A tough month looms, but let's still count our blessings
Also: backup your data. Very, very carefully.
I end this week, Code 47 readers, feeling grateful. It's been a weird week, but it's true.
This weekend will mark the one-month mark of my parents and aunt getting vaccinated, as I discussed previously here. My 93-year-old grandmother, who has a comorbidity that would leave her a sitting duck for COVID-19, was vaccinated just days after that. We still need to get second doses arranged for everyone, but real-world data is showing that even the first dose, after a suitable time for immunity to build, is providing enormous protection from serious illness and death. As a third wave kicks Ontario squarely in the gonads, knowing they are safe(r) is a profound relief. Just yesterday, I was speaking with a friend who told me that both of her parents are finally vaccinated, and that she was sobbing. I wasn't quite so expressive as that, but I got the feeling. I really did. It is good news after a dark year.
I'm also grateful that Ontario is changing strategy re: its vaccine deployment. Essential workers, including teachers, in high-priority areas will be accelerated. That will include my wife. It's a bit of a quirk of geography, frankly, that makes that so, but I'll take it all the same. I am the kind of person who is pretty rational and ruthless in pondering unpleasant scenarios. I am a big believer in insurance and planning ahead, and that has to include thinking about what it would mean if she became seriously ill or died. But that doesn't mean these scenarios are nice to think about. I’ll sleep better once she is jabbed.
Being married to a teacher always meant contemplating some grim (though obviously unlikely) scenarios. That’s a weird quirk of modern life that I’m not sure people who aren’t related to a teacher fully grasp. Every report of a school shooting somewhere hits you in a strange place. Indeed, she's had to run drills with her students for locking down in case of a mass shooter — remember when "lock down" made us think of that instead of this? And that's never been fun to contemplate. But this pandemic hasn't been fun to live through as the spouse of a teacher, either. I do not like how it has felt almost every working day of late when she drives off to work in a confined environment with many people, and I settle in, mug of steaming tea at the ready, and begin another day of toil from my comfortable, isolated home office. I feels … unchivalrous, if that’s the right term.
So knowing she should soon get vaccinated — details are still depressingly scant on exactly how and when that will be, but they have a few days to sort this out — is obviously a huge relief.
I’m also thankful to live in a city with an incredible children's hospital. Toronto's Sick Kids is much in the news right now because it is now accepting adult patients in need of critical care due to serious overcrowding in Toronto's ICUs as the third wave surges here. The fact that Sick Kids is taking adults ain't encouraging, especially since things will get worse for many weeks to come even if the newly announced restrictions begin to work immediately. It takes a long time to slow something like this down, and the next month's growth in case and hospital usage is mostly baked-in already, since both cases and hospitalizations are indicators that lag by weeks. The people going into hospital today were probably infected weeks ago.
But the news reports of the hospital’s new role brought to mind my two stories of experiences (both as an adult) with Sick Kids. It's an incredible institution and we are very lucky to have it. I wish everyone there, patient and staff, the best. (If you're interested in those two stories, see my Twitter thread, below.)
And one last thing: as noted in the afore-mentioned column, I was freaked out earlier this week at a near disastrous data loss. I got it all back. I’m very grateful to all of the people who wrote in helpfully with advice, recommendations and even just moral support. It meant a lot. And I was pleasantly surprised how few people were just doing that terribly irritating thing of proposing, in the most passive-aggressive ways possible, the blindingly obvious solutions that of course I’d already tried.
So, yes. A tough month ago, particularly for us in Ontario. But still a lot of blessings to count. I think doing so is good for the soul. Take a moment this weekend and count yours, too.
I’m mostly taking next week off, readers. It’s Ontario’s delayed “March Break” and my wife and kids are both off. There won’t be much to do but I’ll still spend the days doing … whatever … with them. I may or may not put out a note on Friday. Sorry to be so wishy-washy. I’ll just have to see how the week goes.
But for now, here’s what I was up to this week.
First, let’s start with the column I’ve referenced twice already. Written just for Code 47 readers, it detailed a strange quirk of Apple’s Cloud. I have a folder of professionally and sentimentally valuable documents that I keep on my desktop. This folder has existed in some form or another on my desktop since I was in university, a depressing number of years ago. Nothing in the folder is vital, all of it is meaningful. I recently replaced an old computer with a shiny new version, and backed up my folder on Apple’s iCloud. I then deleted it from one of my computers.
And Apple, in its wisdom, concluded, well, if he’s deleting this Cloud-linked file off one computer, I guess he doesn’t want it! So they automatically deleted it from the Cloud, too. And then they also deleted it from an entirely separate computer that I’d also very carefully and deliberately put the folder.
It was obviously intended as a way of keeping a user’s experience smooth and seamless across multiple devices. But it actually completely perverted what I was intending to do — I was putting it on multiple devices and in the cloud to keep it safe, not delete it everywhere. I had a happy ending. I saved the folders thanks to a disk recovery app I dropped a hundred bucks on. But this is a really stupid design decision on Apple’s part. They should fix it. Now.
Over at the National Post, on Monday, I published this video, where I noted that, as I’d previously warned, the provinces were going to need to update their vaccine game. As Ottawa speeds up vaccine procurement, the provinces will need to speed up their delivery.
My column in the Post this week was also about the pandemic. A day after my claim that Canadian governments can’t pivot, Doug Ford began trying to pivot Ontario. With case and hospitalization numbers surging, after weeks of only modest, incremental action, Ford put the province back under a real — sort of — form of lockdown. But in that typical Ford pattern we’ve seen too many times, he waited until it was too late to avoid a disaster before realizing there even was a disaster.
“The borders weren’t properly hardened,” I wrote, “the vaccines weren’t arriving in sufficient quantities to get ahead of a third wave, and this was all obvious weeks ago. It was obvious when Ford said the patios could open, and teased the imminent return of haircuts. It was obvious when he changed his mind on that and put the whole province back into the “shutdown” last week, but withheld a stay-at-home order. It was obvious earlier this week, when local public-health leaders closed schools in parts of Greater Toronto.
“But we waited? Why?”
Why indeed? Check that column out here.
Later in the week, having not quite entirely vented my spleen at Ontario’s failure, I published this video.
Over at TVO.org, well, as you’d guess, the pandemic was on our minds.
I started the week interviewing Anthony Dale, head of the Ontario Hospital Association, about the movement of patients across, and out of, the Greater Toronto Area. “For the first time in this pandemic,” he told me, “I am seeing so much fear and worry about the trajectory. Community spread is clearly completely out of control. The new variants are cutting people down more easily. It looks like we’re seeing a kind of acceleration in the number of patients requiring admission to ICU. Every day, I wake up and I look at the Critical Care Services census, and I wonder to myself, is today the day we’ll level off? And it just keeps getting higher.”
It’s a grim read. But it’s worth checking out. Find it here.
Later in the week, I spoke to Dr. Zain Chagla, an infectious disease expert in Hamilton, who explained to me how the new variants differ from “COVID Classic” — but also how they don’t.
“More transmission in comparable environments and an overall worsening in outcomes are the big differences,” the good doctor explained. “Some of these variants seem to pose a reinfection risk — having experienced COVID last year doesn’t necessarily prevent infection from variants, though it might still provide some protection from serious illness. In Canada, this isn’t a huge issue, because we’re doing reasonably well at preventing infections. But in other countries, where it’s harder to prevent infections and where health-care and hygiene systems are more fragile, this is not good. These communities do not want to be dealing with large numbers of reinfections.”
It’s a fascinating interview. You can read that one here.
OK, folks. I’m off to begin my weekend. Thanks for everything. And count those blessings! (And backup your data!)
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney