Darwinkgo
Active Member
If you get the case load down by a lot, it makes sense that you would open up again. Then yo-yo up and down until better weather/vaccine.
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- Thread starter AlvinofDiaspar
- Start date
TrickyRicky
Senior Member
I largely agree with Northern Light’s list of failures.
Even the things that were done right were done wrong. It looks like for instance the Federal government went way overboard on income subsidies in the first wave. Personal income actually rose 11 % in the second quarter.
The problem with that income subsidy overload is it hampers the government’s ability to provide lasting support for the people who actually need it now and in 2021.
Even the things that were done right were done wrong. It looks like for instance the Federal government went way overboard on income subsidies in the first wave. Personal income actually rose 11 % in the second quarter.
The problem with that income subsidy overload is it hampers the government’s ability to provide lasting support for the people who actually need it now and in 2021.
Darwinkgo
Active Member
Canada entered into the pandemic without a tool that most other developed countries have: monthly reporting from companies of employment income payments to individuals into a centralized citizen database, which is then used to help automate programs like employment insurance and other forms of income support (delivered in Canada by other levels of government). We don't have it for various reasons, but because of the lack of it even the best designed income support tool was always going to need to be less targeted than elsewhere to actually get the money to flow in a short amount of time. Plus afaik we were the only country which backstopped student seasonal earnings. The supports for the unemployed were more generous for the individual in the USA, if you were able to qualify for unemployment, but actually qualifying for unemployment in some republican dominated states is much easier said than done.
Would need a deep dive, but would also need to examine whether benefits paid in other countries were taxable or not. In which case, after the year end reconciling Canada could all of a sudden drop in the rankings.
gabe
Senior Member
Tourism is dead in Canada. It's only going to get worse. I can see places like Niagara Falls and even Toronto closing large scale hotels if they don't get help from the government.
/https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/content/dam/thestar/business/2020/11/17/half-of-canadian-hotels-near-closing-due-to-covid-19-says-industry-leader/grynol.jpg)
www.stcatharinesstandard.ca
Half of Canadian hotels near closing due to COVID-19, says industry leader
The CEO of the Hotel Association of Canada is seeking more federal help, pointing to jobs provided to ‘most vulnerable Canadians.’
Richard White
Senior Member
Tourism is dead in Canada. It's only going to get worse. I can see places like Niagara Falls and even Toronto closing large scale hotels.
Half of Canadian hotels near closing due to COVID-19, says industry leader
The CEO of the Hotel Association of Canada is seeking more federal help, pointing to jobs provided to ‘most vulnerable Canadians.’
It is actually a good thing for Niagara Falls. They were gouging people for years with their prices.
Two years ago during the summer they wanted 400 dollars a night for a room with no windows near the Rainbow Bridge. A fallsview room at the same time was $700 a night on the low end.
Maybe now the prices will come back from orbit. Once they do people may start coming back and staying the night.
tayser
Active Member
More antipodean news - a cluster has emerged in Adelaide and has been linked back to a breach of quarantine hotels from early in November. Only 22 cases have been found so far but the SA government just did what Vic should have done in the beginning: slammed on stage 4 restrictions: all employment if it cant be done from home or is essential (i.e supermarket workers, medical workers, pharmacists etc) is cancelled for 6 days and you cannot leave home even for exercise (we were allowed that here in the strictest lockdown). 6 days circruit breaker and then 8 days of lesser restrictions.
The SA CHO said that the time between different generations of this strain of the virus (it was imported into Australia from the UK - the person arrived in Adelaide on the 2nd of November) is only 3 days - meaning people are becoming infectious after initial contact with 24-48 hours... hence they want to slam everything off for 6 days / 2 generations to put an even bigger foot on the neck of community transmission.
www.abc.net.au
I dare say this strategy wouldn't work for you guys, you'd have to do what we did in Melbourne (multiple weeks of lockdown) but if you are at a clean or relatively clean slate (like the Atlantic provinces), this is how you'd go about reacting rapidly.
The SA CHO said that the time between different generations of this strain of the virus (it was imported into Australia from the UK - the person arrived in Adelaide on the 2nd of November) is only 3 days - meaning people are becoming infectious after initial contact with 24-48 hours... hence they want to slam everything off for 6 days / 2 generations to put an even bigger foot on the neck of community transmission.
South Australia ordered into major six-day lockdown amid COVID-19 outbreak
South Australia is being locked down for six days in what the Government describes as a "circuit breaker". From midnight tonight all schools, pubs, cafes, takeaway food outlets and the construction industry will close. Exercise will be banned outside the house.
www.abc.net.au
I dare say this strategy wouldn't work for you guys, you'd have to do what we did in Melbourne (multiple weeks of lockdown) but if you are at a clean or relatively clean slate (like the Atlantic provinces), this is how you'd go about reacting rapidly.
tayser
Active Member
The other thing we're now doing - Vietnam started it, pioneered in NSW, proven toward the end of the lockdown across multiple outbreaks and now in Victoria and now being deployed in SA: for contact tracing (which is only effective at small volumes) you isolate contacts of contacts.
1 infected person, say has 10 close contacts - they're all isolated/quarantined and the close contacts of those 10 close contacts are also isolated/quarantined.
22 cases so far in the cluster in Adelaide, but there are over 4000 people in isolation! Adelaide has a population of 1.3 million and up until a few days ago was relatively normal (i.e it is quite possible that the average amount of close contacts you have each day is 100 people - when we were in level 4 lockdown in Melbourne, authorities would quote 5-10 close contacts a day), but it gives you an idea of the scale of that method of contact tracing we're all using now thanks to Vietnam!
1 infected person, say has 10 close contacts - they're all isolated/quarantined and the close contacts of those 10 close contacts are also isolated/quarantined.
22 cases so far in the cluster in Adelaide, but there are over 4000 people in isolation! Adelaide has a population of 1.3 million and up until a few days ago was relatively normal (i.e it is quite possible that the average amount of close contacts you have each day is 100 people - when we were in level 4 lockdown in Melbourne, authorities would quote 5-10 close contacts a day), but it gives you an idea of the scale of that method of contact tracing we're all using now thanks to Vietnam!
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
What I am curious about is how the politicians are able to act so decisively - is Australia (and NZ) unique among western democracies?
AoD
Midtown Urbanist
Superstar
I've been giving that thought and the logical reasoning would be that psychologically it is just a lot easier for a population to accept a temporary or localized lockdown when you live in an isolated country like Australia.
Short term pain for long term gain actually seems accomplish-able and the desired end-results attainable. The value-proposition for going into lockdown is much easier to sell in Australia compared to Europe or Canada where the proximity and fluidity of other borders put much doubt on the potential success of the strategy.
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
True in the context of western democracies; but it would be tough to explain away countries like Vietnam, which is not isolated. Also do we actually have proof that it isn't attainable here? We have similar quarantine requirements on paper afterall - and the lockdown for the general population has nothing to do with that. We were also able to beat it back to a significant degree in March/April. Also, we were able to achieve similar goals in the Maritimes.
Also I wonder how prevelant the anti-mask, anti-lockdown crowd was in Australia - and whether they have a political "home" like we do here.
AoD
tayser
Active Member
AFAIK, from a legal perspective, each state is activating their relevant emergency powers acts (or powers vested in public health acts and the like). We had an issue a few months ago in Vic that the emergency powers were running out of time (the legislation, when it was written up long before or after a recent pandemic, limited the time for emergency powers to be available for 6 months... they were also written of the context of the - broadly speaking - annual bushfire emergencies we get Dec-March each year. There was a shitfight from the stray cross-benchers that do exist in our state parliament but the state gov managed to get cross-benchers to agree to a new limit of 12 months).
For instance, broadly speaking, emergency powers legislation allows the executive to impose curfews, move people on forcibly (again, think of this in a bushfire context: when a fire is raging in one direction and could go another, the powers allow authorities to force people to move into shelter etc) or shut sectors of the economy down.
But we appear to have suddenly reminded ourselves that we are a society too.
I don't think many people have cottoned on to the fact that this pandemic will be talked about like how our grandparent's generation talk about world war 2. The virus doesn't give a shit about gender, ethnicity, sexuality or any other favoured small-l liberal talking point - but it does give a shit about where you work and what your economic circumstances are. Twice now, failures in AU society and the mass casualisation of work has been put on display, warts and all. The story emerging from Adelaide is that one of the security guards was also working as a part-time pizza maker and belonged to a large-family unit so spread as split in two directions (family and anyone who was at the pizza joint) - potentially half of that spread wouldn';t have been an issue if we actually provided well paid jobs where people won't need to go get another just to survive!
Plus, I suspect, Australian society, in general, tolerates mild bouts of authoritarianism every now and then - and before you come up with a convict joke, South Australia and Victoria are the two areas of Australia not originally set up as convict colonies lol
(it was amazing to watch how everyone looked to our Premier during the lockdown - and he wasn't messing about). North American countries appear to see libertarianism play a bigger role in society (although I dare say the Us has a bigger libertarian problem than Canada!).
TrickyRicky
Senior Member
There may be nuanced cultural differences between Canada and Australia but I think it’s still largely a contextual issue.
Put simply Australia and New Zealand are much more isolated than Canada. Think not just the movement of people but flow of goods across the border. Australia’s food supply chain is entirely filtered through ports and airports. Canada’s is fully integrated just-in-time with the US.
Canada does not nor has it ever had a zero-case pandemic strategy. From the cbc almost 5.5 million people have crossed the land border with NO quarantine ( the actual figure is deemed much higher than this because it just counts from the summer). There is no restriction on flights to and from Canada internationally. Snowbirds are taking short 12-minute flights to the US and continuing on to their US residences.
The Australian example is interesting and a credit to their leadership; however, it’s so contextually removed from the Canadian experience. That is why I point to Germany or Switzerland as more relevant examples. Countries with superior healthcare and organizational culture to Canada but similar Provincial decentralization and geographic context.
Put simply Australia and New Zealand are much more isolated than Canada. Think not just the movement of people but flow of goods across the border. Australia’s food supply chain is entirely filtered through ports and airports. Canada’s is fully integrated just-in-time with the US.
Canada does not nor has it ever had a zero-case pandemic strategy. From the cbc almost 5.5 million people have crossed the land border with NO quarantine ( the actual figure is deemed much higher than this because it just counts from the summer). There is no restriction on flights to and from Canada internationally. Snowbirds are taking short 12-minute flights to the US and continuing on to their US residences.
The Australian example is interesting and a credit to their leadership; however, it’s so contextually removed from the Canadian experience. That is why I point to Germany or Switzerland as more relevant examples. Countries with superior healthcare and organizational culture to Canada but similar Provincial decentralization and geographic context.
Darwinkgo
Active Member
I think part of it is scale and the media reaction and reporting of 2 deaths a day initially versus the big surge we had here. 2 a day and the media can tell stories about all of them. How they got it, what the path of infection was, who they were, and provide emotional context of what the death meant. That emotional context informs us better than statistics-we did evolve in small villages/groups after all.
It might come down to something as simple as Australia reporting the names of (some) people that died, not solely their age and location (different privacy rules). Take a look at this piece from months ago for example: https://www.theguardian.com/austral...e-names-deaths-covid-19-australian-death-toll
It might come down to something as simple as Australia reporting the names of (some) people that died, not solely their age and location (different privacy rules). Take a look at this piece from months ago for example: https://www.theguardian.com/austral...e-names-deaths-covid-19-australian-death-toll
smably
Senior Member
Canadians also have a bad habit of comparing ourselves to our neighbours to the south -- as long as we're doing better than they are (which is a pretty low bar), it's easy to say that we're doing enough. By global standards, our COVID response has been a mess, but most people's point of reference is the American situation, which is many times worse. A better point of reference would be AU/NZ, but they're barely present in the Canadian COVID narrative.
W. K. Lis
Superstar
Australia and New Zealand are both isolated and surrounded by water. Canada is bordered with the USA, which is a leaky border and not isolated.