Re: Risks and benefits (re: Covid protocol update)

You keep leaving out the most important issue --- the unvaccinated young children in the homes / communities of SFU Staff, Faculty, TAs, Grads and many Undergrads. Let's do the risk assessment using current study data.

So by your stat guess, you said vaccines are 75 to 95% effective against breakthrough cases.

And surely the best science finding is that they are typically over 99% effective against hospitalization and death. That is great. However the worst science finding of Covid is the somewhat recent discovery that those with these mild or asymptomatic breakthrough cases can transmit Covid to others.

So let's us 80% from your 75-95% guess, since the vaccine will become less effective as time passes by end of semester and surely we should account for some unvaccinated people in the system.

So there are about 50,000 staff,faculty,students at SFU. Using 80% effective, that means 20% breakthroughs cases.

20% of 50,000 is 10,000.

So without the mask mandate (even with a loose vaccine passport mandate) SFU might see 10,000 breakthrough cases. 10,000 people going home or to indoor places with children, most of them with no symptoms able to transmit Covid to the unvaccinated children at home.

You mentioned not knowing the risk for sure and where is the science ... Well there it is. The risk of 10,000 SFUers going home (or to daycare or ...) and many unknowingly, because they are asymptomatic at the time, possibly infecting their or other peoples children (younger siblings, sons and daughters). And of course the other big recent science finding is the delta variant is way more negatively significant to young children.

So that is some of the science based evidence for the risk of not having a mask mandate.

Generally these science study results are known, so like here in BC, most Govs/institutions realize it must be this two mandate approach: vaccine usage for longer term ending this, but with masks for the short term because of 1) breakthrough transmission findings, and 2) there is a delay of months with vaccines effectiveness and adoption. Masks mandates now get us past the big spikes we are in now, to vaccines being the solution.

On Sat., Aug. 28, 2021, 10:04 a.m. James Fleming, <james_fleming@sfu.ca> wrote:

I am disappointed by the recent statement from SFUFA.

The Provincial Health Officer has abruptly re-imposed a very strict indoor mask mandate, among other requirements. In response, the SFUFA executive has done little more than call for yet further restrictions on its own members. Driving these positions, seemingly, is a powerful risk-benefit analysis.

Benefit: movement toward Covid-zero. Risk: What risk? It's just a piece of cloth, etc. What's the down side?

It seems to me that the only honest answer to that last question is: "We don't know."

We don't have values for the downsides of this supposedly clear and decisive risk-benefit equation. Do we?

Focussing for the moment solely on the issue of mandatory, extended, and long-term social masking: Do we know its effect on public health? On mental health? On suicide rates? On relationships? On pedagogy? On cognitive, social, and moral development, especially in young people? Has any of this been measured?

If the answer is "no," then the supposedly no-brainer, "it's the science" analysis is revealed as no such thing.

Instead it's a matter for ordinary judgment. Here's mine:

Next week, we will return to campus facing a virus which, even though very scary, and even in some new ways, still seems to have an approximately 99% survival rate. Against that virus, we can expect the vast majority of the university (including me) to be fully and effectively vaccinated. Not 100% immunity, to be sure; but (as far as I understand), between 75% and 95%, iow, pretty darned good. As we get closer to full vaccination of the population, there will, perforce, be more and more cases among the vaccinated (just because that starts to approximate to almost everybody). However, it seems that we can expect these cases to be, in general, mild (if not asymptomatic). Demographically, the age of the main university population (our students) constitutes a further protection. Other minimally-disruptive measures may easily be anticipated: including vaccine boosters, continued social distancing, sanitizing, and ventilation. Finally, anybody who wants to protect themselves yet further by wearing a mask, including while teaching, is more than free to do so.

And yet we are accepting, even embracing, a picture of our future in which vaccinated professors are required to teach vaccinated students only from behind a multiplex screen of masks, panoptic documents, and other coercions.

I find that picture both irrational and disturbing.

James Dougal Fleming

Professor, Department of English

Simon Fraser University

Burnaby/Vancouver,

British Columbia,

Canada.

A grateful mind / By owing owes not

-- Paradise Lost