22-02-2022

It was a two’s day today. Lots of two’s in the day of the month. A day that was called a palindrome – that is if you use a calendar that uses the year, day, month – 2022,22,02. Yet my computer says it is 2022-02-22, year month day. A format that is preferred in many English-speaking countries would be the month, day, year – 02,22,2022 and in other places, it is the day, month, year – 22,02,2022, another palindrome.

There are so many different ways to look at the same thing.

Numbers can have so much meaning and so many uses. People tend to be enamoured by statistics, they tend to use them in all sorts of applications. Still, there are different ways to look at them. Ways that people use for their own purpose.

The use of numbers goes back thousands of years. The first thing we learned to do was count. The one thing I know how to do in French, Dutch and Spanish is count to ten.

Why did I hate math anyway?

Maybe this is why they have been using the case counts and shared the statistics since the beginning of covid. It’s something they think everyone will understand.

But there are more ways to use the numbers.

In BC we had 345,734 cases and 2,830 deaths with 310,533 recovered out a population of 4,894,302. That means we had a death rate of .06 percent of the population from covid 19 in the last two years. Many people use this statistic to claim that it is unacceptable we shut down our economy for such a low number of casualties.

But what if we had done nothing?

That number meant we won. Except there are numbers which are missing from the equation. Numbers we will never really be able to figure out – what is the percentage of people that committed suicide or died from overdoses because of the lockdowns? We may never know the full cost.

Is it time to move away from the restrictions and get back on our lives? I believe it is, but I am not expert.

In many parts of the world the choice has been made to live with the disease and move forward. I hope BC will chose to move forward and we can recover from the last two years.

We’re all counting on it…