Yes. Even opening school up for voluntary attendance by young children in September was met with a lot of resistance. These are people who a year ago in many cases would have sung the praises of mandatory public education, so I don't know how they can argue that school is optional or pointless. Closing down schools has a serious cost, pandemic aside, that needs to be weighed in any trade-off.

The fact is that the children have a very very low personal risk from covid, lower than flu in the under 18s. So the only possible reason to keep them home is to protect other people. I find it morally questionable to stop the education of 5 year olds based on hazy fears of infection of other people.

I think part of what's going on is that wealthier and more influential parents or old people with no children are a loud voice here while as usual the poor kids who take the brunt of what is going on have little or no voice. And of course we have the overall climate of hysteria encouraged by the media and politicians.

It wasn't aimed at anybody in particular. I don't have a problem with mild, evidence-based public health interventions. We need to remember that people will do a lot of things voluntarily and this will tend to match personal risk if we have good communication.

One thing I will point out is that Canada for whatever reason has been pretty good at avoiding the worst lockdown excesses, and people being literally trapped in their homes. The UK and Australia have, I think, been less reasonably governed. However I think school shutdowns were in retrospect clearly wrong even with the information we had by April or so.

If I have one simple criticism for Canada specifically it's that the goals are unclear. What do we need to hit to go back to normal? What level of increased risk are we willing to accept while operating normally? I don't think we've truly grappled with those questions. I think our authorities have largely punted and hoped that medical science will save them from a bunch of tough decisions.

If anything, those three countries have a better sense of community/looking out for one another than the rugged (aggressive?) individualism of certain western countries.

"I've got mine, fuck you", basically?

They are not authoritarian but cultural differences do play a role. The government makes a decision and the people seldom question it. Not so much the case here. We question everything.

By the way the rationalization of needing to keep the health care system from falling over is also less convincing than it sounds.

Most of the people dying from covid are elderly near the end of their life. They have horrible outcomes in hospital and in ICUs in particular and the net improvement to survival is likely lower than what the ICU survival statistics indicate. In Canada, many people in this group are electing to die outside of a hospital environment. For example, in BC our 80-89 age bracket had 95 deaths (out of 188,000 in this demographic in the province) but only 20 of those ever occupied an ICU bed.

The younger cohorts have only a tiny probability of ending up in the hospital or ICU.

The obvious conclusion from this is that the net difference in population level mortality from having ICU beds available is low, so low that the IFR estimates matter far more than health care interventions up to this point (i.e. "best healthcare in the world" and "no healthcare whatsoever" fit neatly within the US CDC's margin of error for estimating the overall covid IFR). Consequently, an argument that we need to worry about hospitals being overrun instead of the IFR when assessing overall public health risk (i.e. person A says "fatality rate is only ~0.3%" and person B responds "we need to do X, Y, Z because there would be some other unacceptably high death rate if hospitals didn't have spare capacity") is incorrect.

I think there are a few reasons on the list that need to be examined before we get to "cultural differences." Cultural differences don't describe why we have* an incompetent government response from the federal level. Unless you're saying that incompetence is part of the American culture.

*Used present tense because the response has continued to be incompetent for 8 months and counting.

Exactly, that is really my point

Bearing in mind the limited powers over the States that the Federal Govt has, and other than locking everybody in their homes (never. Gonna. Happen. Screw that) What specifically at the federal level going back to the beginning of 2020, and without the obvious benefit of hindsight, would you have done differently? Be specific. I want a detailed description of what policies, emergency orders, etc you would have implemented that you think would be so much more successful than where we are now.

I think at this point we also know the virus better than we did in the spring. Many places are getting daily case numbers that are higher than the spring peaks (this is the case in Québec and Ontario) but hospitalizations are perhaps only 20% of what they were during the peaks and deaths are only a fraction of what we were seeing back then.

So now we have a much better idea of who is most vulnerable to this thing and why, and how to protect them.

Yes, it has changed. I consider school closures to be easily defensible in March (earlier than they were implemented), debatable and a bit of a stretch around April/May, and absurd in September (for non-Canadians, this is when most Canadian students go back, so they a lot of places just did their normal summer shutdown and resumed in September). Even by April we had data from China, Italy, and the US about demographics and even the case fatality rates were low for children (i.e. practically 0).

Not all of the cases are detected. This has really not been publicized much. We are probably picking up a higher percentage now than we did in March/April because testing is so much more common.

There are a lot of weird narratives out there that ignore this basic fact that infections were never completely traced or isolated. For example in New Brunswick there were only a couple hundred confirmed cases but 0.3% or so were showing antibodies in some surveys. And then people act like it's a huge shock when there are new outbreaks when they "knew" that there were 0 active cases in the province. There's a small amount of circulating virus, most people don't even get that sick from it, and then occasionally it hits a senior care home or other health care type setting full of old and sick people and blows up.

We also have a 10pm curfew here, which simply does not work. You can’t get a reservation after 8pm, which is very early for people who work late.

The simple fact that one needs to be seated is hugely problematic. You must have a reservation to go anywhere decent for dinner, or even to have a beer at the pub. Due to the early closing time, those reservations are hard to get and can’t be made last minute.

You can’t decide at 6pm to go to dinner. You can’t decide spontaneously to pop into your local bar for a beer (alone or with friends). You can’t have anything resembling a normal night out (book dinner somewhere, but meet before somewhere for drinks, maybe wander into another bar after dinner, etc). Not to mention that the point of going out is often to meet other people, which is now impossible, not to talk to the person/people you can’t with all night.

It’s Friday evening, I’m a night owl, and we are going to make a salad at home and go to bed early, because unless you make multiple overlapping reservations every night of the week (hugely unfair to bars and restaurants) you can’t begin to have anything like a normal life in the city.


I am not just going to not like doing this for another six months - I am not going to do it. It’s time for very active resistance to this bullshit.

And there should be a ban on grandparents seeing grandchildren before another child misses another day of school.

So sorry that your enjoyment is affected!

Unless you are one of a very tiny minority of people who does something for a living that could be described as a “mission”, enjoyment is the only real point of life. If you’re not enjoying it there is no point in living it. And when it’s no longer enjoyable, it’s time to end it (I’m a big proponent of legal assisted suicide for this reason).

I’m not going to work and pay taxes and be denied all enjoyment in life because of irrational fear of a contagious disease that is only dangerous to a small segment of the population, and could be better controlled with restrictions on that segment of the population.

We are about to temporarily ban indoor dining again (which seems ill-thought out tbh), but prior to that it's actually been almost easier to visit good restaurants in Toronto than pre-COVID. As Monkeyronin pointed out, demand is down considerably and from my experiences many places aren't taking resos at all right now. I have a number of friends in the industry who work on the higher end of things and they relay that it's a very different scene than before. While not ideal many places are also doing takeaway that wouldn't even be considered before, and are now legally able to sell hard to find wine/beer to go that isn't normally available at the provincial liquor store.

I'm about to have a few patio drinks with friends "in the bubble" at a local bar - we made up plans on the spot. Yeah it's not the same and I can't wait for it to go back to "normal", but it's not downright terrible. As mentioned above though, our lockdown even at it's worst wasn't as draconian as some. My main issue is the nuance in the way things are done. The bars I go to aren't the same as clubs in the Entertainment District that have been tied to spreading cases, for instance. And of course that the government should be doing more to directly support these small businesses that are suffering.

It should be a personal decision. If high risk populations want to take a chance and eat out or or socialize, that should be their choice but we shouldn't lock them away for our convenience nor should we shutdown everything altogether without an endgame. If some people are that paranoid, they should stay home but I'm ready for a beer BUT i still think there should be limitations on large public gatherings and masks in confined spaces until we get a handle on the positivity rate.

They shouldn’t be subjecting everyone to these restrictions because high risk people refuse to avoid crowds voluntarily. That’s the issue.

The number of infections or cases means nothing. All that matters is not having high risk people get infected. Policy should be targeted with that objective in mind.

That could be the last time for a while, no?

That’s good for you I guess. In London demand is as high as ever and supply is constrained so you get turned away from your local pub unless you’ve booked a time slot a week in advance.

And by the way, because of my extended time in Italy this summer I am one of the only people wearing a mask when I get up to go to the bathroom etc. I think it’s a useless farce but as others have said a minor inconvenience (and you can joke about it). But “social distancing” in general just ruins life.