“We have to hunker down, I just can’t stress this enough,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said in a press conference last week, signalling the arrival of more restrictions. “This is crunch time right now.” Those restrictions arrived Tuesday, to both relief and frustration. Relief in many quarters that the government has put in place a stay-at-home order and other measures to address Ontario’s alarming COVID-19 numbers (a seven-day average of 3,480 new daily cases). And frustration, surely all around, that a province that has already been on high alert or some form of lockdown since November now needs new restrictions because the situation is so grim.
How did we get here: the dire numbers in the latest modelling, strained hospital systems, the bleak winter ahead? Depending on whom you ask, that comes down to a tangle of factors: the province’s slow, and many would say inadequate, response to rising COVID cases and hospitalizations; breakdowns in testing and contact tracing; reopening schools with high community transmission (and without smaller class sizes or improved ventilation); the realities of indoor transmission in winter, particularly in workplaces that can’t be shut down.
In any case, even before the new measures were announced, we had reached the phase of proceedings where blame settles on the behaviour of citizens: Why didn’t we do our part? After all, the mantra as of November was Stay Home. Don’t leave your house except for groceries and essentials. Don’t see anyone. “You should assume [the virus] is everywhere,” Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health, told residents Nov. 10 as the city closed gyms, theatres and indoor dining. In December, Toronto mayor John Tory tweeted with familiar glibness, “1. Stay home 2. Refer to 1.”
[Interesting Read]
See Also:
(1) GM Canada announces tentative deal for $1 billion electric vehicle plant in Ontario
(2) Pandemic housing market to stay hot in 2021, but economists expect a hangover later in the year
(3) Ontario extends nearly all emergency orders another 30 days
(4) LTC companies put shareholders over frontline workers
(5) Canadians leaving big cities at record numbers: Statistics Canada