Barrel Strength

From: Our World in Data; three-day rolling average of deaths per million population from COVID-19
May 6, 2020

Premier Ford has extended the Emergency Orders in Ontario until the Victoria Day weekend on May 19th. This includes electricity rate relief for small businesses and farmers. Actually farmers in Ontario with greenhouses should be awarded free electricity to encourage more home production of food. [here]

As far as Ontario’s COVID-19 deaths, the Ottawa Citizen reports (May 6th):

Although Ontario reported no new nursing home outbreaks, the number of long-term care deaths in the province passed 1,000, with another 31 residents dying. In all, 61 new deaths were reported, bringing the province’s total to 1,361, according to latest government data.

So only 361 deaths were not in long-term care facilities. And how many of those had co-morbidities like obesity, heart disease, diabetes etc.? It’s beginning to look like if you are a reasonably healthy person, not overweight, and without other problems, the probability of your dying of COVID-19 is very low.

So now the politicians must start thinking about trade-offs. Millions of lives are being ruined by this on-going throttling of the economy with its concurrent risks, including risks of people dying of conditions that would normally be treated in the health care system. Yes, there might be an increase of corona cases, but we now know more about the virus and how to deal with infections and their spread. People will be used to a higher level of risk, but can act accordingly. Most people have common sense.

Most in the media don’t have common sense, so politicians will be condemned whatever decision they make.

Has the lockdown had a significant effect on the case numbers? Standard thinking goes like this…

Fact A: novel corona virus is a new disease and we have no natural immunity to it. [Reducing the spread is thus a good idea and a lockdown will do that.]

Fact B: the spread had been greatly reduced and cases and deaths are falling in number.

So, was fact B caused by fact A? Well, not necessarily. Compare countries that pursued the lockdown strategy and countries that did not, for example, Sweden. [See graph above].

If you did not know which countries were pursuing lockdowns and which were not, the data above does not show any significant differences. Something to think about.

Rebel Yell