Originally Posted by
misanthropist
That said, Quebec appears to be struggling with it, and to a lesser degree Ontario. A lot has been made of the timing of Spring Break as a reason for this - BC's Spring Break week is two weeks later than the eastern provinces for some reason - and by the time it occurred we had more information and were telling people not to travel unnecessarily. But personally I am skeptical of this as a major factor - we have more international travel to mainland China and Iran from Vancouver than they do, by far, and there was an absolutely enormous number of flights from Hubei landing at YVR for weeks and weeks and weeks at the height of the epidemic, and no screening of any sort was taking place. So while we might have caught a break on spring break, I can hardly believe that the amount of travel it would have generated would even really make a dent on our numbers.
To be honest, if I had to guess, and this is purely a guess and nothing more...we had spectacular weather for most of March and the first half of April. Everyone was outside, walking around, in parks, on trails, at the beach...but mostly staying six feet apart.
I think it's possible that being outside all the time, while socially distancing, lowered transmission rates. During the same time frame, everybody in Ontario and Quebec would have been indoors, avoiding late winter-early spring weather. Again just a guess, but it strikes me that people staying inside all the time are putting themselves in environments that are probably more conducive to transmitting viral respiratory illnesses than people who are outside a much greater percentage of the time.
The only other factors I can think of to explain Quebec would be cultural: the cheek kiss is a standard greeting there, although I imagine that's fallen off these days.
There is also a much greater tendency to rely on the state or other institutions to provide certain things than there is elsewhere in Canada. Here, I'd say you don't put your parents into a care home unless you HAVE to do so. There, there is much more of an attitude of "so what, I am living my life, you go to the home, that's for you tabarnac" so I bet their numbers in care homes are much higher. In fact, realizing I was about to post this without checking it at all, I looked it up: Quebeckers over the age of 65 are about 3x more likely to live in a private seniors' residence than in the rest of the country. This lines up with my seat-of-the-pants experience of Quebec. I suspect there are a bunch of factors like this adding to their woes - I know they transferred a bunch of people from hospitals to care facilities in the early days of the outbreak in order to free up hospital beds, for example...this may well have seeded clusters in care homes and killed a lot of people.
Anyway bottom line here is that taking basic steps seems to be totally adequate and we're not experiencing a lot of problems, and the scale of the problems we are having, keeps shrinking week after week. I expect a bit of a surge of cases in the fall, but as far as we can tell here, we're really equipped to handle this thing and it just doesn't seem to be as bad as we expected.
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