Ford declares province-wide house arrest

Vincent J. Curtis

12 Jan 21

 We don’t let mathematicians dispense medical advice, even if they have a Ph.D. in Statistics.  So, why are we letting medical doctors play statisticians and actuaries, and letting them shutdown Ontario?  When Doug Ford said on December 21^st that the provincial shutdown would be “a temporary, one time measure” he lied, and I said he was lying at the time.

The doctors advising Ford make worrisome noises about case loads being above 6,000 a day and of the imminent collapse of the healthcare system - and we believe them?  Why?  They’ve said it before and were wrong before!  On November 12, these same people said that starting from a base of 1500 per day, Ontario would be having 6500 cases per day by December 15^th.  They were utterly wrong, by a factor of three.  Why should we believe such demonstrated incompetence now?

Last April, Ontario had 3504 ICU beds, of which 2811 were equipped with ventilators.  On Tuesday, January 12^th, Ontario reported 2903 cases province-wide, 385 in ICU and 262 on ventilator.  That’s ten percent utilization.  And in two weeks the system is going to be overwhelmed? Nonsense!

After eighteen days of shutdown, the incubation period is over, and daily cases look like they’re beginning to drop.  They ought to be dropping.  So, the only thing that justifies a “state of emergency” is modelling, and we’ve seen how good they are with modelling.

Heads need to roll!

At the press conference in which Premier Ford announced house arrest as the latest turn of the screw, the Premier had the medical professionals justify why it was necessary.

In explaining, the great worry of the medical professionals was that the pandemic would cause the collapse – of the health care system.  Where they work.  Never mind your life, it’s their life they want to keep orderly.  But they admitted something else.  They admitted that the shutdown isn’t working, and that’s why we need another turn of the screw, namely house arrest.

For some reason, everyone simply assumes that lockdowns will control the spread of the virus.  But the medicos at the conference spent a great deal of time explaining why they didn’t, and aren’t.  They determined that one third of the people had violated the shutdown protocols at least once over Christmas.  These lockdown measures won’t work unless everyone complies completely all the time.

In short, their control measures won’t work because the level of compliance they need to work is simply too great.  One third break the rules once causes the edifice to collapse.  Stop bitching and scolding, that’s human nature and the humans have been putting up with just-this-once promises for ten months now.

What are you going to do – throw them all in jail?  The irony of that is too much!

The shutdown is supposed to work – in theory.  And in theory, we could have 20,000 cases per day by Valentine’s Day.  News flash: ideologies don’t work in the real world.  Ford needs to make the ends and means more practical.

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