We arrive in Banff 3/24 and head straight to the grocery store, having heard from our AirBnB host that things were pretty well stocked. Indeed they were! They were out of beans, sugar, flour, hand sanitizer, and were low on eggs, had just one pint of Haagen-Daz left (ours now!). But generally they were well stocked with fresh items and wht we needed. So far, we have continued to eat well. The AirBnb itself was smaller than it looked in the pictures, but bright and has a great view of the mountains.
Reports from New York are worsening and there is a concern that the system will be overrun. John Mandrola re-tweets this from one of the NY hospitals:
The next day, Peter Rice texts us that Dr. Cabeza, who commutes all the way from Peru, has to quit to take care of her elderly mother, and of course there may be travel restrictions. That left a total of three weeks without coverage; Seong decides to pitch in but we have major concerns about logistics, quarantine, PPE, and personal safety. She responds the next day that she will take a week beginning June 30, and we wait to see if any of the other two weeks get filled by others. Presumably, we would know a lot more about this pandemic by then, PPE would be available, and so forth. In any case this could represent a major change in plans. We were sort of prepared for this anyway, but I’m clearly a lot more concerned than Seong is.
On the same day, Seong’s mom calls feeling poorly, with GI symptoms, shortness of breath, and fatigue; she tells Seong that she will be going to bed at 6pm. She rarely calls Seong with symptoms like this and it’s pretty concerning; could symptoms represent a small heart attack?
But by the next morning she’s feeling much better, so Seong is too. Mom decides to wake us up early to sing her Happy Birthday – all the other family members had beat us to it.
By March 25, Italy is really having trouble, with over 600 new deaths per day, and an overall mortality rate of 10%.
Our days are mostly the same – breakfast, lazy start, skiing at the Canmore Nordic Center, then back home for some snacks, dinner, wine. We had bought six wines fro a local wine merchant, all of which were fine but the best by far was a 2008 Maison Blanche Bordeaux. Overall we continue to eat just fine.
On March 28 they start shutting down the parking lots to the Nordic Center, so we have to park down the road and ski in. The next day they close even that lot and we had to park at the dog park, then walk nearly 30 minutes to go skiing. It was pretty warm and sticky so we used the liquid wax, but it was still pretty slow.
I had been having a pretty civil exchange with Sheasby up until now, but we differed on the data for azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine, which the media have taken up as some sort of cure-all; I send him a few minutes of a podcast by John Mandrola about the weaknesses of the French publication that prompted the entire thing; I maintained that the evidence was good enough recommend an RCT. This was the last straw though; he responded with:
“No actionable data” …Hilarious You remind of the judge who said the 8 or so irrefutable facts I cited were irrelevant – he made his decision in favor of Teri for one reason, my “demeanor”. Another judge in response to a question about the date of a deadline refused to answer it and told me to hire an attorney – after not letting me explain a delay (eg Kayla was sick). Another judge suggested why I hired my attorney – like he could read my mind – which was completely wrong. All 4 of you can Fuck Off. You all are either stupid, ignorant and/or so biased you’re functionally operating at diminished capacity FYI in the last month or so I have not heard one person say it is “just” like the flu – and anything to that effect was only drawing one parallel – typically net annual deaths or the like. when I hear conservatives comment about liberal news I go to the source to verify – it smells like you get your info about conservative viewpoints from liberal sources – which if true, is at the best ill-advises and probably just fucking stupid
I didn’t quite know how to respond, so I didn’t, which perhaps means that’s the end of our relationship? Hard to say. We certainly never convinced one another of a single thing so ultimately it probably wasn’t too advantageous for either of us.
Finally, on 3/30, we decide to take a day off from exercise. By then US cases had increased dramatically and both Italy and Spain have mortality rates in the 10% range.
On our last day in Banff, we were able to score locally made hand sanitizer from O’ Canada Soapworks – 99% ethyl alcohol, they tell us. It smells like alcohol. We are pretty happy about it and buy two pints for $35/pint Canadian.