Well, fuck. Here is to year two.
Category: plague diaries
Saturday night.
I guess that Monday weather was an outlier: the news says it was the warmest March 11th in Toronto’s recorded history. Well, today was still sunny enough for an urban hike to my bank, a whole mile away. The weather was right around the freezing point, but the sun lured out so many others… I’d say about 80% of Torontonians wear masks outside. At this point, at least for me, seeing an unmasked face is like stumbling on a panda: so exotic and rare.
There’s apparently an Ice Fest on the main street right next to me. I had no idea that was even a thing. One of the many advantages of living in the biggest Canadian city, eh? Some of those human-sized ice sculptures are relatively crude. Some are incredibly elaborate. All are beautiful. They’ll likely melt by tomorrow, if the same hooligans that knocked over a couple of them don’t get to the rest tonight. Ephemeral beauty…
The Bobiverse book I mentioned a few nights ago was fun. The fourth in the series, it was quite different: the space stuff was more of a backdrop, with most of the novel taking place in a mysterious alien society. Not exactly what I was expecting – it was a bit of a switcheroo, with one book wrapped inside another, where the author knew his readers would buy it anyway. Still, the Bobiverse book (but not the Passage book) was good fun. Well written, with a ton of hard sci-fi concepts that even I, a self-proclaimed geek, have never even heard of, and plenty of literally LOL moments. The quantum concept of a soul was particularly interesting.
Some choice quotes to lure y’all in:
“All actions have risks. Most inactions even more so.”
“Laws of thermodynamics do not necessarily apply in quantum-mechanical situations.”
“The wonderful thing about knowledge is that you can give it away and still have it.”
“That was a question for another time. A much calmer time, filled with cups of coffee and purring cats.”
If that writing style sounds like something you think you might enjoy, start here, with the first book in the series: We Are Legion (We Are Bob).
In covid news, a resort in the Bahamas is trying something new and different. The place is called Baha Mar, on the island of Providence, and if you happen to test positive for covid while staying there, they’ll get you either a free flight back to the US or a complimentary two-week stay. (With a $150 meal credit, to boot!) That’s an interesting edge over their competition (which I imagine will heat up, since everyone wants to catch up on the lost time), and it just might pay for itself. Still, I can’t help thinking that some particularly cynical tourists might try to catch covid specifically to get two weeks of free lodging. That might sound unlikely, but never, ever underestimate the power of human stupidity. (Mostly I’m just jealous that they get to travel someplace hot and sunny. Canadian winter sucks. A lot.)
Good night, y’all.
Friday night.
One definite upside of this creepy Monday-Friday fly-by effect is that in my subjective experience, my life mostly consists of weekends now. How cool is that? Heh. This weekend’s project: learning more about trading options. More precisely, about finding inefficiencies in their pricing, when someone accidentally fatfingers a wrong price, and it’s yours for the taking. When you short a stock, you take on a lot of risk, since your losses can be potentially infinite if the stock price goes up by more than 100%. When you buy a put, on the other hand, you can still lose 100% of your money, but never more than that. It’s the user-friendly, safety-scissors version of shorting.
Earlier today, I figured it’d be a fine idea to short SeaWorld. (SEAS) They’re objectively bad guys, so on top of the profit motive, there’d also be some satisfaction for benefiting from their loss. As of today, this stock is priced 47% higher than their highest 2020 price point, just before the pandemic. I somehow doubt that most people’s “revenge spending” on entertainment will include going to SeaWorld to observe depressed and abused sea creatures all day every day. (Some might, but basing the entire stock’s valuation on those weirdos would be kinda fishy.) SeaWorld hasn’t added anything groundbreaking to their marine torture chambers – there are no krakens, no giant squids, no mermaids, no sirens. At $50.74, they’re grotesquely overpriced. So… buying puts, trading options. I got lucky to find a particularly inefficient price point on $25 puts for June 2021: they were selling at a much lower price than all the others. The price has normalized since I bought in earlier today, and that alone has resulted in a 56.6% unrealized profit. In one day. If the SeaWorld stock makes the slightest move downward between now and June, my gains will be even greater. That is remarkable, but also just plain dumb luck: I stumbled on that pricing inefficiency. But if I learn how to find them, and not just manually… Heh. Sounds like a new hobby.
In covid news, it’s possible that there was something wrong with a batch of AstraZeneca vaccines sent to the EU. Two women developed serious blood clots days after receiving their shots; one of them died. So far, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said it wasn’t due to the vaccine, since blood clots hadn’t been reported among recorded side effects. Even so, multiple countries have suspended AstraZeneca vaccinations, if only partially. This article claims that Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg suspended vaccinations from that particular batch, which would’ve been enough for a million shots. Additionally, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland suspended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine altogether, regardless of which batch it came from. That particular brand of vaccine had already faced a lot of prejudice in Europe, with people allegedly refusing to take it, and with Germany doing an awkward 180-turn, first claiming it’s not efficient, then grudgingly saying the opposite.
It’s worth noting that AstraZeneca still hasn’t received the FDA’s emergency authorization. One major problem is that AstraZeneca’s vaccine manufacturing is distributed and not centralized, meaning there could be variations depending on where a particular batch was made. It’s especially tricky since the clinical trial vaccines had also been manufactured at different sites: I’m not sure how they’d even begin to untangle that if there was, indeed, some variation based on the point of origin. Oof. Just… oof.
In better news, it looks like Canada might have vaccinated 100,000 people today for the very first time – at least according to fellow covid geeks. The official news should break shortly. That’s way, way less than what the US is doing, but at least the pace is ramping up, eh.
A tiny bit more good news with every passing day. What a strange and unfamiliar sensation.
Good night, y’all. I hope your weekend is entertaining, edumacational, or both.
Thursday evening.
Someway, somehow, today we had some actual warm weather. I ventured outside for a celebratory Tim Hortons lunch and was surprised to find that it was just sweater weather: no jackets or dramatically billowing cloaks required. (Ditto for not having to watch out for refreezing ice.) This really sneaked up on me. Not sure if things will be easier now that it’s not necessary to gear up to head outside, or if it’ll be that much more frustrating that as the nature awakens, it’s still not safe to socialize with others. (I would seriously pay hundreds of dollars for just a basic hour-long massage if I knew it was 100% safe.) Or maybe this is one of those “false spring” things Canadians talk about. We’ll see.
I should get my experimental covid vaccine next Friday morning, or in about 180 hours, give or take. It’s probably not a good idea to start counting down hours, but there’s not much else to look forward to. Actually, scratch that: there is absolutely nothing else to look forward to. It’s just a long grey stretch of groundhog days as I await the many, many pending bureaucratic formalities. Bah, humbug.
A pleasant surprise today: while I was recommending one of my favourite sci-fi book series to a coworker, I realized the writer released yet another book. Somehow, some way, it completely slipped past my radar two months ago. The series is “We are Bob” (or “Bobiverse” as fans lovingly call it), and it’s about a programmer who signs up to be frozen and revived should he die – and promptly gets hit by a bus. He wakes up as computer software onboard an experimental little spaceship tasked with exploring the galaxy and making more copies of himself. This series is about his adventures and saving the world. It’s incredibly geeky but fun: highly, highly recommended. (At least this will help me kill a couple of evenings, maybe even three.)
In covid news, this is remarkable: Alaska becomes the first US state to drop all covid vaccine eligibility requirements. Alaska has vaccinated 23.6% of its population with one dose, and 16.4% with both. It’s the leading state in terms of its vaccination progress, and 46th state in the number of covid cases. They’ve had a total of 59,000 cases and 305 deaths. (For context, Alaska’s total population is 740,000 people; there are New York buroughs with more people than that.) I expect other states to follow its lead pretty soon.
Just like with stocks, just like with weather, just like with many other things (I’m really gonna have to work on this pessimistic trait of mine), this news has sneaked up on me. I’d expected something like this to happen, but not until May. This is truly remarkable, and great news for all Alaskans – and other Americans who don’t mind booking a ticket there. (The article says it’s only for residents, but I’m not sure just how strictly that’d be enforced.)
That opens up some more options… Neither my elected congress-critters nor the US consulate got back to me. Canada’s own vaccine rollout is moving with all the urgency of a lethargic caterpillar. (And they’re still aiming to have a four-month gap between their doses, based on educated guesswork and no actual clinical data.) I may have to fly to the US to get my vaccine shots: that’s somewhat of a grey area, ethically speaking, but I still pay my US taxes, and if they’ve really got so many extra doses, I wouldn’t be depriving anyone. One issue with that plan: as per Canada’s travel restrictions enacted months ago, there’s a good chance that I wouldn’t be able to reenter Canada with just my work permit. (All the search results say the trip must be “non-optional.”) That means I should keep waiting for my permanent residency and hoping that it’ll be sooner rather than later. It’s been seven months and one week. It might get here tomorrow; it might be five months from now. This is a whole new type of hell, eh?..
Can’t leave the country (or return, rather) without my residency, but assuming I do get it in the near future, the choice becomes an interesting one: do I get my first dose in Canada and then fly to Alaska (or wherever) to get the second shot of the same vaccine three weeks later? (I’d rather not wait around for months on end.) Or do I just fly off to Alaska (or some such) for three whole weeks to get both of my shots while exploring whatever sights the local area has to offer? The worst of all possible combinations is one where my PR is delayed forevermore and I have to join millions of Canadians as we all participate in a gigantic medical experiment to see if a single dose is good enough to last four months against all the variants out there. There is, of course, always the possibility that Canada relaxes its travel restrictions. We’ll see.
I hope all y’all’s day is less existential-crisis-y than mine is.
Wednesday night.
In late December, I plundered a bunch of “best of” lists on Goodreads for new book recommendations. Being a frugal bastard (never pay if you can get it for free later), I put a bunch of those ebooks on hold at my local library. Not sure how or why, exactly, but a whole lot of them suddenly became available in rapid succession. It’ll take a while for them to become available again, and in-demand e-books can’t be renewed after the three weeks are up, so I guess I volunteered myself for a lot more reading and a bit less gaming. Heh.
I’ve just finished devouring Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, and it was quite good. Beautiful writing, multiple LOL (literally LOL) moments, fun characterizations. In a nutshell, it’s a book about a failed heist, an accidental hostage situation at an apartment viewing, and idiots. Lots of idiots. (But mostly lovable ones, which is how you can tell it’s fiction and not reality.) The book takes a weird U-turn towards sentimentality somewhere in the middle, changing the tone and seriously cutting down on the levity, but it’s still quite good. It’s rather moving, if nothing else. Solid 4.5 stars, and recommended if you’re looking for something fun and moving to read in this long lockdown. (Just check out the first few pages of the e-book preview – you’ll like it.)
Next up: Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller about the world’s most stubborn taxonomist. (Because it’s good to balance outlandish fiction with almost-as-outlandish non-fiction once in a while.)
The stock I wrote about yesterday, ADS, has finally closed that tiny gap – my online broker sold it at the exact price I’d requested: 5% below its highest pre-pandemic price. That made for a fine 77% profit, especially considering I’d bought it on November 12th, 2020. Just a bit less than four months, basically. (I’d swing-traded it twice before, starting in June.) I never post the dollar figures from my portfolio but it crossed a rather significant point today. I’m trying to be a bit more conscious about my health, so instead of celebrating with a whole bottle of champagne, I’ll just treat myself to a Tim Hortons lunch tomorrow by way of celebrating. (Besides, an entire bottle of champagne holds five glasses, which is entirely too much for one person, and those miniature bottles they sell hold only two glasses, which is just one too few. No justice in this world.)
It’s funny… The first time I researched ADS and added it to the “risky bets” section of my portfolio, in early June, it was trading at a 52.7% discount from its pre-pandemic high, just a few months earlier in 2020. And now, just nine months later, it’s come within 5% of reaching that high price again. (And, therefore, sold as per my standing order.) At the time, it seemed theoretically possible but unimaginable that all those beaten-down stocks would soar again, or that the world would get back on its feet (or at least start to), and especially in less than a year. That’s a weird finance allegory for the fight against covid, but hey, I deal with dollar signs and wild stratagems all day every day at work, so a lot of that carries over. I own 19 different stocks. One has doubled and sold, and I’ll use that cash to pay some of my 2020 taxes. (My company-provided accountant should send the grand total aaaany day now.) There are 18 to go. I sure as hell hope we’re more than 1/19th of the way to eradicating this damn pandemic, not only in the first world but everywhere, but still, this is a real-life proof of concept that at least some things can return to normalcy.
In covid news, there’s more drama in Canada, eh. Someone leaked a draft of the letter from Canada’s top scientists to the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI). The scientists, who include some of the most senior bigwigs at multiple institutions, are really not enthusiastic about NACI’s decision to turn all of Canada into guinea pigs by extending the gap between the vaccines to four whole months. In their own words, “What will the impact be on the variants of concern and potential others? This will remain a guessing game without being able to transfer knowledge from properly performed trials,”
The whole decision behind the four-month gap is a huge bioethical dilemma: try to vaccinate everyone fast in the name of the greater good but take a gamble due to unknown effects of just one dose over four months? Or follow the standard procedure that had been used in clinical trials (three weeks apart) and vaccinate only half as many people, but properly? You already know which side I’m on… The only course I ever failed in my life was Advanced Bioethics. I have a feeling that my professor (he wasn’t nearly as much of a relativist as he’d claimed he was, especially after the rest of the class laughed to the point of tears as he and I debated) would’ve sided with NACI. One big side effect here: I really hope they’re right about this, but if they’re wrong, if this backfires, then it will fuel anti-vaxxers everywhere for the rest of the century and beyond: “here are a bunch of scientists who broke their own rules, didn’t give Canada enough immunity, and made a mess of things when another new variant spread like wildfire among the partially vaccinated.”
Again, I hope it never comes to that, but the cost/benefit analysis here is absolutely bonkers.
And meanwhile, British Columbia has only now started booking vaccine appointments for folks over 85 years old. That’s good news on the balance, but the fact that it’s taken them this long… Oof. Oof, I say.
Stay safe, folks. Pick up a book or something, eh?
Tuesday night.
I’m ending this day with less blood than I started it with, and with the uncanny sensation of knowing what my blood-brain barrier feels like. In other words, I had my initial screening for the vaccine trial. The blood filled multiple vials, and the nasal test was apparently mandatory, to reassure them that their newest guinea pig does not, in fact, already have covid. Heh. And here I thought I’d go the entire pandemic without having the edge of my brain scraped… If you never experienced that sensation, good for you – I hope you never do. If you did experience it – how weird is it, huh? Why the hell would we even have receptors that far up? Ye gods, that was such an unsettling sensation – and there’s nothing you can do to take your mind off it. Logically, I knew that I wasn’t harmed, and definitely wasn’t harmed permanently, but it just felt so… wrong.
Anyhow, I’ll get the first of this experimental vaccine in 10 days, next Friday. They’ll keep me around for an entire hour just to watch out for any side effects and/or superpowers. Should be fun. It was also equal parts sad and pathetic how excited I was to have a tiny short conversation with the receptionist dude and the doctor dude. It’s been so long… On my drive back, when the sun was fully up, I had my window down and my mask off. It seemed safe – a way to enjoy some fresh air at long last. Next thing I knew, a maskless construction worker got right in my (equally maskless) face to tell me I had to make a U-turn due to some construction. That was the first time I actually came face to face (with no masks) with another human being since I left my landlords behind almost two months ago. It sure would be ironic if after all these precautions, all these months, I catch covid due to a random encounter with a maskless worker. Heh. I know I talk a lot about my zombie video game, but come on, that was a classic zombie scare jump-scene right there.
The world is starting to recover a little… S&P-500 is about 20% higher than its highest point just before the pandemic. I think a lot of that is driven by the overvalued tech sector. Almost a year ago, I sold all of my Amazon stock and invested the proceeds into the most covid-battered stocks out there. I set my sell price for each stock using the same formula: their highest point in Q1 2020, just before the pandemic, minus 5%. (No need to be greedy, eh?) The rationale was that once they get that high up, the economy will have recovered. Most of them aren’t there yet, but they’re getting there. ADS (Alliance Data Systems) is a company specializing in loyalty cards, among other things. Today, the ADS stock price missed my target by just eight cents. That was pretty funny – I’m sure it’ll get there soon.
Speaking of stops, that mad legion at r/wallstreetbets finally succeeded in getting Gamestop’s stock price back up again. It rose up past $100 last week, briefly kissed $200, bounced up and down, and closed at $246.90 today. Gotta say, that’s impressive and I didn’t see that resurgence coming. Good for them, eh. As for me, I’ll have to start stockpiling cash for what I expect to be a pretty high tax bill in the coming weeks. (And it’ll be higher yet next year, once I have to pay taxes on my Gamestop earnings.)
In covid news, a very macabre success story from the US: for the first time since late November, the daily covid death toll is below 1,000. According to this article, 749 Americans died over the course of 24 hours. Once upon a time, that would’ve been a tragedy. Now, just a year after the virus appeared in the US, it’s good news. Who knows, maybe someday the States will celebrate fewer than 100 daily covid fatalities.
In other covid news, there’s a vaccine war between Italy and Australia. (If you had that on your 2021 bingo card… Well, you got a very weird bingo card, what can I say.) As near as I can tell, the sequence is this. Australia ordered AstraZeneca vaccines. Australia defeated covid. Italy did not defeat covid. AZ vaccines got approved. AZ’s facility in Belgium had manufacturing issues. The EU didn’t get all the AZ doses they ordered due to manufacturing issues. AZ decided to send the ordered vaccines to Australia, as per prior agreement. Italy blocked the shipment, got the European commission to back it up, and caused an international scandal. (One of Italy’s arguments basically comes down to “we need it more than they do.”) Australia is being a good sport about it, saying the block won’t impact their vaccine rollout. However, Germany is warning Italy and the rest of the EU that their decision to “tear up the rulebook” could have serious and wide-ranging consequences down the road. When even Germany tells you that your foreign policy might be a little bit too aggressive, you know you probably made several bad decisions. Heh.
And now, time to catch up on all the sleep… Good night, y’all.
Monday night.
Today was marginally more productive than usual: I went through all my paperwork I’ve been lugging with me around North America: old mementos, tax documents, the many immigration documents, etc. I’ve learned three main things:
- Ye gods, I have a lot of greeting cards from friends and family and coworkers. Someday, somehow, I’ll actually sit down and read them all again.
- My old Russian classmates had a bunch of different looks and styles going on: a lot more than I remembered at the time. (Those class pictures from the 20th century will last forever!)
- I do not, in fact, have a birth certificate. It must’ve gotten lost somewhere somehow. Now comes the fun part: reaching out to my Siberian hometown to get them to fax (or mail?) me a copy, so I can translate and notarize it, so I can get a step closer to becoming a Canadian rescuer, eh.
No clue how busy folks are in Siberian hospitals right now, so this may or may not work. The whole process will almost certainly cost less than $100, but it’s such a churn… I wish I could ask my Amazon Echo to do it for me. (As a personal assistant, Alexa shows zero initiative. Tsk tsk.)
Tomorrow morning, at 7am, I’ll start the process for the experimental covid vaccine trial. That was about as early as they could fit me in the morning – work is rather understaffed right now, and I don’t feel comfortable leaving them for more than an hour. It feels so strange to actually make plans to drive 20 minutes north, to pick out a basic outfit for tomorrow, to remind myself to put some product in my hair lest they turn me away on sight. Heh. If nothing else, my car will finally get a good workout: I don’t think I’ve been on a highway since I moved into this studio. One major downside, of course, is getting up at or around 5am. Blargh. Blargh, I say.
In covid news, there was a bona fide covid riot in the University Hill neighbourhood in Boulder, Colorado. A party got out of control, and as many as 800 young people trashed the area, damaged cars, flipped over at least one of them, and ran away from the police. The video from the event shows zero masks worn by anyone involved. A guy who looks to be about 20 and who watched entirely too much Hunger Games gave an interview, claiming “this is a culmination of kindred spirits that have come together to put on something beautiful: a rebellion, revolution. They feel like they’ve had their freedoms taken away from them by the school, by the county. This was a revolt.” Yeah, no, someone is entirely too full of themselves. As months go by and restrictions remain in place while the world gets vaccinated, there’ll probably be more of this. This really is a global-scale marshmallow experiment, isn’t it?..
Good night, y’all. Stay safe, and get more sleep than I’m about to, eh.
Sunday night.
I am trying to declutter my mind. Today’s experiment on myself was a pretty productive one. It felt weird, absolutely weird to go so long without social media. (I cheated a bit and checked it first thing in the morning, but only to see if I had any replies.) Social media is a cobweb for the modern brain: all those apps – Reddit, Twitter, Facebook – are specifically designed to get you engaged, entrapped, hooked on the dopamine hits of receiving “likes” or reputation points. The conversations on those apps rarely bring joy. I couldn’t completely detach myself from my computer, so after I finished reading “The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)” by Dr. Katie Mack, I went back to playing 7 Days to Die. (My new character is an office drone guy turned survivor. Heh.) Perhaps it’s because of my social media fast, but today was nice and tranquil.
I’ve also quit (or I hope I’ve quit) a certain political blog I’ve been part of for several years. If you’ve been following my blog for any amount of time, you might have noticed that I’m, ahem, a bit more passionate about politics than most people. The blog I used to hang out on is mostly left-leaning (as am I), and has a diverse group of people engaging in mostly engaging discussions in the comment section. Last night, I made what I thought was a reasonable point (Democrats took 45 whole days to pass the stimulus bill in the senate, and lost the caucus unity while doing so), and today I woke up to see about 10 downvotes. Heh. That place really is an echo chamber… It’s all for the best.
This, here, now, is the seed of the kind of person I’ll be in the future. This isolation, this overabundance of time with virtually zero human contact is an involuntary experiment, a chance to rearrange my priorities. I don’t want to eventually turn into an angry old man who yells at a news channel or spends days on end getting angrier and angrier about social media strangers who have different opinions. It’s futile, and it changes nothing. Quitting all of this cold turkey (at least the political blog; social media can stay, in very limited capacity) will not be easy, but I think it’s the right move.
Incidentally, and before I forget, Katie Mack’s book was all sorts of amazing. I like to think I’m smart, and there were whole sections of that book that made me feel rather stupid. Not all of the material was easy to digest, but Mack is a great storyteller with a fun sense of humour: she turned what could have been a mind-bogglingly dry book into a rather fun romp across the universe. Next up: Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. I like the premise, and the opening is quite engaging.
I measure life in bottles of vitamins… Today was the last gummy from the bottle I started 141 days ago, all the way on day 217, in mid-October. I guess I missed 16 days or so, because it’s definitely been longer than 125. Oh well. A fair bit has changed since I started that bottle. Multiple vaccines got approved. Trump lost the election and organized an attempted coup. I made more money on the stock market than I’d ever dared to imagine in my wildest dreams. (Thanks, Gamestop!) I got my own little studio even though I’d thought I’d stay with my Vietnamese landlords forever. (If not for their strange free-for-all dinner parties 10 days in a row in December… Incidentally, the landlady got invited to apply for permanent residency, so her family will be able to stay in Canada now. Hooray!) I discovered new frontiers of solitude. I signed up for a covid vaccine trial. That’s quite a lot for less than five months, eh?
The new bottle has 150 gummies. Two a day, every day, ideally without skipping. Seventy-five days. I’ll run out in late May. How different will the world be by then, I wonder?
In covid news, there was an anti-mask protest in the US. Again. This time it was different, though. In Idaho, approximately 100 protestors started a fire in a barrel and set masks on fire. There are videos of children throwing masks into the fire while their parents cheer them on. Idaho doesn’t have a state-level mask mandate, though some cities and counties require folks to wear masks. I know that idiocy isn’t representative of the entire United States. I know it’s just a surprisingly large group of militant morons. But still – that could be the first of many such events. Idiocy catches on really easily. I don’t so much care about the way this impacts the US image abroad (there is nothing left to impact) – I’m concerned about empowered yahoos escalating things even further and going after businesses, elected officials, or their fellow citizens who are just trying to get through this pandemic. We’ll see, I guess.
Here is to a sunnier week.
Saturday night.
I just got eaten by zombies. To be more specific, my avatar in the 7 Days to Die game took one wrong step, fell off the roof during the seventh-day feeding frenzy, and got devoured by zombies after the famous last stand. (Alas, zombies respawn faster than I can reload.) I play the game by my own rules, and even though the main character gets resurrected, for me one death is final and the game is effectively over. (Can you tell that I’m training for a real-world zombocalypse? Heh.) That was 31.5 hours well spent, eh.
I’m going to try something new tomorrow: zero social media and zero gaming. Those are fine ways to waste time, but they’re like fast-food: technically food, but the least nutritious kind. I feel like after discovering a low-key announcement about a vaccine trial on Reddit (it doesn’t seem to be advertised elsewhere online), I’ve officially reached the highest level of social media addiction. Who knows, I might finally catch up on my reading or other stuff.
Lessons in laziness: I found out the hard way that doing a dumbbell chest press while lying down on a very soft mattress will just make sink deeper into the mattress, and won’t result in a very efficient workout. (It must have looked hilarious, though.) Or, to spin this the other way, I’ve conducted a brilliantly simple science experiment that showed how the fabric of time and space (and/or my mattress) gets affected by increased gravity. Yeah. It was definitely a science experiment and not a case of laziness gone hilariously wrong.
In covid news, after a great deal of confusion about Canada’s unilateral and unique decision to extend the gap between two vaccine shots to four months, there’s a PR piece in the news. To summarize, a maverick scientist (Dr. Danuta Skowronski) claims that she could “correct” Pfizer’s raw data where no one else in the world could. She claims she deduced the effectiveness of just a single dose (92%, not 52% as Pfizer claims), and that’s now being touted as the newest explanation for this weird, weird decision. I would’ve been a lot more comfortable with (and accepting of) this explanation had Dr. Skowronski not used the word “art” when describing her allegedly scientific approach. In her response to Dr. Mona Nemer (who called this a “population level experiment”), Skowronski said “The comment from the chief science adviser was most unfortunate,” said Skowronski. “It did not reflect the careful risk-benefit analysis that went into this decision, and frankly, that is a science and an art to be able to do that.”
Call me old-fashioned, or cynical, or too bitter to live, but when you a) claim that you alone saw something that literally every other scientist in the world missed, and b) say there’s “a science and an art” to your methodology, that seems like a bit of a red flag. It’s entirely possible that I’m completely wrong and Dr. Skowronski is completely right – but when the entire country’s vaccination strategy hinges on this… It’s a bit lie the uncomfortable sensation you might get if your pilot starts saying flat-earth gibberish over the intercom in the middle of a flight: maybe it’ll have zero effect on his plane-flying (and more importantly, landing) expertise, or maybe that’s a sign of something pretty damn bad.
In other Canadian news, this article explains why Toronto still hasn’t vaccinated everyone over the age of 80. (If you recall, my mom, who is 67 years old and lives near Seattle, got her first shot a couple of weeks ago.) In a nutshell, there was some really bad distribution modeling: vaccines got spread evenly across the province, even though some regions had far lower covid cases, and some places (such as Toronto) have a much higher concentration of elderly and other high-risk groups. That attempt at perfectly fair distribution may have made sense on paper but it didn’t account for reality. (See also: Robert McNamara and his disastrous planning during the Vietnam War.) Toronto has over 120,000 folks who are over 80: we’re six days into March, and that cohort is still not fully vaccinated… I really, really want to believe that this is a small hiccup, an exception in the long series of other, completely unrelated exceptions, and that the rest of the vaccine rollout will go without a hitch. Time will tell.
Have a good second half of your weekend, y’all.
Friday night, for what it’s worth.
Today was incredibly hectic, work-wise, but at least I managed to find some time to call the covid vaccine trial people. I’m in! This will be a phase-1 trial for an eVLP-based (enveloped virus-like particles) vaccine. The trial will run for a year, and there’s a 66% chance I will get the real deal and not the placebo. (Then there’s a 50-50 chance that I get two shots of the experimental vaccine, or one shot of the vaccine and one placebo.) They’ll actually pay me for participation, too, which is something I hadn’t even considered. I passed the phone screening: the initial screening at their office will be at 7am on Tuesday. (The best way to make that align with my work schedule.) This is exciting!
I won’t know whether I got the real deal or the placebo until much later on, and there’ll be no way to find out exactly how efficient this thing is until maybe a year from now. Still, though: I spent 10 years of my life in Nevada, and I know all about stacking the odds in my favour. There’ll be a 66% chance that I’ll receive some protection against covid, if only minimal. That beats the 0% protection I have here and now.
At work, there’s an email thread where folks describe the things they’ve learned and done during the pandemic. A couple of guys made some wooden furniture. Someone else turned the basement in his new house into a maker-space, 3D printers and all. Someone else learned to make amazing pies. Someone else taught himself all about glazing and started creating beautiful glazed vases in his furnace. (Most of Amazon’s tech employees can afford a hobby if they get really into it. Heh.) Someone else ran through almost every street in West Seattle. The winner of that informal contest is the guy who fulfilled his old dream and got his Bachelor of Science degree by taking a ton of online courses over the course of six months. That right there is impressive. That email thread was filled with self-reported examples, and chances are the other 95% watched it but didn’t contribute. (I don’t have much to add aside from my broken Spanish and French, as well as buckets of minerals I collected.) I’m trying to convince myself that I haven’t wasted this almost-year of lockdown, since the main objective was to stay alive and not spread the virus. That self-mantra is mostly working.
In covid news, today was filled with some remarkably great news for Canada, eh. Canada has approved its fourth vaccine, the one-shot Johnson&Johnson, adding it to Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca. On top of that, Trudeau announced that Pfizer will move up its delivery of 3.5 million doses: they were originally scheduled for this summer, but they’ll get here within three months. An extra 1.5 million of Pfizer doses will get here in March.
With all this happening at once, the official timeline has improved: now the promise is to get every Canadian their first shot by June 20th. The announcement rollout got a bit waffled, and it’s not altogether clear if that’ll be for absolutely everyone or just for every high-risk individual out there. (BIPOC folks, the elderly, those who are immunocompromised, etc.) Hopefully it’s the former. The real question now is whether provinces will be able to distribute all these doses quickly and efficiently. Ontario is still 10 days away from launching a site to sign up for vaccinations… I’m trying to adjust to this burst of optimistic news after a remarkably sad February. (You’ve probably noticed the change in tone over the past few weeks as bad news kept coming.) I’m trying not to get too hopeful because Ontario’s government, led by the college dropout Doug Ford, has shown remarkable tendency to sabotage itself. But if the June 20th promise holds… Huh. On top of the 66% likelihood of some kind of immunity from the vaccine trial, I might also get my first shot in just over 100 days. That’s still so very, very far, and yet much closer than September.
In the US, another state has decided to throw caution to the wind and open up everything: this time it’s Arizona. It’s following Texas and Mississippi in their bizarre mission to trade their own people’s health for extra revenue. I recently saw a great analogy: this is a real-life large-scale marshmallow experiment. They can reopen now and get some fun and entertainment, but if they wait just a few more months and reopen once enough people have been vaccinated, they’ll get to have so much more fun – and far fewer covid deaths. I’m well aware that not everyone thinks like me or shares my priorities, but still… It’s baffling, absolutely baffling that governors of three large states, with all the doctors and scientists to advise them, would do something so catastrophically stupid. I think other states will join them soon, if only because their people will demand it. And the neighbouring states might see spikes in infections as folks cross the state lines to fill their need for maskless entertainment. Not for the first time and certainly not the last – WTF, USA?
Enjoy your weekend, y’all.
Grigory Lukin.com 