04-17-2021, 02:53 PM
(04-17-2021, 02:29 PM)tomh009 Wrote:(04-17-2021, 05:07 AM)plam Wrote: Shutting borders is necessary but not sufficient. Workplace outbreaks are a problem too. Paid sick days. Understanding that it's airborne would help.
Yeah, right now, I don't think foreign travel is a prime contributor any more.
Absolutely we should have paid sick days, and that would help some. But I looked at the workplace outbreak data for Waterloo Region and for Peel, and while it's hard to match up the data, it doesn't seem like the number of workplace outbreak cases is a significant percentage of the new cases we are seeing -- my gut feel says it's maybe 10-20%. (Our tracking and tracing is pretty poor, but workplace infections are one of the easiest to identify.)
Private gatherings, indoors, without masks? That's potentially a big one, but due to the lack of tracing data, it's impossible to confirm that.
How we have got to this point is a series of mistakes and poor judgements. And now many people are fed up, tired of it all or just tuned out. People are still wearing masks in public (without that it would be worse yet) but the human behaviour, combined with the aggressiveness of the variants, is overriding the mask usage and the current vaccination levels.
So, what could the government do to have a significant impact now, until the vaccination levels get significantly higher? Enforce paid sick days, yes, but I think that is not sufficient in itself.
What percentage of infections are even traced right now? I don't get the sense we are doing any of this tracing. We might identify an outbreak, but given asymptomatic people, large workplaces, etc. this isn't the kind of thing we'd even hear about.
Heck, how many people were sick at the Amazon warehouse before anyone heard anything about it.
My gut says workplace infections are a major driver, I'm sure it's not the ONLY driver, but if it was a third, that would still be one of three problems.
But ultimately, I don't think we have any data on it, because, one of the many MANY failures our government has had is an unwillingness to actually bother investing in these services.
Of course, they lacked imagination, maybe they prepared for full contact tracing at orange levels, without the slightest clue that we'll exceed orange levels by 10 pretty easily.