Monday 28 December 2020

I Hope You're Sitting Down

So as some of you are now painfully aware, most of the province of Ontario has entered into a Covid lockdown.



Largely driven by our friends in Toronto.

No, I'm wrong.  Completely driven by our friends in Toronto.

So here is something astonishing;

These six neighbourhoods in Toronto, representing 123,000 people....


....have more Covid cases than the entire shaded area in the map below, representing over 2.3 million people.


Yes, that's right.  Those six little neighbourhoods in Toronto have more cases than the entire purple area.

And as a result, the government has decided to shut down almost the entire province.

If we look at the numbers on a per capita basis, it becomes even more dramatic [Click to see better].

Those six Toronto neighbourhood rates dwarf the shaded regions in the province (blue bars). [As a guide, a rate of 55,000 cases per million people means 5.5% of the population has been infected.]

But here is something equally astonishing; the rates for the six lowest neighbourhoods - yes, lowest in Toronto are all higher than all those shaded regions (except for Chatham, by a hair).



That means every neighbourhood in Toronto is higher than a huge swath of the province.  But they lockdown just about the whole province.

So why isn't the government focusing solutions on Toronto, or at least on those six neighbourhoods?

Boy, if 2020 was toilet paper.....











3 comments:

Rob Greenfield said...

You may have missed the point UC. If only the high infected areas are locked down and the rest are not, what's stopping those under lockdown heading to non-lockdown areas to shop, go to bars and restaurants to spread the virus they may have since they come from a highly infected area? As someone who lives in a green zone, I think the lockdown province wide is the correct move and we up here should be lockdowned for the same length of time as the south. We've already had busloads of shoppers up here from the grey zones and Quebec before the lockdown.

Urban Cowboy said...

Okay, good points. But my point was really, do something about the high incident areas. Shutting down restaurants and gyms and movie theatres has done nothing to slow the spread in Toronto.

Easier said than done, but I say by locking everyone else down, they are addressing the symptoms (out of town shoppers) not the root cause.

Maybe things will be clearer in a month.

Hanna said...

Liking the positive thinking about possibly things being better in a month but from a conversation with a fellow member of the hood earlier today, we are losing hope of things being better in the end of Jan either. Which sucks as having a meal at a restaurant or happy hour at a bar is starting to feel like it was another life time!! Fingers crossed - gotta keep up the spirit!! Looking forward to Jan stats updates :)