Quote:
Originally Posted by JHikka
Hindsight is 20/20. We really don't know how serious a situation was or how we should have acted until after the fact. That applies to the current day, as well.
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I would argue that the public health measures we enacted actually worked, and that the low incidence of disease that we are seeing is directly as a result of shutting things down as quickly as we did.
So, now, people look around and think "what's all the fuss about", and grumble that the government and public health services grossly overreacted, shutting down the economy for no good reason.
In reality, public health did what was necessary, and did it just in the nick of time. Even a couple of days delay at the beginning of the pandemic could have made all the difference, especially with all the Canadian citizens being repatriated from abroad. Any one of these people could have been infected, and could infect dozens of others. In my mind, the Maritimes dodged a bullet here.
Now we have the contagion under control. Yes, there will be locallized outbreaks (like in the Restigouche), but these flare-ups can be easily controlled because they are localized. Because of this, we can open things up now, while maintaining vigilance, and directing our resources appropriately. I think we should be able to open our internal borders between the Maritime provinces.
A good analogy is that with an uncontrolled forest fire, you throw everything at it, including water bombers to beat it down, but even after the fire is under control, you still have to send in fire crews here and there to deal with hot spots. We are in the hot spot phase of the pandemic now; we don't need the water bombers any more, but we still need the fire crews on standby for the inevitable flare-ups.