When you tell people they can gather, they will gather. They may not read the fine print. This should surprise no one.
When exponential growth takes place for three months, as it has for variants and little is done to halt it, it will continue. This should surprise no one.
The question I would have asked today, if I could, would be:
You've said people need to do more, but what is the government doing to signal the seriousness of this to the majority of people, who don't pay attention to these briefings & have seen restrictions ease recently?
40-odd hours later, I'm still trying to fully process Friday's government COVID statement that warns about "myriad misinformation" on social media that "fuels our apprehension and anxiety."
I dunno man. The thing that fuels my anxiety is not having fully explained what's being done to stop cases from continuing to spike in BC. Among the issues: are many ACTUALLY anxious about spiking case counts? It would appear not! That's the friggin' problem!
Like, if you know real people, you know they're *less* anxious now than before restrictions are eased. They're seeing *more* people. And case counts are going way up. What's the plan? That's what makes me anxious.
THREAD: The first week of the @currentfv newsletter is drawing to a close, so let's figure out what we learned. 1. The province wants to complete the widening of 24 kilometres of highway in barely five years. Is this realistic? @BowinnMa said it's 'tight' overstory.activehosted.com/index.php?acti…
2. That same edition, we talked with family members of an Abbotsford hiker who took his life this year. Brook Morrison was a prominent local hiker who once quit his job to hike the PCT. Now his family is working to help connect more people to mental health supports.
Link 👆
3. That talk, as it happened, led us to a very interesting new way of delivering mental health support to people. That story's coming in next week's fvcurrent.com
1. In 2019, @BowinnMa rose in the legislature to give a lesson on induced demand. Widening highways, she said, does not solve congestion problems. 2. In 2020, John Horgan told Ma: Widen Highway 1 to Abbotsford!
So we asked her about that: bit.ly/2Punelu @currentfv
5. I'm not sure a satisfactory answer is possible on an issue that is stacked politically in a certain direction, as Highway 1 in the Fraser Valley is. It's to have politicians willing to engage in these discussions.
1. Was reminded of this, and I can talk about this now, so a short thread on why media monopolies are bad, a shortage of journalists is problematic, and why Twitter can be good.
*This is about structures, not people. One episode
of journalism says nothing about individuals.
2. @robyndoolittle's great 2017 unfounded series prompted Statistics Canada to begin reporting data on the rates at which sex assault complaints (and other crimes) were deemed "unfounded" by police departments. Those statistics began to be included in annual crime stats releases.
3. They show the rate at which a police department deems a report of sex assault to be "unfounded." They vary incredibly from one region to the other, suggesting one's likelihood of being believed is highly dependent on the police officer, and the agency they belong to.
1. Let's look for a quick second at how decreasing "normal COVID" cases can obscure how much of a problem contagious variants can be until it's too late.
This is a thought exercise to illustrate the numerical illusion. Don't take specific numbers too seriously.
2. Let's give, for the purpose only of this exercise, the variants a weekly new-case increase of 50% and "normal COVID" a weekly case decrease of 5%.
Again, these are chosen just to illustrate the concept.
Anyways, we start and new case numbers look to get better for weeeeks.
3. (The numbers are conceived of as daily new cases, FWIW) Anyways, look how small that green chunk is! The number of total cases keeps going down. Things seem under control. They are not at all.
'Italian virologist Andrea Crisanti said 'the risk of spreading the virus rises sharply," citing a recent study which found "if there is one positive case in a choir they can infect 50.“'