Trust the CBC to bring you a truly horrifying headline; The pandemic numbers out of Ontario are horrifying...
That's a headline designed to ramp up the anxiety level of everyone already suffering the mental health pressures of three weeks of self-isolation.
Ah, but it turns out the story isn't about "pandemic numbers out of Ontario," but rather, the pandemic projections out of Doug Ford's news briefing Friday. Yes, some folks have crunched some numbers, and depending on myriad unknown and unknowable variables, Ontario could (ie might or might not) have 1,600 coronavirus deaths by the end of this month, and could have 3,000 to 15,000 within the next two years.
Yes, I suppose those numbers are within the realm of possibility, but they are entirely speculative. Wouldn't a more accurate headline be, "Some pandemic projections out of Ontario are horrifying."
Let's consider actual pandemic numbers by the only number that counts, the death toll. The "new cases" numbers that are foregrounded constantly are a function of how much testing has been done and nothing else. The CBC's own coronavirustracker tells me that as of two minutes ago, the Ontario death toll attributed to COVID-19 stands at 135.
We know over 80% of deaths are among the elderly with underlying conditions such as COPD, pneumonia, etc., and we have no way of knowing how many died of coronavirus as opposed to with coronavirus. Worst case scenario; at best, no more than a few dozen healthy Ontarions have been felled by this "pandemic" thus far, out of a population of fifteen million.
In response, our government has jammed a big fat panic stick into the spokes of an $800B economy.
How does that make any sense?
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