[daenz]

>The Canadian people are overwhelmingly vaccinated and don't mind wearing masks. 90+% of truckers are fully vaccinated.

Then why require the mandate? I haven't seen any answer to that question besides the implied: "because we demand full compliance."

[jsjsbdkj]

Do you understand how public health works? The vaccine does not 100% prevent any infection, it reduces the odds and intensity. Some people cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons. You would think computer people would understand "defense in depth".

Meanwhile, anti-vaccine people are single-handedly working to revive diseases that were almost eradicated:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/03/28/anti-v...

[walkhour]

> Do you understand how public health works?

Is the science settled on whether 90% vs 100% has an impact on the health of society given omicron?

> Meanwhile, anti-vaccine people are single-handedly working to revive diseases that were almost eradicated

Conflating traditional anti vaxers with the new COVID anti vaxers is dishonest, they actually usually come from different parts of the political spectrum.

[raxxorrax]

You don't have your facts correct because the vaccine does not inhibit transmission. Some argue it reduces the risk but the data is inconclusive.

It is militancy like yours that is elevating opposition.

I am vaccinated but support anyone that stands up to a mandate, vaccination passes or emergency powers. I don't really have to justify that any further.

[shinyamagami]

Please stay home forever and never get out because some people cannot get vaccinated. No exceptions. I hope those unvaccinated prove scientists right some day. It would take decades.

[absoluteharam]

it sounds like you’re using the post covid-19 definition of Vaccine.

It’s amazing that the definition of a word like vaccine could change suddenly, because it is was incompatible to one virus — a mysterious super virus whose origin is still unknown, according to the WHO.

[Tiktaalik]

Omicron may be "mild" to healthy, vaccinated people, but it's a serious, deadly health threat to the unvaccinated elderly.

Accordingly places where transmission is likely (eg. a small intimate restaurant) are serious and potentially deadly health risks to the elderly, unvaccinated part of the population.

So long as our hospitals are overwhelmed (as they currently are) it's a very bad idea to open up these high transmission areas to unvaccinated people, as they'll inevitably catch the disease and are so much more likely to end up in the hospital in ICU.

This is why restaurants/bars/etc should continue to have vaccine mandates even though so many people are vaccinated.

The point isn't to coerce the last 10% into getting vaccinated. It's to protect the hospitals from being overwhelmed by new cases from the unvaccinated.

[b112]

This is a strange comment to me.

In all provinces, the elderly were the very first to get vaccinated. First. First to get second vaccinations, and for a long time, the only group allowed to even get a third shot.

There are no unvaccinated elderly people running around, unless they insist on not being vaccinated. In such cases, that's their choice, and no one should take additional precautions for those opting out.

Your last paragraph makes sense, but the rest?!

[Tiktaalik]

There's plenty of unvaccinated elderly getting themselves killed. This article has charts showing deaths/ICU/hospitalized over the last 120 days. The elderly and unvaccinated are particularily impacted. https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/covid-19-in-alberta-788-weekend-...

> In such cases, that's their choice, and no one should take additional precautions for those opting out.

Yeah it's getting to the point where if stubborn old people want to meet their maker sooner than later, well sure that's their choice and we should let them, but at the moment the hospitals are overwhelmed and this has negative impacts on everyone, as it delays all the other surgeries and other work that the hospital needs to do.

I'm fine with lifting vaccine mandates once hospitals are unlikely to get overwhelmed, but it's not at all clear we're at this point yet.

Going to be very interesting to see what happens in Alberta and Sask over the next little while as they're lifting the vaccine passports.

[absoluteharam]

> A death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death identified…

notice the probable or confirmed case and know that hospitals (US) are eligible for additional reimbursement with covid “case” patient from a $100 Billion CARES act fund (at minimum)

>Individuals who received at least one dose was calculated as (# of individuals who received at least one dose) / (population estimate).

Deaths are also only attributed to Vaccinated category after 14 days from the second dose, else it’s a “unvaccinated” death.

This is the first vaccine ever where you can die 13 days after a vaccine, and be classified unvaccinated. It’s just magical how “science” to advance “public health” works.

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm... — the source data for the site in the parent post

[thisiswilson]

You've made a lot of claims on this post, but can you cite a source behind your statement of "This is the first vaccine ever where you can die 13 days after a vaccine, and be classified unvaccinated."? It also makes sense, since you've taken a vaccine, but you have not developed the expected antibodies until ~14 days.

[pixelcloud]

This doesn't change anything in terms of hospital capacities here. The surgery backlog is massive, the hospitals are overrun with covid patients. Taking additional precautions is an attempt to try to protect the larger populations access to healthcare.

[Tiktaalik]

yeah politicians don't want people to have healthcare. cuckoo.

Sounds like a nonsense insane tin foil hat theory to me.

[epgui]

Because the few who don’t comply to public health recommendations/orders are responsible for the greater share of the economic burden of disease, and this burden was totally preventable.

[Zanneth]

That is not true at all. The greatest burden on the economy was the lockdowns and extreme countermeasures. People choosing not to get vaccinated may have caused unnecessary burden on the healthcare system, but to blame them for the struggling economy is just wrong.

[epgui]

I am a life scientist, and with respect, you're flatly incorrect. The first-order costs of public health measures scale linearly, and the first-order costs of infectious diseases scale exponentially. Higher-order costs are at least comparable between the two, and I would argue much higher in the case of covid than in the case of lockdowns.

(This being said, very few governments did lockdowns properly, and therefore almost every half-measure taken was ineffective and wasteful.)

[vorpalhex]

As a heads up, your bio still says you are a software engineer at CircleCI.

[epgui]

That I am, but I have 12 years of post secondary education (and research experience) in life science, mostly in biochem.

[Zanneth]

A vast majority of people who contract COVID recover without any treatment. Are you arguing that the minority who don't impose higher costs than locking down the entire country?

[greycol]

Lets assume that the only cost associated with covid is lost work. So lets weight death rate by age group and years to retirement i.e. if you're in the 50-59 age group you have a 1.3 percent death rate and we'll say 10 years till retirement, 20-29 0.2% and 40 years (we'll exclude people from 60 up as they obviously contribute nothing to society and their deaths are meaningless especially in a economic sense /s). We'll ignore age distribution as we're talking about Canada which has a population pyramid which is pretty much square accross ages 10-60 (similiar to US FYI).

So as a napkin calculation how many normalised years of lost labour do we have from the deaths... 0.13 years from the 50-59 year olds, 40-49 0.08, 30-39 0.06, 20-29 0.08, 10-19 0.1, for a total of 0.45 years of lost labour from deaths if the whole country caught covid.

In a world were all economic activity can be turned on and off like a lightswitch it would make economic sense for Canada to flick that switch and leave it off for up to 5 months (of absolutely zero economic activity which is not the actual level of lockdown as essentials still run) to irradicate covid, from the impact of deaths on work produced alone.

So yes as a general rule I would argue that locking down entire countries can make great economic sense if you can lower your death rate (say by using the time where covid spread is reduced by rolling out a vacine that would reduce the lost time to 0.0045 years if everyone got it). Though of course you'd need to get into the nitty gritty of stunted business growth and if killing off 8% of people over 60 is a good way to reduce taxes needed to support them to have a definitive answer.

NB: I'll add that I'm replying to your question on the economic sense. Personally I find reducing the pandemic to this view deplorable but as some do argue it I thought I'd argue the countercase along those lines. I.E. Even if you're a heartless bastard only interested in money you should still be enforcing strict controls until your population is aproaching as vaccinated as it's going to get.

[epgui]

This is obviously a gross oversimplification, but it's exactly the kind of napkin maths that people need to make before they pass judgment based on no more than gut-feeling and misguided suggestions from the internet.

Add to that that the true cost of Covid-19 in survivors (including asymptomatic and mild cases) remains to be seen in terms of DALYs/QALYs, and is known to be significantly greater than zero. [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00403-0

[mastersummoner]

Over 900k dead in the US alone from covid. Sure, that's a minority, but can you really shrug your shoulders at that number and say it's just a minority, no big deal?

[Zanneth]

Did I say that it wasn’t a big deal? Nobody is denying that. I cringe at the number of people who die every year due to smoking, car accidents, etc. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend mandating anything that gets in the way of people taking those risks if they choose to.

[epgui]

I can only guess what your question is (sorry, bad grammar), but I’d rather not guess. What exactly is the question?

[YZF]

What extreme countermeasures were done in BC? Closing Yoga studios for 4 weeks? Our economy has done pretty well during the pandemic. Is it all fun and games, nope.

As a vaccinated person I flat out blame the people that didn't get vaccinated for making the last year much worse than it'd had to be. If we had better vaccine coverage we wouldn't need the restrictions that we had to put in place. They don't only put burden on the healthcare system (which they do), preventing people that need care from getting it (which they do), but they also mean the rest of us have to do more because they're not willing to do their share. I guess the bright side is that this is a tiny minority around these parts.

[epgui]

For my part, while I do blame the unvaccinated at least in part, I place even greater blame on all the anti-mask and anti-social-distancing insanity we’ve seen in both Canada and the US. (In many cases these are the same groups of people, it seems... But I believe in being specific in my accusations.)

While we developed vaccines at an impressive speed, governments royally screwed up the rollouts and logistics. Had we all done real proper lockdowns and taken public health recommendations seriously for a few weeks, and had governments been properly supportive (ie.: enabling) of that, our current vaccination uptake might have been enough to eradicate covid-19.

[nathanaldensr]

You can't possibly know these hypothetical would-have-been futures would have actually happened. You're not omnipotent.

[epgui]

You really don’t need to be omnipotent to know it. For months, Canada was hovering at an Rt just above 1.0. Very little more would have been required to tip the balance.

[_3u10]

Exactly. In Canada, $40,000 per person was spent on lockdowns most of which went to large companies posting record profits. Zilch on making an ICU room for every Canadian which is what that money could have bought should it have been spent responsibly.

[bearjaws]

You understand that you can't just throw money and magically create doctors, ICU nurses, pharmacists, etc?

[JamisonM]

It is wild to me that people don't understand that with infinite funds spent the day the first wave hit the first fully qualified nurses that would be hitting the hospitals would just be arriving now at the earliest. And those wouldn't have spent a day on a ward or in an ICU yet... and you would be years away from more doctors. Not to mention physical infrastructure.. all the while the virus scales exponentially!

[_3u10]

That’s kind of exactly how it works. Why do you think people are dropping out of law school for coding boot camp?

Why do you think our hospitals are understaffed? It’s not because of the great pay of the Canadian system

[epgui]

I am prepared to believe this number, but I think a citation would be very helpful here. In any case, have you bothered to also look up the economic burden of disease of covid-19 in Canada, in terms of QALYs and/or DALYs?

[JamisonM]

The poster's assertion that none of the pandemic money was spent on increasing ICU capacity is false, capacities were increased in every province, in mine by about 35-40%.

That said you can't healthcare-capacity your way out of a pandemic, the USA has managed to overwhelm its capacity in numerous jurisdictions despite having much higher baseline capacity than any Canadian jurisdiction. It is not an honest argument worth engaging with.

[_3u10]

I said $40k per person was enough to build an ICU bed for everyone in Canada. My assertion is honest. And you’ve provided no data / argument to refute it.

Not sure what province you are in but using the Canadian average and a 40% increase in beds, that’s roughly $50 million per bed. That is quite frankly a colossal waste of money. Do you feel that this is money well spent?

[_3u10]

Not familiar with either of those acronyms.

It’s mentioned in Pierre Poliveres speech in parliament, here’s a link: https://youtu.be/cGbnjF3OdNQ

[shakna]

QALYs and DALYs are how you measure the burden of health.

Quality-Adjusted Life Years, and Disability Affected Life Years, respectively. Without an understanding of them, you can't actually have an objective conversation about measuring the impact of any kind of illness.

[epgui]

Without QALYs and DALYs, any comparison or weighing of dollars and health outcomes are meaningless. Wiki has enough to point you in the right general direction!

[FpUser]

Utter BS.

There were no orders but recommendations only in regards to vaccines. I understand you realize the difference between the order and recommendation. Recommendation does not require compliance.

And the burden was caused by lockdowns and complete absence of vaccines in Canada for a big while

[epgui]

In the context of public health, "compliance" is a word that is used to refer to the percentage of people who follow expert advice. The same word, "compliance", is used to describe how many people take their prescribed pills properly and on schedule. The word doesn't only apply for "mandates" or "orders", and as you correctly pointed out, what ultimately matters is what people do.

[YZF]

I'm pretty sure the decision to require truckers to be vaccinated at the border crossing or quarantine (no, they're not forced to vaccinate) came about around Nov 18th when Delta was ramping up. It's just that the implementation was not immediate. I think it made sense back then to try and figure out ways to generally increase the vaccine coverage. By the way the US has the exact same requirement (so even getting the Canadian Federal government to reverse its position here wouldn't change anything for those truckers).

Now with Omicron (for the last few weeks at least) it's clearly not needed any more, but governments move slowly, so it'd take a few more weeks. There's other restrictions that were put in around that timeframe that no longer make sense, like requiring PCR tests, and all those are on their way out.

This protest makes no sense except as a way of sowing chaos and seeking to destabilize the country.

[bawolff]

Well yes. Vaccines are most effective on a population level.

[sailingparrot]

Because otherwise there is approximately nothing the federal government can do to end the blockade if the protestor don't leave by themselves. No matter if most of the population want it to end.

This allows the federal government to send the army if necessary (although Trudeau said they wouldn't), allows the police to fine and detain protestor that do not want to leave the blockade. And allows the federal government to require private companies to provide services, in this case towing companies to tow the rigs.

It also allows for freezing bank accounts of e.g. companies that have trucks participating in the blockade without a court mandate.

I think, but I am not sure, that this only applies to "strategic sites", in this case the border and maybe highways. Protester blocking a random street in Ottawa may not be concerned.

So, why require the mandate: To prevent the slim minority of truckers participating in the blockade from impacting everyone else for months.

[akomtu]

A proper answer would be to lift the mandate to vaccinate all truckers, because it doesn't make any sense anyway, give them 2 days to clear the roads, and bring in troops if they refuse. Problem is, Trudeau's ego is too big to yield to a bunch of unwashed truckers.

[sailingparrot]

Except Trudeau lifting the mandate would not change anything since this is also a requirements by the US for truckers to cross.

But sure, it's all because of Trudeau's ego.

"beginning in early January 2022, DHS will require that all inbound foreign national travelers crossing U.S. land or ferry POEs – whether for essential or non-essential reasons – be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and provide related proof of vaccination. This approach will provide ample time for essential travelers such as truckers, students, and healthcare workers to get vaccinated."

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2021/10/12/secretary-mayorkas-allow...

[b112]

Except Trudeau lifting the mandate would not change anything

So it causes no harmful change for Canadians in general, for as you say, nothing changes.

So... why not give in to this demand then?

As an aside, forcing truckers to get vaccinated makes no sense. They mostly work in isolation, and it isn't like blocking the virus at borders really helps these days.

I support forced vaccination for front line health care workers, those caring for the elderly, where it matters.

[staticman2]

Laws in a democracy shouldn't be set by whatever minority decides to block streets with heavy equipments.

Giving in would set a terrible precedent and would undermine Canada's continued existence as a free society.