This goes back to one of my other points...if the second we lift the restrictions, even at 80ish percent vaccinated, the cases spike so badly that we crash the system and have to implement full lock-down again...when does it end? How many have to be vaccinated to stop this? If the variants keep hitting, none of this ever ends. If it's here to stay we'd do well to get long-term solutions to the trouble we have right now, and the biggest target is lack of capacity with the healthcare system. Also, if we need to be over 95% vaccinated, but the vaccine could potentially wear off in seven months...this never ends. This is life now. I've mentioned this before, but just to reiterate: the fact that we've allowed our heathcare system to get this bad is a crime of such epic proportions that I can't articulate it here. YEARS of not paying the front-line workers enough money, particularly the PSWs, and cutting nursing hours and staff (but somehow not really cutting out management),creating a system that can barely staff itself when things are normal and allowing the universities to cap the number of doctors so that they can remain in demand has lead us to a point where we have zero extra capacity of we ever need it. Now, two years into needing more capacity, we have at best bandaid solutions and oh, by the way, we just spent over half a BILLION dollars on an unnecessary election that did nothing to alter the political landscape when that money is desperately needed someplace else. If the system had been maintained and managed such that we could handle the ER cases we have now, not have staff working at half capacity on double shifts and still keep up with the standard, every-day healthcare then I'd really be pushing to ease up on the mandates. But we have a shitty system and the frontline people are on the broken end of the bottle and now that it's crashed, I don't know how you fix it in any kind of timely fashion.
But how? You keep asserting that these covid checks will track all your movements and report them to the government, but you've yet to say what the actual technical mechanism for that is. There's nothing about having a QR code that reports any information to the government (in fact you don't even need a phone, you could walk around with the code printed on a piece of paper if you really wanted to) and there's nothing about scanning the code that reports any information to the government (all of the math is done locally in the scanning app). I'm pretty sure the apps are even open source, so you can inspect their code if you're curious.
I really don't understand how everyone thought this was going to be over if we gave up on public health measures before we even get to the point that children under 12 can get a vaccine. We have only just barely hit 80% in eligible people in Canada are closer to 70% when factoring in all of the children under 12. Current research and data has been saying for a while that since delta emerged the best guess estimate for herd immunity is around 90%. We are nowhere near that # and to expect we should be free and clear now doesn't make any sense. No one is arguing that our healthcare system is in the shape we would all wish it to be in and if you think you could swoop in and fix the healthcare system in 2 years.... well you really should step up, it would a Nobel worthy achievement. It has been an ongoing battle for as long as I can remember. Meanwhile back in reality we have to deal with the system we have and the system we have is incapable of handling a surge of covid patients and regular patients at the same time.
Timely, from USA Today: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/us/c...come-manageable-instead/ar-AAP3UNC?li=AAggNb9 Quotes to note:
I claim no direct knowledge of how these will work but I would assume the QR code you present for verification would decode into a hashed key that is associated with your personal vaccine records. So simply requiring any merchants who were going to scan QR codes to have an account would allow them to see a list of people who scanned their code at this establishment. So they would now be able to easily track your dining and gym habits. Although it would still be easier to use the tools they already have to do those things rather than build new ones from scratch that don't track as well as the phone, credit cards, debit cards, cars, etc that people already willing spew all of this data out of.
Because asking people to pause their entire lives for years at a crack is also unrealistic, and the economic and social repercussions of a lockdown are arguably as bad as the disease itself. People aren't stupid, or assholes, for wanting to get back to normal as quickly as possible. But we completely trust the recommendations of the government - who built this system, allowed it to get into this condition, and have been unable to even shore it up well during the crisis - to correctly navigate us through this mess and we should do everything they say. Gotcha.
them is always the boogie man which in DCC's case is the government The government could require the merchants to set up some sort of account (i would assume there would be some sort of login to query the database) in order to access the system that says yes or no this person is vaccinated. If the gov't know what account is verifying what persons record on the backend they know where you were. (again ignoring that unless you don't own a phone, drive an old beater, make all transactions in cash and are an online ghost then they already have all this info.)
Nope we trust the recommendations of the doctors, scientist, epidemiologist etc who are making the recommendations to government. The places you should be getting riled up about are the places where government is ignoring the recommendations of these people. (hint places like alberta that went full steam ahead into the rocks despite the outcry of any and all expert with a shred of credibility would be a good place to look at as an example)
But that's not how the system works. You don't need to query a government database at the time of check; all of the data is present in the QR code, and all you need to do is verify that the signature on the code is valid. The only communication involving the government is: 1. When the vaccine is given, the provider informs the government who was vaccinated and with what on what date. This happens already no matter what. 2. When the QR code is generated, the government looks up the record in its database, signs the record with its private key, and creates a QR code for you to save on your device. 3. When someone writes a scanning app they embed the government's public key into the app for later verification use (and/or keys can be downloaded later, either way the communication is unidirectional). At the time the code is scanned, the public key is already present on the scanning device, and no communication happens. This check can be done in the absence of internet entirely.
I bolded the part of your statement that doesn't play. It simply isn't possible to go back to normal yet despite the hurt feelings of some. To deny this fact is to deny what we are seeing in alberta, saskatchewan, manitoba and to a lesser extent in NB. So while it may suck that we have to keep on with this covid don't give a fuck. People can keep wishing this will magically go away or they can roll up their sleeves and get this over with.
If you aren't terrified of the government accumulating and exerting unchecked power and control, then you haven't read enough history. Please name me an example where a government assumed full control over the movement and actions of their citizenry and then acted benevolently with that power. That's probably where all this is going. Right now, the state has placed the burden on the businesses and retailers to enforce their mandates. This means, likely, that a bunch of minimum wage frontline workers are now going to be subject to a shitton of abuse and paperwork, in addition to whatever their regular duties are. The businesses will push back and demand some kind of compensation or aid so that their staff doesn't have to deal with bullshit that isn't part of their job descriptions, and the answer will be a government-manufactured terminal of some kind that has to be installed wherever the public can enter. It will make sense from the perspective of, "It's not fair to ask businesses to shoulder the burden of the government's request," and will be a buffer so that maybe companies can hope to keep some of their retail and low-wage staff. Or maybe we keep the hodgepodge system where you show people an email saying you were vaccinated and people scream at the waitresses. Who knows.
My understanding is that throughout human history prior to vaccines, plagues and pandemics raged, killed whoever they killed, and the world carried on.
Everything that has been coming out since they started to get good data on the delta variant has pointed to a vaccination rate around 90% being sufficient. In Canada we are at 71% which while pretty decent is still a far cry from 90%. This is only my prediction so its not worth much but I believe barring a new crazier variant I think this winds down early next year as we get the children vaccinated. Getting approval for the kids under 12 along with all of the reluctant but not militant people who are all now lining up for their shots because while they don't believe in it they also are much to lazy and apathetic to put up any real fight will push us up very close to or over 90% pretty easily. After that I expect we will only see flareups in places with higher concentrations of unvaccinated. Although lots of those are starting to get hit pretty hard around here lately. (A big chunk of local outbreaks have been traced back to churches who are preaching against the vaccine and any health measures.) (Note this is my prediction for Canada it will take years before the entire world gets back to some sort of normal. )
for the lazy in Medieval Europe, during times of the plague, they would make ships wait offshore for 40 days before coming in to unload their cargo. I went to Dubrovnik once, the origin of such practices, and it was so successful they still bragged about being the first once.... not sure if that's one of the tourist talking points now with all the conspiracy theory shit, but yeah. What we are doing now has a lot of historical precedent.