Tag Archives: Covid-19

Wanting to connect

This is one of the headlines that came across my news feed several times yesterday, “Ontario to maintain group size restrictions amid rising COVID-19 cases, crowded parks”

It seems that many people wanted to take advantage of the great weather and social distancing took a back seat to social gathering, despite an uptick of COVID-19 cases in southern Ontario.

This isn’t unusual behaviour, with similar things happening in parks and on beaches across North America. It isn’t something that bodes well when considering that economies are opening up and people are beginning to be exposed to more interactions with others. Social distancing needs to be something that we continue while things open up. So, why are people behaving like this?

We have a natural affinity to want to spend time with people and to be social… well, most people do, definitely not everyone. This is the typical overreaction we see with teenagers, when they get new freedoms and want to push the line. How many times have you heard a phrase like, “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.” Well, seems like this is as true for adults as it is for kids.

People want to connect. They want to congregate, they want to celebrate.

I know many people that have had to cancel travel plans. My own summer plans with my wife and two other couples is no longer going to happen. I know of two cancelled weddings, one was a local celebration and one was a destination wedding. These are big events to change! These are celebrated gatherings that will not happen for a while yet. This is tough to miss out on.

But it’s not as tough as not being able to visit another country to say goodbye to a loved one who is dying, it’s not as tough as knowing you are the one that spread a virus to someone that didn’t recover like you did. It’s not as tough as shutting down the economy a second time, when the curve isn’t flattened enough and there is a fear of hospitals being overwhelmed.

The economy has to be opened up. We need to be returning to some sense of normalcy, we need to create opportunities to connect with others in our communities, to work along side each other, and to do things that are more social than they have been. But we need to do so in recommended and respectful ways.

We need to accept some risk, but not be risky. We need to connect, and not crowd each other. We can’t wait for a vaccine, and we can’t stay shuttered in place indefinitely. We need to connect responsibly, and in ways recommend by experts. We can’t ignore the need to engage in our society, but we also can’t be reckless.

Trying to find the Truth

I enjoy seeing funny quotes attributed to the wrong people. Like these two examples:

Abe Lincoln fake internte quote

Use-the-Force-Harry-Gandalf

The second one is an assault to the senses of fiction and science fiction fans. When the joke is obvious, there is comedy in the creation of these fake attributions. However, we are living in an era where Truth seems more and more subjective.

What’s scary about this is that I consider myself fairly objective, but I’m finding it harder and harder to know what to believe. What I do know is that newspapers today come with tremendous bias, and something as simple as this chart from two years ago is even more exaggerated now, with papers moving further towards the extremes:

News-Bias-MarketWatch

Here is an example of something that I know little about, and feel that the more I read, the further I am from having a clear understanding of where to put a value on what’s true: Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

The first article I read was from the Washing Post (dated May 17th, 2020): The results are in. Trump’s miracle drug is useless.

Excerpt: THE HYPE over the drug hydroxychloroquine was fueled by President Trump and Fox News, whose hosts touted it repeatedly on air. The president’s claims were not backed by scientific evidence, but he was enthusiastic. “What do you have to lose?” he has asked. In desperation, the public snapped up pills and the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on March 28 for the drug to be given to hospitalized patients. On Thursday, Mr. Trump declared, “So we have had some great response, in terms of doctors writing letters and people calling on the hydroxychloroquine.”

Now comes the evidence. Two large studies of hospitalized patients in New York City have found the drug was essentially useless against the virus.

Next I read an Article from the Washington Times (Dated April 2nd, 2020 – about 6 weeks before the article above): Hydroxychloroquine rated ‘most effective therapy’ by doctors for coronavirus: Global survey.

Excerpt: Drug known for treating malaria used by U.S. doctors mostly for high-risk COVID-19 patients.

An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.

The survey conducted by Sermo, a global health care polling company, of 6,227 physicians in 30 countries found that 37% of those treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” from a list of 15 options.

Of the physicians surveyed, 3,308 said they had either ordered a COVID-19 test or been involved in caring for a coronavirus patient, and 2,171 of those responded to the question asking which medications were most effective.

So, the ‘evidence’ presented in the second article came well before the the first article was printed. Which article holds more ‘Truth’?

First, if you had to guess, which of these newspapers is more Left-of-Centre – Liberal and which of these papers is more Right-of-Centre – Conservative?

Let’s have a look at the sources on MEDIA BIAS/FACT Check. (Full disclosure, I have not checked the reliability of this website.)

Here is the bias of the Washington Post:

Washington Post MediaBiasFactCheck

Compared to the bias of the Washington Times:

Washington Times MediaBiasFactCheck

Take a moment to read the final, bolded comments that I clipped from this fact check website about each paper. They would suggest the Post being more reliable than the Times because of a lack of fact checking at the Times. That said, the source for the survey linked to in the Times article checked out when I looked into it. The same source, Sermo, is now toting Remdesivir use more than Hydroxychloroquine, and even then stating that, “Remdesivir Seen as Only Moderately Effective”.

I don’t have the time or mental energy to go fact-checking every article I read, but I do find myself evaluating the source of the information a lot more. However, quite honestly, even when I do that it has now become blatantly easy to read the bias of the reporter woven into almost every news article that’s based on a ‘hot’ topic. How can you look to the news for objectivity when that objectivity is blatantly disregarded?

I’ve now started reading headlines with the following ‘BS Filter’ as a lens: “Does this article headline anger me, or try to anger me? If the answer is ‘yes’, I either ignore the article, or I open it with my ‘BS detectors’ fully engaged. Click bait articles tend not to be focused on sharing any kind of ‘Truth’.

In this day and age of abundant information, I thought Truth would rise above the BS, but that hasn’t been the case. Neil Postman said,

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

It seems that there is an information war on both our capacities to think, and our capacities to seek the Truth.

By the numbers

Documented worldwide cases of Covid-19 have surpassed 3 million people. The US will surpass 1 million of those later today. Canada will surpass 50,000 this week. And sadly, over 200,000 people have died as a result of contracting this virus.

Canada and California are similar in population size, both are doing a good job keeping the number of people infected down, and both are still dealing with 1,000 to 1,500+ new cases a day.

The good news, hospitals here on the North American west coast are not inundated like they have been in Italy, Spain, and New York. The challenging news, we are not out of the woods yet and diligence must be maintained… especially as we move to reopen parts of the economy.

I’m no longer making predictions about what things will look like in the coming weeks and months… the virus isn’t a weather system coming in from the west and bringing rainfall. It has a life of its own. While we have considerable influence as a community, and as citizens who want to keep the spread of the virus down, we also have to respond to new outbreaks and change our habits as suggested by health authorities.

It will be a dance… Opening things up, tightening things up, closing things down, permitting small gatherings, and then recommendations against them. The numbers will dictate what makes sense. And while that’s easy to say, as we do the dance, it will feel like the songs aren’t staying on long enough for us to get used to the rhythm.

It won’t feel like things are normal for quite some time. And that’s not the new normal, that’s a level of stress and uncertainty that will loom for a while. I was trying to avoid paying attention to the numbers, but I realize now that they are something tangible that I can pay attention to. I can see patterns, and try to understand why we are getting the provincial and federal health and social distancing advice that we are getting.

The numbers aren’t complete, they don’t tell the whole story, but they tell us when things are headed in the right versus the wrong direction. Whether they grow incrementally or exponentially, they tell us a story, and we should be aware of when that story changes… and be prepared for new changes to our rules of social and work engagement when they do.

It’s about saving lives

Chances are that you will know someone who contracts Covid-19. If you are unlucky, you will know someone that this Coronavirus kills. That’s already the case for me. My dad’s cousin, my second cousin, was just a year older than me. She went on holiday from England to Bali, arrived without symptoms, and was diagnosed 4 days later. Six days after that she passed away. She had some significant health conditions which contributed to the affects of the virus. There are many people who do.

You probably keep hearing that we need to “flatten the curve”, what this really means is that we need to save lives.

Here is an excellent, detailed article that goes over the numbers. The reality is that no country will escape the effects of this virus, but some will have significantly higher or lower mortality rates… and we can all do our part to decrease that number by helping slow the virus down. We can’t increase the capacity of our hospitals in a significant way. We can help them not reach that capacity in an overwhelming way.

In this article by NPR, Drew Harris, the population health researcher at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia who created the widely shared graphic below, compares the concern about overburdening our hospitals to rush hour on a subway. We need to get everyone on the subway trains/in our hospitals when they need to be there. However, missing a train is different than not getting a respirator when you need one. Italian doctors are already doing wartime-like triage in hospitals, deciding who lives or dies because there isn’t enough equipment to save everyone.

Do your part to flatten the curve and you will be doing your part to save lives!

*UPDATE – These simulations show how to flatten the coronavirus growth curve – From the Washington Post