Pandemic: One More Bit of Progress

[dewline]

According to covidvax.live, we might get to 5 % of Canadians fully vaccinated as of tonight. I figured it would take at least one, maybe two more days for that.

Comments

[kaffy_r]

Oh, my goodness, I hadn't thought it would be that low a number! I thought Canada was ahead of the U.S. and that the American percentage of fully vaccinated people was horribly low, and it's at a little more than 40 percent, I think. Am I missing something here? (That wouldn't surprise me. Lately I've been staying off news sites more than I've been checking them.)

[dewline]

We seem to have improved the pace to the point of over half our population having gotten their first dose. So there's that much improvement going on up here.

[kaffy_r]

That's good to hear. I really hope the improvement continues.

My brother in Nova Scotia told me he wouldn't be getting his second shot until, I think, the end of June. He'd gotten his first shot in April, and I was surprised at the length of time it took for him to get a second appointment.

[jsburbidge]

Canada was/is better than the US at takeup of pandemic behaviours (masks, social distancing, etc.) but was much later at getting a large supply of vaccine, unlike the US (which backed a number of companies and has vaccines made there) or the UK, which heavily backed one vaccine - luckily, one of the early successes - made domestically. The US is well ahead of the curve globally.

Canada was a little later to the game and hedged its bets by putting bids on about ten vaccine developers. Of them, two are the favoured ones, two are approved but have been slow (J&J was seriously set back by the quality issues it encountered, and both it and AstroZenica are being dealt with cautiously on account of the blood clot issue). I'm not sure what the other six are.

All of which puts us behind the US/UK and more in the position of the EU.

[dewline]

There were so many ways we could have ended up mishandling the Pandemic, by accident and by design...some of which ways you just detailed how we avoided.

[kaffy_r]

Thanks for this information; it makes sense. I just wish the U.S. hadn't politicized common sense and science.