For most of the remainder of the month, Saskatchewan will remain under the restrictions that don’t permit you to have visitors to your house or allow you to go out to a restaurant or a bar with more than a couple other people.
The critical question is whether we will have to be under other circumstances.
This is in no way to be taken as an endorsement of the nonsense from the anti-mask crowd peddling their idiocy that the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t real or that their personal freedoms are somehow more important that any societal commitment they have to not the spread the virus.
The novel coronavirus is all too real, becoming both increasing common and increasingly deadly in this province.
At the press conference last week in which Premier Scott Moe and Chief Medical Health Officer Dr. Saqib Shahab decided to extend current restrictions until Jan. 29, Moe justified by the decision by explaining that Saskatchewan was having success in December before what he describes as a “Christmas bump” and went so far as to suggest the January numbers haven’t been all that bad or much worse than elsewhere.
At least on the latter points, Moe is incorrect.
We were experiencing the highest daily averages, highest hospitalizations and ICU admittance, and highest death totals. By all unbiased statistical measures, January 2021 has been the worst.
It’s also now worse than just about anywhere else. We certainly have surpassed Quebec and Ontario in daily per capita cases. And, as it stands now, we are going in the wrong direction. This isn’t what is happening elsewhere.
Manitoba was facing dangerous numbers of 300 to 400 new cases a day — even after Progressive Conservative Premier Brian Pallister issued a severe clampdown that ticketed those attending church services, limited what big box stores could sell to avoid pre-Christmas shopping traffic and stopped people from travelling from one area of the province to another.
The outcry was loud from many sectors of that province and the positive results in Manitoba were not necessarily immediately. The novel coronavirus was rampant in Manitoba nursing homes, which is why deaths in that province have far outpaced deaths here.
But as it stands right now, Manitoba has seen its daily case numbers below 100 and its death toll fall. Sadly, the expect opposite is happening here in Saskatchewan.
For that reason alone, it seems passing strange that Moe would call for more of the same for the next two weeks.
Perhaps the premier and his health officials will be right that the high numbers of today are just the hangover after Christmas and New Years.
They are certainly right that any such lockdown is hard on business. One surely does sympathize both with struggle businesses are going through and tough choices Moe must make.
But what if doing the same thing isn’t doing enough? If we are experiencing large-scale COVID-19 community spread right now, is it logical to think doing more of the same will actually work?
What if, by the end of this month, we find out that all that’s been accomplished is postponing a necessary clamp down?
Moe and the rest of us are taking chance.
