An Open Letter to Covid Deniers

Recently a close acquaintance of mine advised me that he was “so done with all this Covid BS”. He went on to explain that the precautions we’re being asked to take are seemingly illogical and arbitrary, and in his opinion not doing much to make us safer. And he thinks we’re over-reacting to a disease that “kills 1%” or less of those it affects.

I said nothing at the time, because I didn’t want to start a fight, and because while I thought he was wrong, there are things he said that struck a chord with me. I needed to sort out my own thoughts on the matter before I responded. So, I did what I usually do – I sat down and tried to get some data that I could interpret.

I’ve come to rely on a web-site called Worldometer for my Covid data. It tells me that Canada has had 1,784,354 cases, resulting in 29,628 deaths. That is a fatality rate of 1.66%. Worldwide, there have been 261,512,395 cases resulting in 5,215,675 deaths, for a fatality rate of 2%. So, the fatality rate is 2%, not 1%. Note, by the way, that in Canada it’s 1.66% of those who catch the disease. If we don’t halt transmission and everyone catches it, we’d lose over 630,000 people. 

Our death rate is 775 deaths per million people. In the US, it’s 2,395, UK is 2116, France is 1815, with corresponding fatality rates of 1.6%, 1.4% and 1.6%. So why is our deaths-per-million statistic much better than those countries? The answer is that we’ve done a better job of preventing transmission of the disease. Our fatality rate is a little higher, but our infection rate is much lower. We’re not getting as many cases per million, and therefore not as many deaths per million.

Now, we in Canada have a big advantage in prevention of transmission. Our population density is low compared to those other countries, and intuitively, low population density helps to prevent transmission. A Covid carrier who only bumps into a couple of people in a small-town setting isn’t going to spread it as fast as a Covid carrier in a crowded city setting. Having said that, we’d be silly to abandon all efforts to prevent transmission. They appear to be working.

Do all the precautions and rules seem to make sense? No. there’s a rule which says you need to be recently tested prior to re-entering Canada from the United States. Good rule – that makes sense to me especially in light of American reluctance to prevent spreading the disease. But if you go to the States and stay less than 72 hours, a test taken before you left would be valid to get you back into the country. Absolutely stupid. That doesn’t do anything to evaluate whether you picked up Covid in what we regard as a high-risk setting. We’re about to change that rule, for which I’m thankful, because I hate things that defy logic.

Friday night I went to a hockey game. We were required to present proof of vaccination. Good. We were required to wear masks while in the stands watching the game. OK, that should help prevent spread. But people who brought food or coffee into the stands were permitted to remove their masks while they ate and drank. Does that make sense? We were asked to maintain social distancing. Totally impractical – the stands were far too crowded to permit that. And then we went into the bar and were allowed to remove our masks while we enjoyed a brew. Again, does that make sense? Does it make sense to wear a mask at some times in a crowd setting but allow you to be mask-free in other, very similar, settings?

The answer is yes, it does. Those rules are trying to prevent spread of the virus in a statistical way, not in an absolute way. If I’m carrying the virus and wearing a mask 80% of the time while I’m in the building, I’m 80% less likely to pass it on to someone else. And if we reduced the probability by 80% for each of the 500 people in the stands that night, then we had a significant impact on the community spread of the disease. We haven’t prevented all community spread, but we’ve significantly reduced that spread. If we want to try to prevent community spread in an absolute way, then we’re back into lockdowns, and nobody wants that.

So yes, we still need disease spread prevention protocols. Let’s not get sloppy about things at this juncture.

Two other points about Covid prevalence and fatality rate, if I may. First, that data in Worldometer is the “acknowledged and reported” prevalence of Covid-19. There is little reason to believe that it is accurate. In fact, it is very likely under-reported. Canada reports 46703 cases per million. What’s the likelihood that Bangladesh, one of the most crowded nations in the world, has really had only 9436 cases per million? Or that Pakistan is at 5660? I have no hesitation at all in stating that the prevalence is greater than reported.  I also believe that the fatality rate once the disease has been contracted is probably more than the 2% reported worldwide. The data clearly shows that more developed countries are doing a better job of helping people survive the vaccine. Therefore, in the parts of the world that are under-reporting, there’s a good chance that they’re not doing as well with treatment either.

Second, the pandemic is blamed for deaths that have resulted directly from the Covid-19 virus. But, there are other deaths that are happening because the medical systems are clogged with Covid patients. Between under-reported Covid deaths, and un-prevented deaths from other causes, The Economist magazine estimates that worldwide “excess deaths” over the course of the pandemic are approximately 17.5 million compared to the reported Covid deaths at 5.2 million.

Ok, back to the hockey game. What about vaccinations? Don’t they prevent virus spread? Why should we be taking great precautions in the stands if we’re all double vaccinated? The answer is that vaccinations lower the risk of you catching the virus, but don’t absolutely prevent it. So, yes, there is a chance that as a vaccinated person you might be carrying the virus and have few or no symptoms.

The true value of the vaccination is that it both reduces spread and minimizes the impact of the virus. The Ontario Science Table reports that “unvaccinated individuals are seven times more likely to catch COVID-19, 25 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 60 times more likely to be in the ICU due to the disease.”

There are still many people in this country who have no plans to get vaccinated either because they don’t think it’s important or because “no-one’s going to tell me what I have to put in my body”. I think that stance is ill-informed, immature, and selfish. The country to the south of us, with its 59% vaccination rate, is demonstrating the folly of that attitude.

It’s ill-informed because the effectiveness data is absolutely clear. Those statistics that I quoted above are available and repeated in pretty much every jurisdiction that has reported on their ICU statistics. Vaccinations have been proven effective in a wide variety of diseases, from tetanus to polio, to chicken-pox. Why we would accept those vaccinations as a normal part of health care, but manufacture some radical opposition to the Covid vaccine is beyond me.

It’s immature because the government didn’t start out trying to force anyone to put vaccines in their body. They started out ADVISING people to do it. Good information …  make an informed decision …  and don’t worry, it’s free. They progressed from that to BEGGING people to go get vaccinated. And some people have failed to do that, either through laziness or vaccine hesitancy. And now, at this point governments are trying to force people by making it inconvenient not to be vaccinated and you’re getting your back up about that? I have no sympathy. You could have, and should have, done this a long time before the government needed to try to force anybody to do anything.

 It’s also selfish. Vaccination protects you, yes, but it also helps protect the community. (Remember, unvaccinated people are seven times as likely to catch and spread the disease.) Sometimes, if we’re mature and unselfish, we agree to do things that are inconvenient and uncomfortable because they’re good for the community. Most people who go to blood donor clinics don’t do that because it’s fun. They do it because they are helping save lives when people are terribly injured. Getting vaccinated is much the same thing. It might save the life of an elderly person.

 It might also save the life of a young child. “No”, you say. “Children aren’t dying of this disease.”  And truthfully, that’s almost – but not quite – correct. To this point, 19 Canadians below age 19 have died of Covid. It is, therefore, a low but non-zero risk. Should that seem like an acceptably low risk to you, remember that there are also higher associated risks of winding up in an ICU on a ventilator for some weeks, or of being one of the unfortunate ones who wind up as “long haul” Covid sufferers. Do you really want your child to suffer because you were seven times more likely to give them Covid than you needed to be?

 It seems likely that jurisdictions around the world are going to lean more and more heavily on vaccine mandates. You may be unable to fly if you’re not vaccinated. You may not be able to enter public buildings if you’re not vaccinated. You may not be allowed to access the workplace if you’re not vaccinated. I personally think governments and businesses have an absolute right to refuse admittance to someone who might, knowingly and by choice, put the rest of the people in the building at risk. So, it’s your choice. Choose wisely.