04-17-2021, 02:29 PM
(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.