> People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes.
If this is true, it's some pretty impressive science denialism - it's pretty obvious that there's an extremely low chance of transmission outdoors (assuming that you're not, you know, breathing right into someone's face, or next to 20k people in a stadium).
> During a news conference at Toronto city hall Wednesday afternoon, Mayor John Tory said the three main concentrations of cherry blossoms at High Park would be fenced off to “discourage” people from gathering.
to be fair the park closures might not have been as general as I made it sound in my original comment but there were definitely some degree of closure of parks in addition to general sentiment of people being afraid to even go outside
> Ontario ski resorts were closed for seven weeks from Christmas Day 2020 through to February of this year. Ontario was the only jurisdiction in North America to close its slopes, according to the Canadian Ski Council. The province had said the closures were needed out of an abundance of caution and at a time when cases were soaring and vaccines were new.
It's a tiny bit glib to lament 'science denialism' in a pandemic for which we do not have any living memory of dealing with, a new kind of disease for which there are many unknowns, serious concerns with equipment and personnel shortages, high mortality, time constraints, a state of emergency, and most evidently the very low social cost of 'not gathering in groups' outdoors.
In hindsight, they probably didn't need to go that far, but that's hindsight.
Along with the vaccine denialism, the other thing that has surprised me among the concerns of the plebes, is how they have difficulty grasping what an emergency implies.
There is a term called 'Fog of War' that military people are aware of, hinted at in the term 'No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy'.
Running government is like running a company - it's operational. But governing in an Emergency is more like running a startup but where all your personnel are 9-to-5 functionaries not used to such situations. It's managed chaos at best, nothing will be optimized.
It isn't. Closing off certain places isn't done just because those particular places have an increased risk of infection but also to stop people from traveling to and from those places.
I live in western Germany. Home office mandates in my country were for a large part to stop people from commuting in crowded trains every day, even if their actual workplace might not have had a high infection risk.
I live near a busy shopping street. Back in march 20, there was a blanket order to close everything in that street - cafes, malls, mom&pop shops, etc. The street consequently was deserted for a few months. Later, restrictions got more targeted, with an overall goal to keep untested and unvaccinated persons out. And this may lower the infection risks for individual stores, but I can just observe that the street itself is as busy again as before the pandemic.
So shut down the trains. If someone is driving to their cabin, there is no reason to stop them. It was always completely irrational to prohibit solitary or family-oriented outdoor activities. They did that around here for a while, in a largely rural state in the US Pacific Northwest region.
Senseless "do something!" edicts like that give a lot of rhetorical ammunition to the denialists and antivaxxers, while doing nothing to address the spread of COVID.
Another reason to keep people from traveling is to make sure they stay where there's available healthcare.
If everyone traveled to their cabin and got sick, the local hospital wouldn't be able to handle all the cases.
Not anymore, as the virus is already anywhere. But there absolutely was a reason to stop potentially infected from travelling large distances and carry the infection into other regions.
I think it actually took quite a while for outdoor safety to be firmly established. Canada was meanwhile having a very hard time sourcing medical supplies (and eventually also vaccines), meaning there was fear that a real blowup could be much worse than in the US.
If this is true, it's some pretty impressive science denialism - it's pretty obvious that there's an extremely low chance of transmission outdoors (assuming that you're not, you know, breathing right into someone's face, or next to 20k people in a stadium).