibodies destroy it before it can grow. this is scary too. You are walking around not even feeling sick and you are spreading this disease to people all around you (without social distancing) 20% get a bad night, fever but gone the next day. 20% get a bad 2 weeks,  like a really bad cold and we have all had one of thoses in our lives.. Then it is gone too.  The last 10% is where the system is hurt. They may require medical assistance. 5% just need drugs and such like IV fluids. 3% need O^2 and more intensive care and the last 2% need ventilators and anywhere from 1/3 tp 1/2 won’t make.

So heck, it is just 2% so who cares right? And people who think that are fucking nuts. That is 2% of all Canadians. There are 38 million of us.  2% is …. 760K all sick at once. or 10 x the number of beds we have for all of Canada. All needing ventilators.

We have before the crisis in North America about 100K ventilators. 90% of them were in use for other illnesses. that left 10K… or 1 for every 76 person who needs them. Oh yes, did you note I wrote North America? Yes, that us and all of the ventilators in the USA too. Think they will give them up? This is why we need to slow the process down. this is why we social distance to protect everyone else.

If you are like me, I don’t care if i get this! In fact, i assume i had it in February before they even tested. “You have the flu rest, fluids and aspirins.” I was told. No one was testing, no one was worried. Now i would get two weeks vacation paid at 100%. But in order to protect others, i wear that fish bowl at work. Even if i do not worry for myself or my family.

So wear your gear, stupid as it looks, you will get used to it over the next year or two. Yes I said year or two, We expect there is going to be more waves in Fall and flu season in January. A vaccine is going to be hard to make, not because it is hard to isolate the antibodies, It is not. The problem is you also need to protect the lungs as well as the blood. You breath the infection in to your lungs and you can still get very sick and worse without protecting the lungs you could still be coughing it up.

Second the myth of testing. All we need to do is test 100K-100 million people. Simple right? Except… not enough chemicals to make the test for the antibodies or the virus. We can make more. A small bit, but not nearly the amount we need to taste right now not in some uncertain future.

Its like this, you call the cops, first car is there in minutes. More cars arrive with more help arriving  in tens of minutes by an hour you have overwhelming support. Hundreds of cops, firemen and medical personnel are on scene. Just takes time. Same thing here.  We are at the first stage of the problem. Help is on the way

Start preparing for the next wave. By then you should have wipes, masks, shields and gloves so we are old hand at this. Social distancing is not going away, not for a long time.

Quebec was cocky, they had the supplies on hand, ready to go forward with pride. They had a years worth of normal use in gloves, gowns and masks. They were ready…. opps. normal rates were used up 12 times faster then normal. That year’s supply was gone in a month. Just gone. So we are in unknown territory.

Singapore and Japan saw their curve gone. Its all over folks return to normal life…  3 weeks later? They were closing hospitals because the virus came back and hammered them both. Re-opening is not going to be fast, it won’t b e easy and it will take months.

Basically, this is the new normal until we have a vaccine. Then and only then, do we return to normal… and by then what significant portion will be anti vaxxers? Add to that, every year you get cold and flu? Why? because it evolves. This virus will evolve and then we are all, once again, back to the same boat sort of. The good news is that our antibodies will evolve fairly fast cause we have the basic outline to evolve to and we will have heard immunity. With any given flu that we have 40-70% of the population will get it. In this case, 50% wont get sick just be carriers of the virus says we have a mild flu if it was a flu with herd immunity. Without herd immunity…

So okay, we are going to survive this. It is only a matter of time. We wear mask (what a stupid idea.) shields and gloves to protect each other. We social distance and we let time and medical science do their work, to give the system enough time to cope.

In England, a nurse reported to me that she is not a nurse but a funeral director. Calling in ambulance after ambulance to cart away the dead. A very unfunny Monty Python skit of “Bring out your dead”. Only the people most dying are the old. Roughly 50% of the dead in Quebec are from Old Folks Homes.

Be safe.

Social distance

And just hold on tight, this is not over for a long while.

But we will make it to the other side.