As the chaos unfolds in Canadia where the beavers now lack a way to ship their maple syrup to the donut shops and the lumberjacks are running out of Molsons, I can't help wondering what it's all about from Justin Trudeau's point of view.
Ask yourself this: What percentage of the population meets all three of these criteria?
- Is unvaccinated (16.25%),
- Has no natural immunity (Washington state as a proxy has 36.9% with none) and
- Is in a WuFlu risk group (28.2% using the US data).
It must be less than 1 in 1000 by now. The numbers above lead to 1.6%, but the people at risk have significantly higher vaccination rates. Also, Washington State is an outlier here in the US with many states in the 80-90% natural immunity range.
In any case, the real risks to the population are well behind us. If US WuFlu reproduction numbers are anything to go by, the Omnicorn wave is rapidly receding.
So what does Trudeau get if he wins? Every day the truckers sit there, Omnicorn fades away some more, the natural immunity numbers go up and Trudeau's payoff becomes smaller. For the life of me, I can't figure out his end game.
Is it just as simple as this meme where Bilbo is tempted by the One Ring?
I think it is a combination of fear and bureaucratic inertia. First, the elected officials are afraid of what will happen if they declare the pandemic over, and then another wave comes through of a variant that both bypasses immunizations and causes serious disease. It may be unlikely, but the consequences to them of guessing wrong could be pretty dire. And very few politicians want to be the ones to step forward and essentially paint a huge target on their chest in the event that things go bad..
ReplyDeleteAnd second, it takes time to get restrictions approved through a bureaucracy, and then even more time to approve lifting those restrictions. And, if it turns out that they want the restrictions back on again, that would take even more time. So the general tendency is just to kind of let . . . things . . . slide until it is absolutely, 100% sure that it is time to deal with the bureaucracy.
And meanwhile, the restrictions just seem to be kind of fading away. Like around here. I think there are still some kinds of restrictions, but there doesn't seem to be any enforcement. The restaurants are open, we are holding classes in-person, athletic events and festivals are proceeding pretty much as normal. And while a lot of (but not all) people wear masks around campus, the mask-wearing isn't really much of a hardship, considering that it is zero degrees F right now and having a mask to retain heat and moisture actually feels much better than having a bare face anyway.
1 and 3 make sense, but I don't think 2 applies. All of the restrictions were done under some kind of magical "emergency powers" that only exist in the minds of the rulers and continue because no one can figure out how to sue them out of existence. Maybe Canadia is different than us, I don't know.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, there are countries across the pond who appear to be getting rid of their restrictions with considerable alacrity.
Here in Crazyfornia, the neurotic wine moms are still in charge and don't look to be going away any time soon. Almost everyone wears masks in stores, but not in restaurants because ScIEnCE.
So my experience here in Crazyfornia (awesome name, I will use that exclusively henceforth) is that if you just go into a store with no mask, the number that will tell you to put one on is is small (the really big ones like Walmart and Costco do, but the restaurants and more Mom and Pop won’t - they want the business and enforcing Goober Noisome’s fiats don’t get them customers). In the smaller places the ratio of no-mask to mask seems to run at about 1:1.
ReplyDeleteI’m in AZ right now. The number of people asking me to put a mask on is zero. Went into a Walmart on purpose and counted the no-mask to mask ratio at about 10:1.
I think the “emergency powers” will end right about when the truckers start parking around the Goober’s Mansion. And I want in pool that the Truckers will arrive 2 weeks after that Trucker Fudreau gives in to the inevitable in Canada.
==Trucker Fudreau==
ReplyDeleteAKA Justin Castreau.
... Fidel's bastard bebé
ReplyDeleteOur Goober here gave up his emergency powers last May or so. And regretted it. He was consumed by the power. When the next surges came, he wanted to reclaim those powers, but couldn't because of the political hot water at the time would lead to the republicans starting inquiries and other power grabs.
ReplyDeleteThere are 6 republican canidates for govenor currently. A poll run head to head has the incumbent leading by a few percentage points over each candidate. All 6 have pledged to honor the primary's decision. One can only hope the election boots as many democrats out as possible. And then hope that the republicans in power aren't as horrible as the democrats have been. All of this is, of course, unlikely.
On a happy note, we are going the the Michigan Tech hockey game at St Thomas Saturday night. They have a mask requirement, so I'll be wearing one. 1000 seat rink, unheated. Not the MacInness Student ice arena, but at least we get to see the team play. Go Tech!
Oh, and BTW, the hot sauce is excellent! Fish tacos last night, so it was well used.
ReplyDelete