3 ms·

I think my point was not well constructed. NZ locked down, had good isolation, and got a bit lucky. The problem with COVID is that because there’s a large por

I think my point was not well constructed. NZ locked down, had good isolation, and got a bit lucky. The problem with COVID is that because there’s a large portion asymptomatic carriers, the success of contact tracing can vary a lot. In Canada, it is politically expedient to point to (valid) US failings and throw them under the bus. I don’t doubt that this is something done by the BC health officer at the time. My math of single digit percentage is based on even having a few cases a day coming in contrasted with 10-20 cases underrepresented by a factor of ~5. It’s just guessing, but I doubt they have more than a few direct travel cases each day and therefore community transmission was significant. I would be curious if there was any data that suggests this guesstimate is wrong. It’s possible to argue that all that community transmission was the result of border crossings, but the same is true everywhere and quickly becomes non-sensical. Would the virus have disappeared if not reseeded by travel cases? We do know that New Brunswick and Nova Scotia had the same essential travelers (i.e. baseline imports) but were able to effectively control and have had no deaths since August of last year (and very few cases). I’m not saying that BC did a poor job — I’m not sure that BC could have done anything to contain the virus completely. But I also don’t think it’s reasonable to point the finger completely at travelers as the thing that prevented success.

tempestn 6y ago
I'm not saying travelers prevented success, nor that BC's response was perfect. I definitely don't believe that was the case, and could even point to specific decisions I believe were poor, but it would be getting off topic. What I'm saying is, BC's leadership made a conscious choice not to aim for 'COVID zero', due to the fact that there would always be a baseline number of imported cases, so it would never be possible to eliminate the virus to the extent that restrictions could be meaningfully relaxed, as they were in NZ. To me that choice makes sense, although I do feel they took it a bit too far; as cases started really going up over the winter I would have liked to have seen increased measures restricting gathering sooner. But I'm also not operating with all the information they are, so can only second guess so much. As for the Atlantic provinces, they are quite a bit more isolated than BC is, despite, yes, also having a certain amount of necessary traffic. And I agree with you that there's likely some luck involved as well.
- amscanne 6y ago
  I’m not sure what distinction you’re making here, as most western jurisdictions have an ultimate goal of zero cases and applied the same lockdown policies to a first order approximation (with some succeeding, most needing to relax restrictions after time). But we agree more than we disagree, I just get annoyed at the canard that Canada is dealing with COVID only because of mismanagement in the US (which has caused weird side effects, like harassment of people with US plates).
  - tempestn 6y ago
    Of course all jurisdictions have an 'ultimate' goal of zero cases, using vaccines. But what I'm saying is that BC's health leadership has explicitly stated that their goal thus far has not been to drive cases to zero, and the reason is that it is not practical given imported cases. It could be done in the short term with a strict lockdown, and was in late spring 2020, but there would not be sufficient benefit to justify the cost of maintaining that policy, because as soon as restrictions were relaxed, cases would rebound. That's not the same as blaming the whole thing on US mismanagement. I agree that some people are doing that, and certainly I don't approve. (Although I wouldn't chalk it up to an 'inferiority complex'. If anything I would say too many people here are feeling a largely unjustified sense of superiority. Trump may have provided a very visual display of incompetence, but for the most part on the ground the responses were similar. And while Canada's results have been better than the US's, they've still lagged the world on average.) I do understand this policy though. It's convenient to think that if not for incompetent leadership we could be like NZ. But unlike an isolated island nation, it is not possible for a Canadian province to cut itself off from the rest of the world to a sufficient extent that a COVID-zero policy would have been practical thus far. Instead, the stated goal has been to control infections at a level where they did not overwhelm 1) the hospital system or 2) the ability to trace contacts. As the latter has been stressed over the winter, restrictions were increased.

tempestn 6y ago

I'm not saying travelers prevented success, nor that BC's response was perfect. I definitely don't believe that was the case, and could even point to specific decisions I believe were poor, but it would be getting off topic. What I'm saying is, BC's leadership made a conscious choice not to aim for 'COVID zero', due to the fact that there would always be a baseline number of imported cases, so it would never be possible to eliminate the virus to the extent that restrictions could be meaningfully relaxed, as they were in NZ. To me that choice makes sense, although I do feel they took it a bit too far; as cases started really going up over the winter I would have liked to have seen increased measures restricting gathering sooner. But I'm also not operating with all the information they are, so can only second guess so much. As for the Atlantic provinces, they are quite a bit more isolated than BC is, despite, yes, also having a certain amount of necessary traffic. And I agree with you that there's likely some luck involved as well.

amscanne 6y ago
I’m not sure what distinction you’re making here, as most western jurisdictions have an ultimate goal of zero cases and applied the same lockdown policies to a first order approximation (with some succeeding, most needing to relax restrictions after time). But we agree more than we disagree, I just get annoyed at the canard that Canada is dealing with COVID only because of mismanagement in the US (which has caused weird side effects, like harassment of people with US plates).
- tempestn 6y ago
  Of course all jurisdictions have an 'ultimate' goal of zero cases, using vaccines. But what I'm saying is that BC's health leadership has explicitly stated that their goal thus far has not been to drive cases to zero, and the reason is that it is not practical given imported cases. It could be done in the short term with a strict lockdown, and was in late spring 2020, but there would not be sufficient benefit to justify the cost of maintaining that policy, because as soon as restrictions were relaxed, cases would rebound. That's not the same as blaming the whole thing on US mismanagement. I agree that some people are doing that, and certainly I don't approve. (Although I wouldn't chalk it up to an 'inferiority complex'. If anything I would say too many people here are feeling a largely unjustified sense of superiority. Trump may have provided a very visual display of incompetence, but for the most part on the ground the responses were similar. And while Canada's results have been better than the US's, they've still lagged the world on average.) I do understand this policy though. It's convenient to think that if not for incompetent leadership we could be like NZ. But unlike an isolated island nation, it is not possible for a Canadian province to cut itself off from the rest of the world to a sufficient extent that a COVID-zero policy would have been practical thus far. Instead, the stated goal has been to control infections at a level where they did not overwhelm 1) the hospital system or 2) the ability to trace contacts. As the latter has been stressed over the winter, restrictions were increased.