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Editor:
In an email to the community on Aug. 12, 2021, SFU’s president stated that our health authorities have a “deep knowledge of the specific facts of how COVID-19 is being transmitted.”
In December 2020, when an elementary student was diagnosed with COVID-19, Fraser Health sent an email to the community saying that they were doing contact tracing and telephoning the student’s teacher.
In 2020, on CBC radio, the chief medical health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health stated with great clarity and certainty that one could not catch COVID-19 from someone not showing symptoms.
None of these statements by public officials were true, and were known at the time not to be true.
I have been much troubled by these and other statements from public officials. I do not trust anything they say without suitable evidence.
In each of the provinces and territories, there is a chief health officer and a health minister; the first a scientist, the second a politician. It is remarkable that none of the chief health officers have resigned because their ministers did not accept their advice. It is clear that they have become politicians too and I do not trust them.
The B.C. health officials seem to have forgotten about the concept of the reproduction number very early on.
This number, denoted by R, is the average number of people that an infected person transmits the virus to. If R is greater than one the number of infected people will grow exponentially; if R is less than one the number of infected people will decrease exponentially and the virus will eventually disappear. It seems clear that the health officials were not interested in eliminating the virus, as each time restrictions were introduced and the infection rate came down, indicating an R less than one, they relaxed restrictions causing R to increase to more than one, thus removing any hope of eliminating the virus and causing me and many others months more isolation.
Now it seems that the convoy truckers have won. They may have freedom but I do not. The health authorities have abandoned me, condemning me to indefinite isolation. They have ceased publicizing most of the data on infections, and, I suspect, are no longer collecting it. They have given up, and abandoned their duty to protect us.
This is not a satisfactory state of affairs. We need an independent commission of real scientists to report on these matters and advise on what should be done differently in the future.
David Huntley, Burnaby
