Since my last post here, a lot of stuff has changed, Canada is now facing an election, september 20. It’s definitely an election with a covid flavor, and even an American one .
Anti-Mask, Anti-vaxx anti all, with a sprinkle of Q and far right tendency, with covid. A lot of far right people recycled them self into Covid denying/Conspiracy theory and the lot, not that they weren’t conspiracy theorist before, member from all racist far right group shifted to the Anti-covid discourse, that’s the american flavor, thankfully we are talking about a fairly low number of people, so vaccination number are still pretty good, we will probably plateau at something near 90% of the 12-99+ years old with vaccination of 6-11 years old beginning in november .
So now with the Delta variant, Delta +, Lambda, unvaccinated people make the bulk of hospitalisation, vaccinated people still get it, at a lower rate (early study talk about 29 times less likely), and rarely get sick .
New variants are not that much more deadly, thankfully, the scary part is that the more it goes around, the more likely is a mutation giving those variant more extreme variation, even rending the vaccine ineffective, of course we are living darwinism at warp speed at the moment, and nobody can really predict the outcome in mid and long term.
Often viruses tend to be more contagious, and less deadly, right now, it’s not what we see sadly, Delta is roughly as deadly as Alpha, in Canada, with a fairly high vaccination rate, it almost only kills unvaccinated people, so the total number stays relatively low.
They are talking about a R0 of 6 for the Delta variant, without any mitigation measure, of course, Alpha was about 3 if i remember correctly, so it’s not a insignifiant progression, it’s a lot, coinciding with the return to school and a more loose attitude for the mitigation measure for most.
The vaccine waning protection seems to be more and more confirmed, country who respected strictly the Pfizer delay between the two doses, saw a big spike with Delta (Israel), place like Canada where at first it was ~90 days between dose, seem to fare better with Delta, so now a booster shot is probably going to be necessary 8 month after the second dose. That suck but it was not completely unforeseen even last year .
So now we have an election here in Canada, it’s going to be a sort of referendum on what the PLC did for the last 2 years, now percentagewise, Conservative and Liberal are neck and neck, but in term of county, Liberal is still up by 10, still not a majority, at 146, traditionally conservative county skew the percentage, since their majority is very high .
Most province, are planning some sort of Vaccination proof, Quebec is going to be the first to deploy it , september 1, using SMART Health Card (SHC), a framework not directly designed for that kind of task, but this could work to be sure to have digitally signed proof of vaccination, that is impossible to falsify (Without the private key) .
More on that later this week.