Shots

 

Covid landed on the world like a bomb late last year. The first cases were in China. It started arriving around the rest of the world early in the new year, and the USA had its first death early in February.

Canada has since lost over 11,000 lives; the USA just under a quarter of a million, and the entire world has lost 1.33 million.

This all took significantly less than a year to happen.

What do those numbers mean?

Let's take the US figures, and imagine an absolutely average small city of 100,000 people. That group would have had 3,366 known to have been infected with Covid-19, and out of those infected 75 would have died.

Now imagine the USA divided into 3,282 such groupings. That is how many people live in that country. In each 100,000 person group there would have been another 3,366 infected and another 75 dead.

In my own country of Canada the numbers are somewhat better, but still very grim. Each 100,000 person block of Canadians has had 29 deaths.

That's why the world has reacted as it has.

This is why my own little life has had to change.

I wear a mask in the grocery store and we haven't seen any member of our family since this thing started.

Normally, Helen is off at some kind of music get-together almost every day. This has stopped. Normally, I am off doing Jiu-Jitsu almost daily. This has also stopped.

Normally, we travel a lot; almost 1/3 of the time we are away. Covid actually exploded while we were off on a holiday. This was cut short, and we headed home. A big trip to Europe arranged for autumn was canceled, and there were no short trips to go see friends and family. We have never missed a Christmas with family in Victoria but will be staying home this year.

This hasn't really been a hardship, but it all is a major change. We are happy Covid hasn't had any greater direct impact on us. Nobody in our family has gotten sick.

There have been pandemics in the past. Spanish flu jumps to mind. It was a weird one, seeming to spring from nowhere, and then it vanished again all on its own.

Other diseases stuck around and were just part of the landscape, such as polio and smallpox. Whatever happened to them?

Silly me; how could I forget? What happened to those killers was the introduction of vaccines. As a kid in the 1960s, I was one of many who received polio and smallpox vaccinations. Both diseases vanished from the western world, and by 1980 there was no smallpox left on the loose anywhere on the planet. It was systematically hunted down and wiped out.

That's why I was hoping that a vaccine would be possible for Covid-19. Not every disease can be attacked this way. Sometimes a vaccine can work, but that the protection is far from ideal, and requires frequent boosters.

Of course, anything along that line would be a good thing. Authorities were shooting for something that would be at least 50% effective and were very hopeful that 70% would not be unrealistic. In either case, a vaccine would be a useful tool, but not a pandemic-ender on its own. By comparison, the smallpox vaccine was 90% effective.

Now researchers are finishing the steps in the creation and testing of several Covid vaccines. After clinical trials, two seem almost ready to distribute and the effectiveness seems to be stunning.

One is around 90%, and the other is even higher than that. In each of these vaccine trials, 30,000 people received injections. Half received the vaccine, while the other half were given a placebo.

In the trial of one of these Covid-19 vaccines 90 people in the group of 15,000 who received placebos contracted Covid, 11 of the cases were serious. Of the 15,000 who got the actual vaccine, 5 contracted Covid, and none of the cases was serious. The other trial hasn't released the detailed figures.

Both vaccines will likely be starting distribution in late December or early January.

This is huge. Until now, there was no indication that there would ever be anything even close to an end for Covid. Now it is possible.

The first hurdles will all be about distribution. Many of the most promising vaccines have already been in production for some time. The bottleneck has been testing and government approval. 

One of these two vaccines is extremely difficult to transport and to store. It has to be kept at an extremely low temperature. The other is far better in this regard. There are also dozens of other vaccines hot on their heels.

There will be priority assigned to certain groups; health workers, care-home residents, and people with high-risk conditions. For a while, it will seem as if it is taking forever to be available for everyone, but then suddenly it will be everywhere in large quantities.

Then the saddest and most exasperating phenomenon will happen. A shocking number of people have stated that they will be in no hurry to get vaccinated, and many of these don't plan on getting the shots at all.

Vaccines have been getting a bad rap. There has been all that nonsense where they have been falsely linked to autism. People also fear the list of ingredients, or distrust drug companies so much that they are sure it's all a big conspiracy.

Let's put the importance of vaccines in an easy to understand form. Three of the biggest killers of the 20th century were the First World War (about 20 million dead), Spanish Flu (50 million dead), and the Second World War (about 80 million dead). Those three accounted for 150 million tragic deaths. In comparison, smallpox killed 300 million. That's twice as many. Imagine how many more would have died if nobody had been willing to be vaccinated against smallpox.

But let's look at the future instead of the past. What if Covid kills as many in 2021 as it has so far in 2020? With no end game in sight, let's say it keeps doing so for 20 years. That would mean the deaths of around 25 million people that could easily be avoided. That would put it somewhere in between the death tolls of World War One and the Spanish Flu.

I plan on getting vaccinated as soon as I can. This will likely require two shots several weeks apart. I'm good with that. It also isn't an issue if the immunity is short-lived. If yearly shots are needed I won't mind at all.

People talk about wanting things to get back to normal. It strikes me as a fine desire that we should all work towards. It won't come true just by wishing.

We should all wear our masks, and keep our distance. We should not have social gatherings, and when a vaccine becomes available we should all get our shots.