[Hehe]

Again, I'm not arguing against any policy in particular. They all play some roles.

What I want to discuss is about their effects vs. their associated costs. Again, using the 2 examples already discussed

Closing the borders - how long can we continue to do this and at what cost?
Americans account for a large proportion of our tourism dollars. By closing the border, sure, we prevent Americans potentially carrying the virus, that's the effect but ALSO, the vast majority of Americans who don't carry the virus, the cost.

The virus is estimated to only be controlled with a vaccine that's at least 2yrs out before a sizeable population can be vaccinated. What are people in the tourism business suppose to do? Hoping that our continuous "extension" would suddenly end one day and Americans rush back to visit Canada?

Social distancing in restaurants: social distancing works when the contact between person are expected to be short and in a relatively open environment and ideally WITH protective gears. How long do one usually take at a restaurant for a meal? Would they be using any protective gears? So, the effectiveness of such policy is already questionable in the first place. Now the cost... at a reduced capacity, would the rent of the restaurant suddenly drop by the same amount? Nop. If we had policy such as rent subsidy in place, why not block it out completely and make it delivery/take-out only? Oh... again, it's a question of cost to the business.

What I want to argue is that I am not seeing our gov't, provincial or federal, taking account of everything before making policy decisions.

We keep on doing something that has a minimum resistance with lil to none statistic to back them up. And the numbers show that we aren't really doing much better than our neighbor, the US, who so many of here despise about what they are doing about Covid.

So the question is, what are they (not the US, but any jurisdiction/countries in the world who had any success on suppressing the virus) right? And what are we doing? Maybe it's time for some changes. Because if you look at the curve... we were able to suppress it back in March/April because of a quasi-lockdown... do we want to go back again? What if once it drops, we open up and it goes back up again? Do we just continue to lock down?

Again... not arguing the effectiveness of any policy in particular... I'm just proposing to revisit what we are doing, lay out the pros (effect) and cons (cost) and those policies and find one that best suit us.

And from what I am seeing, the only path back to a "normal", albeit a controlled one, is to really track down all the sources when they come up and keep a lid on them. Trying to cover all potential points to leak without focusing on finding the holes, you'd just keep on getting wet.