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Canadian Politics: The Surreality of Life under King Corona


Tywin Manderly

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Not feeling that cheery this week. How is Manitoba at 7,000 active cases?!

Quebec does seem to be bending the curve a little better this time. But other than that, the trends don't look good. I think we are looking on track at the national level to match spring peaks in terms of fatalities by early '21.

ON will lock down properly soon too I think. 

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Update

Nov.             8         9       10       11       12       13                        

BC            536     462     525     536     594     617             

AB            727     644     713     672     860     907

SK            159     190     127     112     111       81     

MB           441     365     384     431     474     437     

ON         1328   1242   1388   1426   1575   1396

PQ          1397   1169   1162   1378   1365   1211 

Atl-4             2         2         4         5         1        4                 

North           1                               2         1        5                                                                                                                                                   

Total        4591   4074   4303   4562   4981  4658

Everybody's setting records. The Alberta numbers make my eyes hurt. BC has totally fallen off their holier-than-thou perch. Poor Manitoba. People just don't get it in places around Toronto. When the police have to go in and break up Diwali crowds, you really have to shake your head.

I was listening to a part of Cross Canada Check-up on Sunday on CBC radio (that's the old name, is it still called that?) and I heard a Toronto bar owner blame "big box stores and churches". I don't think Costco has been found to be a hotspot, and the numbers of Covid-19 cases at RC churches is something like 0.0025% of attendees. My church hasn't had a single case, but after going twice just to show support I haven't been back. Home is where the heart is.

I'll do another update with the weekend numbers tomorrow. Poor Nunavut, after going so far for so long with no cases they now have 26.   

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Sad news from Nunavut today. They’ve gone from zero cases last week to 26 this week to 60 today. Because all the settlements were living in a Covid-free bubble, when it finally hit them everyone had been visiting each other’s communities and spreading the virus.

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Urgh. We are now edging closer to 100 deaths / day Canada wide. And that's with ON and QC still well below their spring peaks in terms of fatalities. I am predicting around 200-250 / day by this time next month (likely much more if AB and BC really explode). 

Back home, the state of South Australia recorded an outbreak of 20 cases (lol) and is in a full week-long lockdown. Now that's a circuit breaker!

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37 minutes ago, kairparavel said:

This is an interesting article, linking two major things: public health officials setting public health policy and the will of the people. Also the thought of gathering with nine other people gives me hives. 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/opinion/covid-halifax-nova-scotia-canada.html

Kind of misleading as here in NS we're at 24 cases now. I know that sounds low, but we were at zero for a while until about a month ago (I think? Time...what is time these days...). Dr. Strang is pretty awesome though, and our politicians were/are on board. There's always the grumbles from the opposition party (well one, guess which!), and the "taking away my freedumb" people, but we have fared really, really well here.

Also, low housing prices?!? Maybe compared to big cities, but not really in comparison to wages here, especially right on the peninsula where we live. Lucky we bought when we did four years ago, because it exploded right after that. If we sold now, we'd easily get twice what we paid, which is nice for us!

I think the biggest gathering we did was a month ago when we had a get together at our place for eight people when our close friends moved out of province. We just had a feast outside on the deck. Those friends were our initial bubble in the early days when things settled down here, because our dogs are best friends. Family be damned, after a few months of no contact, our doggos needed play dates! 

But overall, yeah. Lovin' the bubble. 

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@Tyria yeah, I felt that the article wasn't full picture and a few commenters on the article who were from NS pointed that out, especially about new cases.

But either way it's nice that's it's been handled rather well and allowed for the expanded provincial bubble. One of the reasons I miss living in Canada so much. [Caveat of Ontario and Quebec being kind of WTF in their policies and handling of things.]

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Ford announced that we should stay tuned for Friday today. I guess new restrictions will be announced then.

One of the restrictions will be about religious services. Our parish priest posted an announcement that Sunday mass will be restricted to 50 people starting this Sunday. That knocks out about half the current attendance. We haven’t had a single case, as I mentioned previously.

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1 hour ago, kairparavel said:

@Tyria yeah, I felt that the article wasn't full picture and a few commenters on the article who were from NS pointed that out, especially about new cases.

But either way it's nice that's it's been handled rather well and allowed for the expanded provincial bubble. One of the reasons I miss living in Canada so much. [Caveat of Ontario and Quebec being kind of WTF in their policies and handling of things.]

[looks at you in Albertan]

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1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

You know, if things get safe before you leave we really should have a get together! Vaccines for all!

I'm up for that. If I get the promotion I've been angling for by the end of this year then I will stay until at least 2022.

I have flights booked to Australia in Jan for an extended visit but I'm going to put my chances on actually flying at about 20%.

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Update

Nov.            13       14       15       16       17       18       19                        

BC             617     654      659     646     717     762     538             

AB             907   1026      991     860     773     730   1105

SK               81      308     181      181     240     132      98     

MB            437      239     494      392     270     400    475     

ON          1396    1581   1248    1487   1249   1417   1210

PQ           1211    1448   1211    1218     982   1179   1207     

Atl-4              4        14        7         10       11       14        5             

North            5         14                     8       35       10       5                                                                                                                                                   

Total        4658     5284   4791    4802    4277   4644   4643

Those numbers in the Atlantic bubble are beginning to worry me, and worrying people there as well, I guess. Nunavut has gone into lockdown. More restictions should be announced tomorrow in Ontario. And also tomorrow, Dr. Tam will be presenting a series of prjections, worst case scenario seeing Canada going to 60,000 cases a day. Stay tuned!

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Some idiot in Halifax, thrilled to get something with her name published anywhere, did an opinion piece in the NYT, boasting of how good they have it in Halifax, w/o infections, going to school, public events and entertainment and art, large dinner parties, no masks, etc.  Because they closed their borders long ago.  And it's only a long day's drive from NYC.  And loads of NYers are now buying up property in Halifax.  So this idiot fixed that covid-19 free life for ya, Halifax!

 

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So Toronto goes into lockdown for 28 days, starting Monday at 12:00 am. Get your non-essential shopping done now! Stores will only be able to do curbside pick-up again for those non-essentials. I guess grocery stores, Walmart and Costco will be open and line-ups are the mode again. And it's cold now.

The Sobey's on the Queensway by the Humber River was already getting prepared, I saw they set up two large open-ended tents for folks to stand under while waiting. I guess more stores will set some up as well.

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6 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Better sooner, rather than like here, later.  Not until early December the soonest, it looks like for here.

A friend of mine on Facebook who lives in New England has been doing a series of posts reviewing the numbers in the top ten states, comparing the situation on Oct. 12 with Nov. 20. I took a look at Canada, and our numbers have gone up a shocking 69% while the US numbers have only gone up 48%. However, we started with a much lower base. For Canada the numbers are 185,086 cases to 311,110 cases, for the US 8,077,244 to 11,873,863. As terrible as the jump in our numbers is, if the US had our rate of infection the US numbers would be 1,621,353 to 2,725,323. Imagine that! If Canada had US numbers, we would have gone from 897,471 to 1,319,318. To have 1.3M cases in Canada is unimaginable to me.

We had such a big jump because while we have had high numbers in Ontario and Quebec, the west did a much better job controlling the virus. But then they started opening up, thinking they could handle things, and they have been racing to catch up with us here.

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The ON lockdown is at least two months too late. Cases have been increasing at a good pace since September, which would have been a better time to do a circuit breaker. 

And notwithstanding the self-defeating NYT piece, the actual analysis is not far off the mark. Places like Western Australia (closed border for many months) have had no local transmission. 

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5 minutes ago, Paxter said:

The ON lockdown is at least two months too late. Cases have been increasing at a good pace since September, which would have been a better time to do a circuit breaker. 

And notwithstanding the self-defeating NYT piece, the actual analysis is not far off the mark. Places like Western Australia (closed border for many months) have had no local transmission. 

Yes, all the premiers seemed to take a lead from US states, talking about how they couldn’t bring in restrictive measures because it was hurting too many people. Maybe some schadenfreude was involved, “we can do it better than the Americans”.

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