Quote:
Originally Posted by cheswick
Ontario had its first case in late January. Manitoba is over a month behind their curve if you will. There are conflicting opinions of experts. Some saying these types of closures are useless. Alberta saying if they close schools it’ll have to be until September to be of any use.
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Depends on the desired outcome. We can have a relatively quick but severe outbreak, or we can "flatten the curve" and extend it out with people being exposed gradually but allow the healthcare system to face manageable demand.
School closures once there is suspected community spread absolutely need to happen either way. I guess how they are timed might help determine how long the closures are. Yeah we might lose 3 months of school. We also might save dozens of otherwise preventable deaths. I mean the direction from Public Health is no public gatherings of 250. How many schools in the province have enrollment less than that? You have schools built for 900 students with 1100-1200 in them. I went to high school in one of them 20 years ago, we were packed like sardines. Our class changes looked like those pictures from the airports last night.
I work in mental health, am a union rep and I've been in a lot of meetings the past couple weeks with medical/clinical people, data people, clueless people and a few people who have clinical brains but also understand data. The latter are the people I trust the most, they have the best balance. The pure data people have little connection to real-life, they get the issue but are a bit cold and always underestimate the human costs. The clinical people are always in a state of panic away from patients/clients due to the stress on our system running at about 110% of capacity at the best of times, they can't think long-term. In our first meetings the balanced people felt that once the community spread was confirmed in BC we were a few weeks from a mass quarantine. I think they were right and I think we're there today. But I'm still at work as normal tomorrow, operations are normal and we'll see if we move people back to their homes and maybe get pulled into other areas of the health system to help out.