Archive for the ‘Pandemic’ Category
Book Review: The Game Café
Stories of New York City in Covid Time
by Eleanor Lerman
I got an advance reader copy in my mailbox. A collection of nine short stories of people who live in New York – or who are travelling there – in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
So this is a thin book, just under 160 pages. none of the stories actually feels complete. These are people, mostly single, all out of their regular occupations, but hanging on in a city that many have abandoned. Just as you are getting to know them the story ends and a new one begins. There are some common themes: women with long black hair and a taste for goth makeup. People suffering from severe back pain at a time when normal health services are no longer available. The author of the stories has black hair. Quite possibly she has a back ache too. She knows New York. People are attracted to the Village and Washington Square Park. But often find themselves in the less desirable outer limits of the subway service – but they are still in the City.
The epidemic is not over now. Not yet. But the mood has changed from when this book was written. People have stopped wearing masks – mostly. Travel has restarted but gets disrupted. Restaurants have reopened and people are using transit again, but in lower numbers. Management would like everyone to be back in the office but has to reluctantly accept that remote work is what a lot want to continue. Especially in places where the cost of living is high and rising. In the stories the idea that prices have dropped for desirable places pops up now and again but that is not what is happening now. These stories are of a rare time and a unique space. There is something special about New York City. And that magic – dead at the time of these stories – seems to be reviving now.
The pandemic is now far worse in China, which is where it started, and where lockdowns are still being enforced. Other places were not actually in formal lockdown, thought it might have felt like that. Cruise ships are sailing again. The planes are no longer just flying to reserve their spots at the terminals. But the chaos of lost baggage, delays and confusion are more to do with the impacts of climate – no longer “change” but “crisis”. Huge backlogs of cancellations and missed connections. A whole different set of stories, rather than the folks who managed to hang on in the City even if they no longer had their former well paid jobs, in the stories scraping by wondering what happens next while we readers are in what happens next, which is nowhere like “business as usual” no matter how much business wishes it was.
In terms of overloaded emergency rooms, and rising death rates, plus increasing numbers of people who have had multiple infections or who suffer from “long Covid” the pandemic is nearly as bad as it was at the earlier peaks, but now a high percentage have had multiple vaccinations which work – at least for a few months – but deteriorate rapidly afterwards. Public Health officials are still on the defensive. Simple ideas like hand washing and being kind don’t seem to have a lot of impact on an airborne virus that has the ability to produce a continuous series of variations, each being nastier and more virulent than the one before. We would like to think that we can learn to live with it, just as we have with the flu, the common cold and HIV – but that does seem to be an illusion. Nevertheless, there are indoor parties, the theatres and concert halls are open and the tourism industry seems to be back with bang. There is not a shred of this new reality in these short fictions, where time seems to have stopped. We do not mask very much. There are still many open schools that have no modern ventilation or even box fans surrounded by HEPA filters. Kids are getting sick – and not just with covid but all the other childhood diseases which have resurfaced thanks to a combination of political opportunism and vaccine “hesitancy”. Plus, of course, plenty of deliberate misinformation.
I am not sure that this reviewer can actually recommend this book. Some of the stories have already appeared in magazines and would have been timely then. Now? I am not so sure. Actually I wonder if there needs to be the sequels to some of these stories, so we know how these stories work out. If they did. Certainly good writing.
The following is extracted from the press materials that came with the book. I had not read this before I wrote the review above.
“For award-winning author and poet Eleanor Lerman, New York
City remains the most vibrant and important urban center in the
world. The idea that it would never recover from the pandemic was
an affront not only to New York but to cities everywhere struggling
to deal with the effects of coronavirus.
A lifelong New Yorker, Lerman was disturbed by pontifications that
the city was “dead,” that everyone was leaving, that it would never
regain its place of prominence in American life or be able to offer
the remarkable range of experiences that only a city with a diverse
population and a storied history of welcoming immigrants, artists,
workers, and dreamers, both gay and straight, could provide.
As writers do, she turned her feelings into inspiration.
The Game Café: Stories of New York
City in Covid Time by Eleanor Lerman
Mayapple Press
Paperback; December 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952781-13-1
$22.95; 6 x 9; 160 pages
Is the Shine Starting to Come Off Bill Gates’s Halo? A ‘Nation’ Investigation
The rest of this post comes from a Press Release from The Nation. There are three articles in the links below but fortunately if you are not a Nation subscriber you can have three free articles. I think you will agree when you have finished reading them that this is a very worthwhile use of your time. And, if you have not been paying attention, go read Cory Doctorow’s latest on his blog
The Nation’s Tim Schwab—whose incisive three-part investigation into the Gates Foundation won a 2021 Izzy Award for independent media—is out with a new deep dive into Bill Gates’s opposition to patent waivers on Covid vaccines: A stance that isn’t just ideological, but could be linked to the Gates Foundation’s co-ownership of a vaccine company—and likely a vast trove of intellectual property:
Is the Shine Starting to Come Off Bill Gates’s Halo?
The billionaire’s role in perpetuating vaccine apartheid in the name of protecting intellectual property rights has begun to draw criticism.
Amid a growing chorus of criticism for Bill Gates’s role in the unfolding vaccine apartheid around the world, Schwab reports that many have understated the full scope of the Gates Foundation’s interests in this debate—including the sprawling array of intellectual property the charity has acquired access to through its grants and investments. And the fact that the foundation co-owns a vaccine company. It is increasingly urgent to ask if Gates’s multiple roles in the pandemic—as a charity, a business, an investor, and a lobbyist—are about philanthropy and giving away money, or about taking control and exercising power—monopoly power.
ABOUT: Tim Schwab (@TimothyWSchwab) is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C., whose sweeping three-part Nation investigation into The Gates Foundation was part of a 2019 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship.
The first installment uncovered the historically opaque operation’s two billion dollars in ‘charitable’ donations to private businesses, documenting how their endowment generates far more income than it gives away. The second part unearthed the foundation’s hundreds of millions invested in companies working on Covid-19, putting it in a position to generate windfall revenues, which Gates himself has failed to disclose publicly. The third piece offered damning criticism of the foundation’s highest-profile research project, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which holds near-monopoly power over global/public health. It exposed a welter of financial conflicts of interest and other irregularities at The Lancet, a leading journal that publishes much of IHME’s work.
Representingthe first substantive investigation into the Gates Foundation in 15 years, Schwab provided readers with a singular narrative about how the super-rich transform money into power and wield a devastatingly undemocratic hold over public policy.
Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the breadth and depth of political and cultural life from the debut of the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical, independent, and progressive voice in American journalism.
We don’t all feel the same.
January 3, 2021
“Everybody on Earth is feeling the same way as you” asserts a sign posted recently in the City of Vancouver.
When I saw that sign my first thought was “What makes you think that?” I suppose it must be some reference to the current pandemic. But my experience tells me that not all of us think the same way about the events we are living through. And this assertion seems to me to be quite easy to disprove.
I posted this image to Twitter and then added a number of thoughts of my own. I seem to have made a mess of the threading process and it got a bit derailed by a misunderstanding with a commenter, so I thought I could set matters straight here.
Here is a very far from comprehensive list of those who definitely are not feeling the same way as me:
There is a small group of highly privileged people who feel now is the time to travel to warmer climes.
There are a large number of people who are very anxious about when they will get the vaccine.
There are people who have made lots of money thanks to the pandemic.
There are people who feel it is really important to try and reverse the result of the last US presidential election
There are people who are utterly certain that there is a God, and that he is an old white male who prefers them over everyone else.
There are people who feel that by driving a Tesla and installing solar panels in their summer home that they have done more than enough to qualify as environmental activists.
There are people who are optimistic about the future of humanity on this planet.
There are people who are more concerned about ducks than you or me. “Foie gras is produced by force-feeding ducks”. [From an email I got from one of the petition generation sites.] No it’s geese actually.
I am pretty sure if I had conducted a survey of my Twitter readers I would have got a very mixed bag of “feelings” – and if you think you can add something feel free to comment below. One thing I know for certain is that everyone carries their own bag of hammers (credit Michael J Fox for that one) and their feelings are going to be very different on any subject you choose. I know of individuals right now whose feelings have very little to do with the pandemic but very much on their recent experiences. The loss of a mother to suicide. The surprising recovery of a husband not suffering from Covid but a very serious condition indeed: we thought that he was going to die and he is getting better.
There are also people who seem convinced that Covid won’t hurt them. The blithe certainty of a family we know that seems to think that many “bubbles” can overlap with no risk. The people who gathered in downtown Vancouver – and elsewhere – to protest the requirements to wear masks.
More about notebooks
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 shutdown I have been keeping a journal. Not another blog but the old fashioned kind that you put on paper in a book with a pen.
The idea came from someone I knew from WordCamp or some similar blogging conference years ago. On Facebook she was encouraging people to write about their experiences, because she is an archivist and she is concerned about what will happen in the future. It is unlikely that the technology we now use to store blogs and pictures will be readable indefinitely. She suggested twenty years – but that seems a bit pessimistic to me. After all I know many people who still use film in their cameras and vinyl discs on their stereos and both are long superseded technologies. Even so I quite liked idea, since I have been writing in notebooks for a while. Most of my early blog posts started off as notes taken at meetings. I could scribble far faster than I could type, so I was able to make good contemporaneous notes – a skill I had developed at work back in the days before laptops or tablets. Before PalmPilots even, remember them?
So the first entries in what I called The Plague Diaries were written in a Moleskine notebook that I had lying around.
That is what now appears at the top of this document. In the original version a scan I had made with my phone using a Google app appeared here – with a complaint about Canon software. That has now been updated and I can once again use Image Capture to operate my scanner. But I am blowed if WP block editor will actually allow me to put the new scan into this space which is where I wanted it. So I have got rid of one problem just to find two more.
And it turns out that I was wrong. I could have bought a refill for the fountain pen I was using. It was just that the shop I went to did not know that.
The Moleskine I had was bought in 2005, when journalling was recommended by whoever it was I was sent to deal with depression. Well it didn’t help then but the Moleskine did get used for a variety of purposes, and I thought that it would last. It did not seem likely that I would need much more than a replacement pen. And anyway there are notebooks lying around unused. My partner seems to get one free whenever she does some professional development course or other. Trouble is they are nothing like as good as a Moleskine. Well, I did get something free myself from The Guardian, as thanks for my subscription. That became Volume 2 (14 March to 29 April) and Volume 3 is from an unknown source but the paper was highly absorbent, bled through (i.e. making it hard to be legible when written on both sides) and was actually falling apart and had to be repaired with duct tape.
There are some of the healthcare pro freebies but all have lined paper.
I went to Granville Island thinking that I could buy a new Moleskine – just like Volume 1 – at Paper~Ya. Somewhat to my surprise the sales lady said that I could do better for cheaper. After all, you are paying quite a lot for the brand name alone. Midori paper is much better than that used by Moleskine, and the notebook is considerably cheaper. The lack of a hard cover is not an issue since I won’t be carrying it around with me and it is anyway too large for my pockets at A5 (European standard).
It was also in Paper-Ya that I found these pens – for very little money.
This is the inside first page. The black pen is a Pentel Plastic Fountain Pen. Made in Japan. The nib is 24 carat plastic. Refillable! I wish I had known that sooner as I recently threw an empty one away! The blue one is a Platinum Preppy F 0.3 which comes without the cartridge being inserted for use, but loose inside the pen. Also Made in Japan.
I am now ending Volume 3 and will start on Volume 4 tomorrow, but I can say categorically that writing in the Midori is a great pleasure – even though I am still using the cheap Chinese pen I bought on line when the previous Pentel Plastic ran out. By the way, beware of online ads. The Jinhao X450 I bought from https://livesmartglobal.com/ for nearly $20 is available elsewhere for $5! It has also had to be repaired twice (Gorilla Glue) as the pencap and its plastic liner kept parting company. It works well enough and you might even be able to find cartridges for it but I bought a bottle of Quink – something I haven’t done for many years.
The one thing I have not done is try to go back to italic writing something I taught myself to do from a book my brother bought. He had a very legible hand. Mine looked much worse – and was not really much better with a proper calligraphic pen. It was also far too slow for note taking – but pretty useful for slowing down creative writing since it needed more care and thought.
I have no intention of publishing The Plague Diaries. Anymore than I have of turning this blog into a book. You will have to outlive me as my heirs will be instructed to delay any circulation of them until there is a general wave on interest into how ordinary people coped with the pandemic of 2020. Though I fear there will be more pandemics before then.
Tlaamin Elder’s Beautiful Digital Gift
In today’s Tyee is an article that I want to quote
“Paul declined to be interviewed for this article, simply because she felt she had already said enough. That’s hard to argue with given how filled the book is with her knowledge. And the wisdom of an Elder is something to be respected, too. Knowing when to start talking and when to stop is a teaching a lot of us could use.”
I had hoped that I had learned that. In so far as this blog is concerned, there is much less new being added as I feel that I have covered the ground I originally intended adequately already. The “Paul” who declined to be interviewed is the author of As I Remember It: Teachings (Ɂəms tɑɁɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder, is Elsie Paul, – which is a book I got from Vancouver Public Library in part because of our trip to the Sunshine Coast. The article is actually about a web site based on the material in that book – go read it to find the link to that!
The other thing that I think also bears your attention right now is “Covid, Twitter, and Critique” which is published in American Anthropologist and deals with what we needed to have been learning from the pandemic.
The anthropologist is Carlo Caduff of King’s College, London who says
“I had not been using Twitter much before the pandemic. During this period, I have turned to it as a kind of public notebook, where I could write down thoughts and then publish them and have a record for myself. The tweets were either orientations, diagnostic, or suggestions for another politics of life.”
“At the beginning of the pandemic there was hardly any political voice, because people were overwhelmed, and then stuck. Many were busy with homeschooling. And then lots of people were scared, so the first responses were either people not saying much, or they were repeating what everyone else was saying, or it was just silence.
Now, I think that has definitely changed. There are more political voices. The views are more diverse. People have gained a better sense of the complexity and the seriousness of the pandemic response and its consequences.”
“The lockdown was presented as if there were no alternatives. And that’s simply not true. First of all, you need to understand the history of the idea of the lockdown. Lockdowns only figured in infectious disease modeling. They were basically a theoretical idea that disease modelers used in simulations: What happens if you do this? What happens if you do that? Can you reduce the number of deaths if you do x, y, z? A complete shutdown was never an option that public health professionals considered in their preparedness plans for a pandemic like this.”
The parallel is the Perfect Competition market – which economists always knew did not exist either but was also a theoretical idea – a simplified abstraction meant to help explain how markets in general would work if viewed without the inescapable complexities of real life. It was never supposed to normative or prescriptive. Unfortunately most politicians never got beyond Economics 101 even if they did study it academically. A bit like putting a new graduate from high school with an A in physics in charge of a nuclear reactor.
I have been keeping a journal during the pandemic but it does not cover anything that can be found in the on line universe. It exists only as some paper notebooks – three so far – written with a fountain pen. Because an archivist that I knew from Facebook said that in the future our electronic ruminations may well not be readable. The technology will certainly have moved on – or maybe be even eliminated – whereas physical marks with permanent ink on good quality acid free paper lasts quite a while in the right circumstances. One thing I do know is that I was completely unaware at the time that lockdowns were only theoretical until now. So we truly are living through an experiment, so maybe my recording first person experience will have value freed from the certainties that seem to infest both social and mainstream media.
Promising new approach
Elsewhere the orange idiot is pushing drugs that have not been proven safe or effective. The following press release arrived in my in box this morning, and may not be noticed by our mainstream media because they are busy cutting staff pay – or even shutting down altogether. The idea that the government – or their readers – should now ride to their rescue seems really strange to me since the reason they have nothing to fall back on is that they have been bleeding the companies dry. I have no sympathy whatever for these vultures.
Queen’s University leading cell therapy clinical trial to help improve outcomes in COVID-19 patients
Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast are leading a UK-wide clinical trial, offering an innovative cell therapy treatment for COVID-19 patients with acute respiratory failure.
This clinical trial, led by Professor Danny McAuley and Professor Cecilia O’Kane, both researchers from the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine at Queen’s, is investigating the use of allogenic Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) in patients with a complication known as Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) caused by COVID-19.
In the most critically unwell patients with COVID-19, many develop a complication known as ARDS. In ARDS the lungs become inflamed and leaky so they fill with fluid. This causes respiratory failure and patients may require admission to intensive care and a ventilator machine to support their breathing.
A recent statement from the four UK Chief Medical Officers outlined the importance of clinical trials amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Professor Cecilia O’Kane said: “It is only through clinical trials we will be able to determine if new treatments are effective and safe in critically ill patients.”
The trial involves the use of MSCs, a type of cell derived from human tissue such as bone marrow or umbilical cord (which is otherwise discarded after the baby is born), to treat the injury to the lung caused by COVID 19. MSCs are a novel treatment that have been shown in experimental models to reduce inflammation, fight infection and improve the repair of injured tissue.
Patients in this trial, which is known as REALIST COVID 19, will be treated with a purified population of MSCs derived from umbilical cord tissue called ORBCEL-C. The ORBCEL-C therapy has been developed by scientists at Orbsen Therapeutics in Galway, Ireland. The ORBCEL-C therapeutic is manufactured under licence by the UK NHS Blood and Transplant Service for the REALIST COVID-19 trial.
The trial is being introduced as part of an existing programme of research investigating the use of MSCs in patients with ARDS. The first patient has now been recruited with plans to recruit at least 60 patients throughout the COVID-19 pandemic at multiple sites across the UK including Belfast, Birmingham and London.
Professor Ian Young, Clinical Professor at the Centre for Public Health, Queen’s University Belfast, Director of HSC R&D and Chief Scientific Advisor at the Department of Health, said: “The Health and Social Care Research & Development Division has been working with researchers across HSC to address the global problem of Coronavirus. We have contributed £230K for this vital research which will provide important evidence regarding a potential new treatment for respiratory failure, a leading cause of mortality in COVID-19. We will continue to support health research and encourage people to participate in research trials and other studies so patients can get the best possible treatment to help tackle the spread of COVID-19.”
The trial has been identified by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) as a national urgent public health study. It is one of a number of COVID-19 studies that have been given urgent public health research status by the Chief Medical Officer/ Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England. The study is funded by the Health and Social Care Research & Development Division and the Wellcome Trust, sponsored by the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust and supported by the NI Clinical Trials Unit, the NIHR Clinical Research Network and the Northern Ireland Clinical Research Network.
Orbsen CSO Steve Elliman noted: “While there are over 100 vaccines and therapies in development targeting the SARS-CoV-2 infection – at present there are no disease modifying therapies approved for ARDS. We’re delighted the REALIST trial was approved and listed by NIHR as an Urgent Public Health Research Study so we can continue assess the safety of the ORBCEL-C therapy in patients with ARDS.”
Sir Professor Alimuddin Zumla of University College London, a global coronavirus and infectious diseases expert said: “This is an exciting and important trial which targets rectifying the underlying causes of lung damage and has great potential of saving many lives from COVID-19. The team should be congratulated for their leadership of host-directed therapies, a concept which has not yet been explored to its full potential.”
Professor Danny McAuley is also part of an international network of researchers who are taking forward trials of umbilical cord-derived Mesenchymal stromal cells for the treatment of COVID-19: UK: (UCL- Sir Professor Azumla); Portugal (Champualimud Foundation – Professor Markus Maurer; Italy (INMI-Professor Giuseppe Ippolito) and China (Fifth Medical Center- Professor Fu-Sheng Wang.)
-Ends-
- Media inquiries to comms.officer@qub.ac.uk
- About NIHR: Please visit https://www.nihr.ac.uk/covid-19/ to learn about other studies that have been given urgent public health status and the single, national prioritisation process that has been established to prevent duplication of effort and to ensure that the resources and capacity of the health and care system to support COVID-19 research are not exceeded.
- About Wellcome: Wellcome exists to improve health by helping great ideas to thrive. We support researchers, we take on big health challenges, we campaign for better science, and we help everyone get involved with science and health research. We are a politically and financially independent foundation. For more information please visit: http://wellcome.ac.uk/
- For further information about HSC Research & Development Division work, please visit: www.research.hscni.net
Social Distancing
There was a little bit of ambivalence for me yesterday. The people who work in our hospitals were posting “Stay Home”
But the official line from Bonnie Henry the Provincial Health Officer is that we can – and should – go for a walk as long as we maintain social distancing. Clearly this is easier to achieve in some places than others. The pictures that accompany this post shows what was going on at Locarno Beach and Spanish Banks yesterday. The logs are now being removed to deter gathering in one spot.
Below the City gets it right
Then this morning this appeared on Facebook. Everything below this is a quotation.
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A good read. Please share Subject: Eye opening
Very, very important information posted by Jonathan Smith:
Hey everybody, as an infectious disease epidemiologist (although a lowly one), at this point feel morally obligated to provide some information on what we are seeing from a transmission dynamic perspective and how they apply to the social distancing measures. Like any good scientist I have noticed two things that are either not articulated or not present in the “literature” of social media. I am also tagging my much smarter infectious disease epidemiologist friends for peer review of this post. Please correct me if I am wrong (seriously).
Specifically, I want to make two aspects of these measures very clear and unambiguous.
First, we are in the very infancy of this epidemic’s trajectory. That means even with these measures we will see cases and deaths continue to rise globally, nationally, and in our own communities in the coming weeks. Our hospitals will be overwhelmed, and people will die that didn’t have to. This may lead some people to think that the social distancing measures are not working. They are. They may feel futile. They aren’t. You will feel discouraged. You should. This is normal in chaos. But this is also normal epidemic trajectory. This enemy that we are facing is very good at what it does; we are not failing. We need everyone to hold the line as the epidemic inevitably gets worse. This is not my opinion; this is the unforgiving math of epidemics for which I and my colleagues have dedicated our lives to understanding with great nuance, and this disease is no exception. We know what will happen; I want to help the community brace for this impact. Stay strong and with solidarity knowing with absolute certainty that what you are doing is saving lives, even as people begin getting sick and dying. You may feel like giving in. Don’t.
Second, although social distancing measures have been (at least temporarily) well-received, there is an obvious-but-overlooked phenomenon when considering groups (i.e. families) in transmission dynamics. While social distancing decreases contact with members of society, it of course increases your contacts with group (i.e. family) members. This small and obvious fact has surprisingly profound implications on disease transmission dynamics. Study after study demonstrates that even if there is only a little bit of connection between groups (i.e. social dinners, playdates/playgrounds, etc.), the epidemic trajectory isn’t much different than if there was no measure in place. The same underlying fundamentals of disease transmission apply, and the result is that the community is left with all of the social and economic disruption but very little public health benefit. You should perceive your entire family to function as a single individual unit; if one person puts themselves at risk, everyone in the unit is at risk. Seemingly small social chains get large and complex with alarming speed. If your son visits his girlfriend, and you later sneak over for coffee with a neighbor, your neighbor is now connected to the infected office worker that your son’s girlfriend’s mother shook hands with. This sounds silly, it’s not. This is not a joke or a hypothetical. We as epidemiologists see it borne out in the data time and time again and no one listens. Conversely, any break in that chain breaks disease transmission along that chain.
In contrast to hand-washing and other personal measures, social distancing measures are not about individuals, they are about societies working in unison. These measures also take a long time to see the results. It is hard (even for me) to conceptualize how ‘one quick little get together’ can undermine the entire framework of a public health intervention, but it does. I promise you it does. I promise. I promise. I promise. You can’t cheat it. People are already itching to cheat on the social distancing precautions just a “little”- a playdate, a haircut, or picking up a needless item at the store, etc. From a transmission dynamics standpoint, this very quickly recreates a highly connected social network that undermines all of the work the community has done so far.
Until we get a viable vaccine this unprecedented outbreak will not be overcome in grand, sweeping gesture, rather only by the collection of individual choices our community makes in the coming months. This virus is unforgiving to unwise choices. My goal in writing this is to prevent communities from getting ‘sucker-punched’ by what the epidemiological community knows will happen in the coming weeks. It will be easy to be drawn to the idea that what we are doing isn’t working and become paralyzed by fear, or to ‘cheat’ a little bit in the coming weeks. By knowing what to expect, and knowing the importance of maintaining these measures, my hope is to encourage continued community spirit, strategizing, and action to persevere in this time of uncertainty.
UPDATE
It turned out to be difficult to find the source of that piece. One of my readers Barb Meinema was more persistent than I and sent me this email today
Hello! I reached out to Dr. Bozard, and she was kind enough to respond and too find the original author. It would be very appreciated if you would please update your post accordingly. See below. Thanks so much!
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From Dr. Smith (Posted on my note to Dr. Bozard)
Hi Barb Cox Meinema and Andrea Collisson – I originally wrote the letter to my small community. Since then it is gotten out on the internet. In an effort for version control, I worked with the editors of Medium to make a public version here:
https://elemental.medium.com/hold-the-line-17231c48ff17
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
And, for what it’s worth, the new WordPress block editor made this update much harder to do than the old system. And it inserted typos where there were none before.
Empty Shelves
The local CBC station asked for images of empty shelves in local stores. This is the tiny convenience store section of the pharmacy which has remained open in the Arbutus Mall during redevelopment. Usually the shelves are kept stocked because of the lack of stores in the immediate vicinity for people living in the Village. There is also a considerable volume of trade during the day for the people building the new development.
The mall also manages to attract a steady stream of people in cars because parking is so easy and convenient – and the dance studio and swimming pool are still open for lessons. Though with the closure today of all K-12 schools I do not know if that will continue.
UPDATE
Wednesday March 18
We went to much bigger Safeway on Granville at 70th – and the empty shelves were again much in evidence. Surprisingly for fresh fruit and vegetables – but not organics. Also for fresh bread, packets of cereal, eggs – and not just some types – no eggs at all! This was all mid-afternoon so presumably people who got there early simply swept up all there was.
Some packages carried stickers “limit 2” – because they often do that for sale items. Safeway is not the only retailer, of course, so we found big oranges, jars of marmite and some fresh bread rolls at Choices. There did not seem to be quite the same pressure there.
Stephen Rees's blog 