End in sight for pandemic?

April update to this post: lmao never mind

As of today, both of my parents have received the first dose of the vaccine and my 92-year-old grandmother is scheduled to receive hers on Monday. I suspect I'll be lucky if I get mine before July, but I'm relatively young, relatively healthy and relatively patient. I can wait.

Active cases in my town are down to about 12, with a total of maybe 2000 cases and a handful of deaths since the pandemic began. People are wearing masks and doctors and nurses are getting better at treating covid cases as they learn more about the disease.

More than that, the sun is out and the snow will soon begin to melt. I seem to recall the warm weather and being able to go outside gave us a bit of a break last year, though it wasn't until much later in the year. 

Still, we aren't out of the woods yet. The worst thing that can happen now is governments giving into the fatigue we all feel and relaxing our social distancing measures. Worse still, in Canada we live on top of a giant incubator to our south that never took the pandemic seriously. Though to be fair to the Americans, they're doing a much better job of vaccinating their population than we are up here.

At some point last year I made the prediction that 600,000 Americans would die of covid and 40,000 Canadians. Just a hunch, based on the numbers of the Civil War dead of one country and the WW2 dead of the other. The number of American covid deaths is officially at 534,000, though I suspect the actual number is much higher, probably already above 600,000 given how politicized the the issue is and how both Trump and Biden admins have been trying to play down the numbers. Canadian covid deaths stand at 22,434. The numbers might actually be higher than that, but I doubt they're double the official figure and I doubt they'll get there now––and I'm quite glad to have overestimated the Canadian number.

The real problem with the number of Canadian covid deaths, though, is that we're going to look at them and say, 'hey, that's not so bad.' Having the low bar of slightly better healthcare than the Americans has been a core part of our national identity ever since we implemented almost universal healthcare (no dental, vision, pharma, etc). Now we don't even have that. 

The end might be in sight for the pandemic, but I'm pessimistic about the reckoning that needs to come after.