More May Snow!

It is snowing today. I think we have had more snow so far in May than we did in all of April. The pattern of two days of precipitation for every sunny day still holds. Yesterday I was particularly grumpy about it all. I am running out of wild bird seed and a grey squirrel keeps raiding my bird feeder so I am getting very annoyed with him or her. I rap on the window when I see it and it stops to look at me but then carries on with its raid. I have to put my boots on before I can go outside to stand under the feeder to yell at it. I used to take a broomstick with me but that proves to be unnecessary, the squirrel runs away when it sees me advancing toward the tree the feeder is hung in. I think it has made the calculation about how long it takes me to get out there and has decided to keep stealing seeds as long as it can before I get too close.

Hapi fell on the basement stairs twice yesterday, her rear end is weakening. She still wants to go down there so as much as possible I have to escort her, particularly coming up the stairs which is when she is most likely to fall. My mechanic's dog died as a result of a broken back from falling on a staircase so I am very conscious of that danger. In addition to falling she also had a "bowel accident" in the night. I am carrying on as usual but not thrilled about the possible implications.

I was talking to a friend on the phone the other day and she was telling me about a mutual friend who was tired of all the social distancing restrictions and didn't believe they were necessary. The mutual friend was saying that she was no longer paying attention to it all. My phone friend was thinking to herself, Okay! Good to know! We laughed and agreed that the mutual friend was someone we would definitely be physically distancing ourselves from, as much as we otherwise liked her. Frankly, as much as I previously disliked and disrespected our provincial premier before all this, I hugely respect his overly cautious approach to the pandemic. I don't know if I would vote for him again, but he would not be the worst choice especially in a time like this.

From my reading of current statistics and of the history of the 1918 pandemic, the overly cautious approach seemed to prevent the most deaths in both the short term and the long term. As well, after the 1918 pandemic local economies bounced back much quicker in jurisdictions that imposed greater restrictions for longer periods of time.

The main problem with trying to take lessons from 1918 though is the dearth of reliable information. The gathering and analysis of statistics was not that great in those days. In addition, all countries involved in The Great War were suppressing that information as much as possible; the only countries that allowed information about the pandemic to leak were neutral countries, such as Spain. Which is why it is often called the Spanish Influenza: Spain was one of the first countries in which the media were covering what was really going on. But the estimates of the death toll from that pandemic range from a few millions to well over 50 million (possibly up to 100 million), which gives an idea of how difficult it is to draw any definitive conclusions from the available statistics.

Already we are seeing the same thing with this pandemic. There is wide variation in symptoms and not a lot of mass and repeated testing. So we really can't say for sure how many people have contracted the disease or died of it or what the death rate really is. Our ability to gather that evidence is far greater than it was in 1918, but still we have a problem with it.

The tulips in the picture are from my garden, their stems broke before they could open up. One of them is supposed to be a red and white tulip in honour of Canada's 150th anniversary in 2017, but as you can see it is not. But it is a lovely colour nevertheless.