Shipping, Fall 2020

As we move into fall, orders are starting to pick up. During the summer, I noticed shipments from the USA to Canada were taking about a month longer than normal. Apparently the other direction was similar. The reason was somehow related to precautions over virus transmission. One theory has it that both Canada Post and USPS would leave packages untouched for a few weeks to ensure any surface contamination on them was neutralized by time. But now that there has been a growing number of studies that have debunked our early understanding of how long the virus lives on surfaces, it seems like packages are starting to move through the postal systems on both sides of the border more rapidly. Lately, I've noticed that shipment times to most areas seem to be returning closer to the norms we were used to last year.

Where we live, we seem to have been in a bubble with respect to confirmed cases of Covid. I personally do not know anyone who has confirmed positive. That in spite of living in a major tourist destination that gets about 4 million visitors annually. Of those, until the lockdown, we would get hundreds of Chinese and European tourists arriving every week. In the latter part of last February, and into early March, there was a wave of a debilitating respiratory flu that swept through the Bow Valley. My spouse, myself, and perhaps more than half my friends and colleagues were afflicted to various degrees with a respiratory flu that had symptoms unlike any other flu that literally knocked the stuffing out of you. Local doctors were commenting that there was a strange flu sweeping the Bow Valley 'pandemic fashion'. Pretty hard to avoid when you go to the ski hill every day and ride shoulder to shoulder in a small enclosed unventilated gondola car up to the top of the mountain with 4 or 5 other skiers from all over the planet that just got off a plane yesterday. Many of us are theorizing that in spite of a huge boom in domestic tourism to our area this summer, as the Bow Valley still remained in a bubble in spite of a relaxation of the precautions at restaurants and bars, it may be related to a form of herd immunity we got after we all got sick in February/March. My seat of the pants theory has not been substantiated by any science such as antibody tests, but when I look at stat's such as yesterday when a nearby city recorded the highest cases ever, a city that pours hundreds of domestic tourists a day into our area, I'm hard pressed to find a better logical explanation why it seems that so far, our bubble has not burst locally. Fortunately, we do not see locals taking precautions for granted in spite of this.