LogFAQs > #952755579

Blightzkrieg posted...

We got super lucky with covid as well.

The fact that an effective vaccine could be developed in the space of a year is crazy.

I'm not actually surprised by that. Most of the time it takes to develop any new drug is a consequence of needing to secure funding and find trial participants. Covid's a really huge problem that everyone wants to fix, so everyone with money to throw at it has done so (see: Bill Gates preemptively building 7 different vaccine factories despite knowing full well that only one or two of them would ever actually end up being useful), and people have lined up to volunteer for trials. With that kind of commitment from world governments and supports, any pharmaceutical could be developed in a fraction of the usual time.

Now, the fact that many of those vaccines are showing 90%+ efficacy? That's pretty lucky. Many vaccines never reach such a threshold, so achieving that on such an emergency basis is absolutely fantastic.

Kanatteru posted...

yeah, i think i am done with ontario after i graduate. i have a lot of friends in montreal now, maybe i'll try there. some would say that's picking a different poison though lol

Right now, Montreal's a mess, certainly, but outside of grossly mismanaging pandemics it's a pretty decent place to live. Quebec's current governing party has some... interesting ideas about how to run the place (you'd think somebody with such a keen interest in his French heritage would know what happens to French heads of state when they try to snuff out poor people >.>), but I'd still prefer it to Ford's bumbling incompetence and active efforts to undermine the basic foundations of society, and whatever Quebec as a whole is doing, Montreal kind of remains its own entity.

To Ford's credit, I actually felt he handled the pandemic reasonably well in the early stages. Stuff was locked down to a reasonable degree early enough to make a meaningful difference and keep many communities safe. He just relaxed things too soon and at roughly the same time as students began going back to many of those formerly-safe communities, mostly from not-safe Toronto, resulting in a bunch of major outbreaks that never came back under control. Then his flip-flopping ever since has just made people less willing to comply while also negating any good the restrictions were able to accomplish while they were in effect.

I shouldn't be too smug, though. As much as the Atlantic provinces have done an amazing (like, almost NZ-calibre) job of getting the pandemic under control, that's been as much because of good fortune as good planning. We never had a really substantial initial load of cases to contend with, which made it much, much easier to wrangle the cases we had and get to the point where we could maintain near-zero levels. By and large, we have still been very good about complying with requirements, but a large part of that is because we have been able to taste success and therefore know that we can achieve it again if we remain committed through additional waves. That does a lot for motivation.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.