BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter from reader Peter Bursztyn discusses the vaccination situation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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To paraphrase Hamlet, “To vaccinate or not to vaccinate – that is the question.” Why are some people reluctant to be vaccinated?
From a purely selfish point of view, the more people refuse vaccination, the sooner I can expect to get mine. I consider the good of the community almost as important as my own. And my community — Barrie, Simcoe County, Ontario — are best served if everyone who can be vaccinated safely receives the appropriate dose as soon as possible.
Until vaccines are abundantly available, the old-fashioned quarantine remains the best way to combat a pandemic. Devised in Italy, by the city states of Florence and Venice at the time of bubonic plague, these towns required ships, caravans or individuals arriving at these cities to wait “quaranta giorni” (40 days) outside the walls before entering. People suffering from the Black Death would have recovered or died within five weeks, so the period of “quarantine” was set at 40 days.
Long before this 14th-century rule, people suffering from leprosy had been shunned. The disease was thought to be spread by contact. Accordingly, society forced lepers to live apart. While leprosy is contagious, contact must be close and prolonged for it to spread. However, the ancients were on the right track; separating disease sufferers from the healthy population is an excellent way to prevent transmission; even better than vaccination!
We saw this play out early in the COVID-19 pandemic when countries like Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand stifled their outbreaks by widespread testing, tracing and strictly quarantining people testing positive. Australia’s island state, Tasmania, was very successful driving infection rates down. Island geography with a single ferry connection to the Australian mainland made it easy to control travel.
Despite its physical size and huge population, China quarantined its COVID-19 outbreak to very low infection levels long before any vaccine became available. Meanwhile, European and North American governments acted timidly. As a result, we contained COVID-19 poorly.
Our political leadership claims to be balancing preservation of our economy with the need to limit virus spread. They fail to understand that so long as infection remains a threat, the economy will struggle. Even if retail outlets and restaurants open tomorrow, I will not be the only person electing to remain home.
Most of us will be waiting until new COVID-19 infection numbers are driven down to double digits. Even then, my wife and I are likely to remain cautious until we have been vaccinated.
We would do better to lock down hard until we have put a tight lid on this infection.
Peter Bursztyn
Barrie
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