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Last weekend, my wife and I decided to drive to Wheatley for a surprise birthday party for her brother.

In decades past, that kind of trip required not much more than deciding when to leave London in order to arrive on time.

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Given my wife’s battle with long COVID, however, we talked our way through several additional assessments: What’s the current prevalence of the infection? How many people would attend? Would the party take place indoors or out? We wouldn’t know some of the answers until we got there.

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As it turned out, the house was quickly packed with nearly 20 friends and family. Seniors in their late 70s mixed with toddling great-grandchildren. The food was delicious. And my brother-in-law, never one to draw attention to himself or speak one decibel louder than necessary, was genuinely surprised and touched by the gesture. It worked out.

With the arrival of colder weather and respiratory infections on the upswing again, more of us will be doing those types of calculations. That’s prudent, even as prevailing attitudes about COVID shift from caution and toward a mindset that prefers a return to “normalcy.”

Which is why, on Wednesday, I went to a pharmacy in south London for my annual flu vaccine and the latest COVID booster.

I’ve taken the flu shot each year ever since the province first offered them in 2000, never with any complication. As for the COVID jab, this was my sixth. No complications with any of those, either. That’s not to deny or denigrate the episodes of those who have had negative reactions, but it’s not been my experience.

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At the pharmacy, the flow of customers at the back counter was steady. On this day, the store was accepting pre-booked patients, as well as a few walk-ins. I was issued an electronic notification device, but it wasn’t more than five minutes before it went off, pretty much right at the time of my pre-booked appointment.

The pharmacist giving the injections said things had been busy; he’d administered more than 120 shots during a shift earlier in the week.

The process was quick and efficient: the Pfizer XBB vaccine in my left arm; the flu vaccine in my right. After the required wait time, I was gone.

It’s difficult for scientists to forecast how severe the upcoming flu and COVID seasons will be, nor is it easy to predict when the infections will crest. In terms of the demand for the vaccines, experience tells local health officials it will be highest from between two and four weeks of availability – so, throughout November – and will then taper off.

Certainly, the eagerness of Canadians to get jabs in their arms isn’t what it was during the spring of 2021, when a sense of relief was palpable among the many who chose to get vaccinated during that first round.

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“We’re in a different space now,” says Alex Summers, medical officer of health with the Middlesex-London Health Unit. The virus has mutated, and most Canadians have acquired some degree of immunity, thanks to vaccines and the body’s natural defences against the infection.

“Our observations suggest that the urgency that people feel to get vaccinated for COVID has decreased with every subsequent round of COVID vaccines,” Summers says. But that doesn’t mean we should take the COVID infection lightly, he adds. An ounce of prevention is always better than a pound of severe illness.

“The key thing in all of this is that the risks of the severity of illness from getting COVID well exceed the risks of getting vaccinated. Those transient reactions [sore arm, fatigue, etc.] are way less severe and problematic than actually getting COVID.”

Public Health Ontario reports that, since the beginning of the COVID vaccination program, nearly 38 million vaccines have been delivered in the province.

“Less than 0.1 per cent (0.06 per cent) of those doses have resulted in a report of an adverse event,” Summers says. “And only five per cent of that 0.06 per cent have actually been severe. I highlight that as an example of how rare serious side effects are from this vaccine.”

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COVID has turned us all into amateur actuaries. We’ve become used to gauging uncertainty, assessing human behaviour, weighing probabilities, then doing a risk-benefit analysis for each event or social function we attend.

When it comes to vaccines, decisions are often coloured by other powerful factors. For some people, previous reactions to vaccines or “gut” feelings about their bodies’ ability to fight infection figure in. Others resist to avoid the stigma of following public health guidance when acquaintances are telling them that masking and vaccines are so much hooey.

As for the science, it’s clear. The risks associated with the vaccines, Summers says, “are infinitesimally small, relative to the benefit you get from being vaccinated.”

Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist.

[email protected]

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