Tags: covid

“I’m thankful to the people who made my life miserable”

Katalin Karikó said that when she won a Gairdner Award in 2022 for co-discovering the foundations of mRNA vaccines, which have saved millions and maybe even billions of us from dying of COVID.

On the bell curve of grit and redemption, it’s hard to find a more exemplary case than the Hungarian immigrant woman who was treated shabbily for years by her employer, the University of Pennsylvania, and last year ended up winning The Nobel Prize.

The search for new truths in science is possibly the hardest search of all, because the bar of evidence is so high.

Read on…

Remember when a night in a decent hotel cost less than a new car?

Two years ago, I got my first whiff that hotels cost staggeringly more than they did before the pandemic.

Some American friends were coming to Toronto for a family event in 2022. I said I’d cover their two nights here and set about booking a mid-price hotel. All I could get was the Delta Chelsea Inn in downtown Toronto, by no means five-star, for $500 a night.

That was nothing. Today, global hotel rates are like Toronto housing prices.

The big issue is supply and demand. Millions more of us are breaking free not just from our homes to travel, but from our home and native lands.

This is especially true with luxury hotels. As this week’s Air Mail points out: “The rich are continuing to get richer, and there are many, many more of them. Today, according to Statista, there are 59 million millionaires on the planet; in 2000, there were only 15 million.”

I remember growing up in Edmonton where my father had a flower shop in the Fairmont Hotel  Macdonald. One night, a wholesaler took a display room at the hotel and invited my dad up to see his wares. All I remember is that the room cost $80 a night. Ever since then, I’ve used $80 a night as my baseline for what a luxury hotel room should cost. I know that makes no sense. It was 65 years ago. But we all carry these childhood markers for value, just as I search in vain today for bacon and eggs and coffee for $5.

Today, the cheapest room at the Royal York in Toronto costs $957 per night, while the Four Seasons is $875. The Chateau Lake Louise is $1,427 and the Fogo Island Inn is $2,875.

Air Apparent

Back in 2019 when newspapers were made of paper, I would take part in an annual ritual of disbelief: I’d turn the page of The Globe and Mail and there would be a full-page ad for Air Canada congratulating itself for being voted the Best Airline in North America.

I would quickly check to see if it was April 1st. Then I would read the small print to find out who gave them the award for four consecutive years from 2019 to 2022.

It’s a magazine called Global Traveler for “U.S.-based frequent, affluent travellers”. It claims the  average Global Traveler reader has a net worth of $2.8 million. Yes, Air Canada’s business class is….respectable. But the Best in all Classes in North America? Puleeeeze.

True, this was before Air Canada reduced its routes; slashed the value of Aeroplan Miles; made spontaneously cancelling flights a sunny-day activity; amped fares; admitted its Montreal-based CEO, Michael Rousseau, can’t speak French; saw customer complaints to Ottawa rise from 18,000 in 2020 to 30,000 in 2022, then 57,000 last year; fought to avoid offering refunds if a flight failed to take off; and claimed its own chatbot was “a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions;” before all this, Canadians had a love-hate relationship with our national airline.

Read on…

Would it kill you to smile?

You know how those models look back at you from the pages of luxe publications: pouty, pale, thin and rich? Not a good look these days.

I’ve always wondered why, among all the categories of ‘stuff’ for sale in the world that luxury goods is the only one where the people enjoying the products are not enjoying the products. Everywhere else, from beer to travel, cars to lottery tickets, the connection between smiling people promising you’ll be smiling too, is swift and sure.

You’d think a $10,000 watch, a Louis Vuitton suitcase or a Dior suit would make you happy. Or happier, at least. But no.

Read on…

Science progresses one funeral at a time.

Max Planck said that. He  won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 for creating quantum physics. That year the Spanish Flu became the deadliest disease in history, killing 50 million people. But COVID, which has killed 6.6 million people so far, may be rising again.

Science is a lot more ready for it this time around. So it’s easy to forget the dreadful early weeks of COVID when residents in Ontario’s Long-Term Care homes accounted for more than 60% of all COVID-related deaths, despite them being less than 1% of the province’s older population.

Another way to ensure we avoid that particular fate is via art, of course.

5th Wave, 4th Vaccine?

Here I was, so proud of my three jabs, and going out to a concert, and dining with friends, and getting on a plane and not feeling it was a flight into danger, and looking forward to Christmas. Very looking forward to that part.

Maybe they were right when they said the virus will always be with us, ever-mutating, one step ahead of science, faith and hope.

Oh well, at least we can still read at home on weekends.

RamsayWrites

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