Health Care Workers that don’t  care

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

I read something startling. Really startling. According to the Winnipeg Free Press, 2 days before health care workers were required to confirm that they had been vaccinated and to declare their immunization status,

“Nearly one quarter of Manitoba’s health-care staff who deal directly with the public had not disclosed their Covid-19 immunization status…Roughly 10,000 of 42,000—physicians, residents, nurses, and aides—have refused to reveal their status despite being mandated to advise their employers.”

 

These workers did more than abandon their patients. They were prepared to keep their supervisors guessing about whether or not they would be able to work. They made it as difficult as possible for health care supervisors and administrators to get sufficient help to care for patients. In other words—these health care workers did not care at all about their patients. And those patients are among the most vulnerable in our society. As the striking path of the pandemic through personal care homes and health care facilities showed, those people were indeed extremely vulnerable.

I take comfort from the fact that on the first day of the new health orders most health care workers, by a vast majority, did show up for work. I heard it was about 95%. But why didn’t more people advise the health care facilities where they worked that they would be working? Added to that, what about the other 5% who did not show up?

Is this not reckless endangerment? Are these recalcitrant health care workers worthy of being kept on? Is this not scandalous dereliction of duty? I don’t know about you, but I find this shocking!  What kind of health care workers are these people? They are health care workers who don’t care.

Climate Change Here and Now

Climate change, Environmental Apocalypse

 

When it comes to climate change, many of us fear what the future will bring. And we should fear that. But this is what we are already seeing!

Western Canada and United States already experienced the incredible this summer. The heat wave and the fires it caused were astounding. As the Guardian said,

“Heat and fires it caused killed hundreds of people, and are estimated to have killed a billion sea creatures. Daily temperature records were smashed by more than 5C in some places. In Lytton British Columbia the heat reached 49.6C. The wildfires that consumed the town produced their own thunderstorms.”

The west coast of Canada, an area famous for mild temperature experienced Canada’s highest temperature ever as a result of what scientists have called a heat dome. That happened when a ridge of high pressure acted like the lid of a hot pot with boiling water that prevented hot air to escape. Such events have been extremely rare in the past.  But as the Guardian claimed, “an initial study shows human activity made this heat dome…150 times more likely.” This is where we are—here and now. This is not our dire future. We are in our dire future.

The World Weather Attribution Group of scientists use computer models to assess global trends of climate change and heating temperatures and extreme weather events.  They warned that temperature increases of 5ºC like B.C. experienced this year “exceeded their worst-case scenarios.”

As the Guardian said, “Scientists did not hide their alarm that a usually cool part of the Pacific northwest had been turned into a furnace.”

A climatologist Nick Bond said, “it blows my mind.” Mine too.

Welcome to apocalypse now.

Statistics are not always Lies

Epidemics/Pandemics, The Sleep of Reason

Mark Twain famously disparaged statistics. He said, “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.” Maybe (OK probably) I am not sophisticated enough to understand them but sometimes those stats tell a powerful story. Sometimes stats are important.

I read some stunning stats yesterday. Of all the provinces in Canada Saskatchewan has the lowest rate of vaccination uptake in the country. At the same time, Saskatchewan has the highest rate of new Covid-19 cases in the past 14 days as it gears up to send Covid-19 patients out of the province for help because its health care system is on the brink. Yesterday, Saskatchewan had 510 new Covid-19 cases  per 100,000 people in the past 14 days. Prince Edward Island on the other hand had the highest rate of vaccine uptake among all the provinces and the lowest rate of new Covid-19 cases in the past 14 days per 1000,000 people  at 6.  Remember this is per 100,000! 510 to 9! Does that not tell us a lot about the effectiveness of the vaccines? Frankly that is a stunning statistic.

The people who are not taking up the vaccines in my opinion are significantly responsible for this. The Vaccines are free and widely available.  The reasons for not taking them have been largely discredited. Yet many people are not taking them, to the point where health care systems are on the brink of disaster.

Yet we are expected not to openly criticize the people who resist vaccines because criticism will not be effective. I disagree with that. We should criticize. We should do it with kindness (as I was reminded recently), but we should do it. A friend has a duty to advise a friend when we see them going on a dangerous path.

 

 

 

A stealth Enemy: Air Quality

Climate change, Environment, Environmental Apocalypse, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Pollution

 

In early 2020 the world changed–we experienced Covid-19. This was something new an international pandemic that hit home to everyone except the most obtuse virus deniers, religious fanatics, anti-science cranks, and conservatives and their fellow travelers.

Covid-19 was big. It changed the world. In many respects the world changed including massive economic slow-downs or even lockdowns. For more than a year we were required to wear masks in most social settings. Many of us were not able to work. An international Marshall plan was established to work on vaccines. Millions of people died while millions of people denied the reality of their illness or the efficacy of the vaccines created to stem the tide. Yes, the world was different.

In the midst of this pandemic and the international response it was difficult to see anything else. As a result, we missed some pretty important things. For example, few paid attention to air quality. That was a mistake.

Rebecca Solnit was the first to draw my attention to this disturbing fact. As she reported in The Guardian,

“While Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we confronted coronavirus.”

  

I was shocked to read that. It couldn’t be true. Could it?

After all at the time she wrote, 2.8 million people had died as a result of Covid-19 and it captured our entire attention. Whether we believed it or not, clearly covid-19 was the issue. Since then of course, millions more have died, and we are nowhere need done with this pandemic.

What most of us did not know is that during the first 15 months of the pandemic that Solnit was writing about “3 times as many people died from air pollution.”

While Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we confronted coronavirus.

 

According to a recent scientific study, 8.7 million people per year die of the effects of air pollution. And part of the problem is that most of us are unaware of this disturbing fact. Air pollution is a largely invisible enemy unless you visit some place like Phoenix Arizona as I did for nearly 10 years in a row. You can see it there. Air pollution usually arrives by stealth. As a result, unlike Covid-19 the world has not rallied to defeat it. There have been no lockdowns or mask requirements because of air pollution. Largely this stealth attack has gone unnoticed and unquestioned.  We have normalized the havoc by treating it as what Solnit called “moral background noise.” Instead Covid-19 gets all the attention. Solnit says we should treat air pollution like an emergency, like we have done with Covid-19. She does not say attention to Covid-19 was misplaced.

The first thing we must realize is that there is more than one serious consequence to burning fossil fuels.  We must also recognize that  climate change is not the only serious effect of our determination to burn fossil fuels. Climate change is a serious problem, perhaps the most serious in the world right now, notwithstanding Covid-19, but so is air quality.  The problem is that burning fossils fuels is to deep a part of the status quo that we don’t really see it. We are blind to it and have come to believe there is no reasonable alternative.

As Solnit said,

“We are designed to respond with alarm to something that just happened, that breaches norms, but not to things that have been going on for decades or centuries. The first task of most human rights and environmental movements is to make the invisible visible and to make what has long been accepted unacceptable. This has of course been done to some extent, with coal-burning power plants and with fracking in some places, but not with the overall causes of climate chaos.”

 

We cannot let this stealth bomber slip under the radar.  Climate change creates similar problems as until we experience dramatic effects as when wild fires consume British Columbia and California forests, or ice bergs break off continents, birds disappear, or in my case, beautiful flowers come earlier in spring, we often fail to take note of the serious changes. It is also difficult to notice when some of the richest and most predatory corporations in the world pay huge sums of money to pundits for hire to confuse the science and persuade these problems are not real.

We must be alert to these problems and the consequences they foist on us. We must dissent from the normal. We must resist the fake reality that predatory capitalist firms try to impose upon us.  As Solnit said,

“According to CNBC, at the outset of the pandemic, “New Delhi recorded a 60% fall of PM2.5 from 2019 levels, Seoul registered a 54% drop, while the fall in China’s Wuhan came in at 44%.” Returning to normal means drowning out the birds and blurring out the mountains and accepting 8.7 million air pollution deaths a year. Those deaths have been normalized; they need to be denormalized.”

Solnit also reminded us that,

 

“A lot of attention was paid to whatever actions might have caused Covid-19 to cross from animals to humans, but the actions that take fossil fuel out of the ground to produce that pollution that kills 8.7 million annually, along with acidifying oceans and climate chaos, should be considered far more outrageous a transgression against public health and safety.”

 

One of the excuses these corporations have tried to get us to believe is that we can’t afford to change. One thing Covid-19 has showed us is that we can afford to spend the money that it takes to fight off disaster. Hugely impactful changes require huge responses. We can do it. We must. We must not tolerate a “normal” that costs the lives of 8.7 million people every year (in addition to all the other horrific effects of fossil fuel consumption.

Rebecca Solnit left us with some hope in her important essay:

“My hope for a post-pandemic world is that the old excuses for doing nothing about climate – that it is impossible to change the status quo and too expensive to do so – have been stripped away. In response to the pandemic, we in the US have spent trillions of dollars and changed how we live and work. We need the will to do the same for the climate crisis… With a drawdown on carbon emissions and a move toward cleaner power, we could have a world with more birdsong and views of mountains and fewer pollution deaths. But first we have to recognize both the problem and the possibilities.”

 

We need to get serious about climate change and air pollution and stop ignoring the problem or paying lip service to them as we have been doing in Canada. It is time for change. It is time to realize that this is not a future problem—this is happening now. This is apocalypse now.

Welcome to the apocalypse: Doom is Here

Climate change, Environment, Environmental Apocalypse

 

For a number of years now we have been hearing, seeing, and reading predictions of doom. There have been so many such predictions that many people have stopped listening, watching, or examining such claims. People have doom fatigue.

I know a good friend of mine who said to me, quite a few years, “We are fucked.”  Sorry for the bad word. He used it so I feel I must tell you the truth. Frankly, I always thought he was exaggerating. Now I know he was telling the truth.

In fact, now I would go one big step farther than that. Doom is here. It is not something my grandchildren will have to worry about. I will have to worry about it. and I am an old man who will die soon as I was once told.

That has never been clearer than it is in this year 2021. The apocalypse is here.  What convinced me of that was the incredible weather this year. In particular, the off the charts heat wave in British Columbia convinced me of that. British Columbia is of course the last place we expect heat waves. British Columbia is famous for mild weather. Mild winters and mild summers. Perfect climate in other words. Well not this year. In fact, not in the last few years.

It is for that that reason that Sir David King the former U.K chief scientific advisor said, “Nowhere is safe…who would have predicted a temperature of 48/49C in British Columbia?”  The answer is obvious–no one would have predicted that.

In fact, I heard a climate scientist say that those temperatures did not appear on any of the climate models, not even the most extreme. It was not only unexpected, it was basically incomprehensible.

Welcome to apocalypse now. You don’t need to wait for it; it’s here. We are doomed. I want to explore this topic in future posts.

 

Nearing the End?

Epidemics/Pandemics

Are we nearing the end of the pandemic?  It is too early to tell, but there are some encouraging signs.

Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, a woman of quiet wisdom I have found, as well as a conservative person not given to making radical statements (unlike some impetuous bloggers) said,

“cases have started levelling off as more people get vaccinated and after public health measures were reintroduced in August and September to slow transmission. It’s the first time since July where the pandemic does not appear to be in a growth pattern for the country.”

 

We must remember she did not go any further than that. After all she is a careful, prudent scientist. Not some blathering blogger. But you can’t blame us for getting excited after 18 months of pandemic.

Dr. Tam also mentioned that Saskatchewan and Alberta had the highest rates of Covid among the provinces. She also mentioned that according to Public Health Agency data areas of the country that were hardest hit recently were those who eliminated rules on mask wearing and gathering sizes too early while not enough people had been vaccinated against Covid-19.

I wish more people in Canada understood this and trusted our top health officials instead of getting their public health advice from personal research on the Internet. Too many people think medicine is easy and that 7 years or more of medical education is not needed to evaluate the science of vaccines.

 

 

Statistics of the War in Afghanistan

Moral Humility, War, War in Afghanistan

 

Mark Twain once said, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” But there are also some statistics that are pretty darn telling.

Here are some interesting statistics about the war as of mid-April 2021.

The American war in Afghanistan cost a lot of treasure. At least a trillion and maybe more, but when it gets to figures like that my eyes glaze over anyway. Whether it was one trillion or two or three who really cares. But importantly, lives.  The war lasted 20 years. The longest war in US history.  And we must remember the US has been in a lot of wars.

2,442 US troops died in the war.  3,800 American private security forces died. I found it interesting that more private American soldiers died than regular military.  It “paid off” for Americans to outsource the war as much as possible. After all who feels sorry for private security forces?

20,666 Americans were injured in the war. Much of the suffering of war is caused by injury. People came back from the war with all kinds of injuries including, of course, post-traumatic stress disorder.

Even though no one in the west really pays attention to this, but 47,245 Afghans died in the war. This is really the most important number though people in the west pay so little attention to it. This of course followed the 10-year war with Russia.  The people have Afghanistan have suffered enormously. That much is clear from the numbers.

 

That is a lot of suffering.

Now for the question:  What was worth so much suffering?

 

Dragon’s Mouth

Orchids of Manitoba, Wild flowers of Manitoba

 

There are some spectacular beauties in the bogs of Manitoba.  One of them is an orchid called Dragon’s Mouth.

After visiting the Brokenhead ecological reserve where I am not allowed to get off the trail, in order  to protect the flowers of course,  I went to another spot nearby where I had no such restrictions. Only fools go to such places. People like me. This allowed me to get very close to a spectacular Manitoba orchid—Dragon’s Mouth (Arethusa bulbosa). This year, the one’s in the reserve were not close enough to the boardwalk to photograph. Some years they have been much closer.

 

The Genus Arethusa to which this flower belongs is named after Arethusa of Greek mythology. Arethusa was a river nymph in the service of Artemis, goddess of the moon, and patroness of unmarried girls and  chastity. This gave her awesome responsibilities of course. One day when Arethusa was bathing in the river she was spotted by the river god Alpheus who naturally pursued her. This required her god Artemis to change into a spring to rescue her from her distress.

This is an interesting genus because there is only one species in the genus bulbosa is it. Sadly, like so many of our orchids these are declining in numbers because the wetlands in which they live are constantly being drained in the name of progress. Can you imagine a world without these gems? It would certainly be much poorer. Is that progress?

According to William Petrie’s Guide to Orchids of North America, “the flower gives the impression of being alive and listening  and reminds one of a small creature with erect ears and drooping tongue.”  I think this is a lovely description of this beautiful plant, except that it suggests the flower is not alive. It is certainly alive. Only a cretan would deny that.