Hey You Canadians, Get Out of That Swimming Pool!
A look back at some primo social distancing stupidity
We’re now well over two years of “two weeks to flatten the curve,” and I’m feeling a bit nostalgic for those crazy, early days of public health policy freakouts. With that in mind, you may have heard this vintage American joke that plays on the perception of Canadians as bovinely pleasant observers of rules:
Q: How do you get 50 Canadians out of a swimming pool?
A: You say, “Hey, you 50 Canadians, get out of that swimming pool!”
Is there a better illustration of this than the recent history of Vancouver’s lovely open-air aquatic landmark, Kitsilano pool?
Let’s go back to July of 2020, when the pool opened two months behind schedule, owing to concerns over COVID-19. At that time was no credible, peer-reviewed scientific evidence of significant risk of outdoor communication of COVID, nor has there been since. But yes, excess caution was understandable at the time, what with Fauci, Brix, Tam, Henry et al. selling a middling-to-serious respiratory infection as somewhere between the Andromeda Strain and the Black Death.
So with this in mind, the City of Vancouver established an online ticketing system for set periods of times for pool patrons. They also painted a grid on the pool deck, to establish two meter separations between them.
Quite sensible, no? But here’s the irony. On the first day I ventured to the pool in late August 2020, I noticed the squares were two meters in scale, but not two meters apart. With multiple pool patrons occupying neighbouring squares, a growing number were soon socializing closer than the officially prescribed distance, precisely because they had to occupy these squares.
Not only that, even though there were no off-limit signs for the grassy area, I noticed only one person sitting there besides me. It was easily the most popular area of the pool in pre-COVID summers because it offers shade and softer ground.
But no, offered now a choice between sitting in a comfortable grassy area and filing into hot concrete boxes, most of the swimmers this morning dutifully and bovinely went with the latter.
There seemed to be no overall conceptual intelligence at work in this bit of semiaquatic social engineering. It’s like no one was capable of making the imaginal leap from the drafting board to real life. Though I suppose the bureaucrats at City Hall had to do something to accommodate the fearmongers in Victoria, imperfect as it was.
If anything, I’d say the peopled-up squares may have succeeded in increasing the risk of COVID infection, if only for the fact - as I said - there is no peer-reviewed scientific literature citing a significant risk of open-air transmission of COVID-19 and its variants. And two years into this shitshow, I also know of precisely zero media reports of outbreaks in North America or Europe sourced back by contact tracing to any urban protests or other large outdoor events.
I wouldn’t be reminiscing here if if this seasonal stupidity was over and done with. But here’s the thing: while all the indoor pools in Vancouver abandoned all their COVID restrictions and rules months ago, the recently reopened Kitsilano Pool is still hanging on to a system of online ticketing for scheduled times, apparently to limit the number of people attending an immense outdoor pool. And those daffy painted squares are still there, if faded, like some dated conceptual art about social distancing by a Pfizer artist-in-residence.
We swam in raw sewage!
Ah, for the wit and wisdom of comic George Carlin in these brain-dead times of rampant safetyism. Remember this routine about his childhood swims and society’s current terror of germs?
When I was a little boy in New York City in the 1940s, we swam in the Hudson River and it was filled with raw sewage okay? We swam in raw sewage! You know… to cool off! And at that time, the big fear was polio; thousands of kids died from polio every year but you know something? In my neighborhood, no one ever got polio! No one! Ever! You know why? Cause we swam in raw sewage! It strengthened our immune systems! The polio never had a prayer; we were tempered in raw shit!
Speaking of New York, sewage and polio…this just in:
Not to fear, my fellow Canadians! We’re on the case up here too!
And damn it, Canada WILL find microscopic evidence of polio in its wastewater! Public health bureaucracies are rewarding responsible researchers to scope out tiny terrible pink dots in sewage across the nation, from Dildo to Skookumchuk. How else to to upsell the Canuck cattle to a gleaming new product line of Safe n’ Effective™ jabs?
What’s that, you’re suspicious? You say there’s only been one recent confirmed case of polio in all of the US in the past ten years (in Rockaway, New York) and zero in Canada for the past twenty? Shut up Bossie, present your shanks and sing along! In the Big Pharma hit parade, monkeypox is tepid emo music compared to the thundering classic rock of polio.
(This just in: the late, great George Carlin is now an unexploited alternative energy source, doing 3000 rpms in his grave.)
But I digress. I suppose I should just be thankful this summer that visitors to Kitsilano Pool aren’t expected to be double-masked, multiply boosted, and outfitted with 2 meter social-distancing pool noodles. Or being directed to exhale underwater only, or stay home if they have a suspicious limp. Because there would certainly be those would dutifully, bovinely comply.
Hey, you 50 Canadians! Get out of that swimming pool!
(Special thanks to the CBC for the news items above.)
Bovine compliance...exhale under water only please!!! Well said. George Carlin would definitely be labeled a conspiracy theorists these days.
You came up with some exceptionally lovely ways of describing our fellow Canadians and their weird obsession with 'compliance'...it sounds like an appliance gone mad...thanks for the laughs!!