Discussion: Lots of People Out

I’ve been hearing that from friends around the world. Being forced to stay in makes a healthy walk seem like a much better idea than usual, apparently. Some parks near our area were originally planning to allow trail use while closed but they closed down completely Saturday night after people crammed parking lots and hiked in groups. We haven’t seen anything official yet but we heard police threw mountain bikers out of Palgrave Forest yesterday afternoon (our back yard trails). :(

In our rural settings it is easier to continue to allow walking/running/biking but I understand the difficulty having shades of grey creates. Black and white situations make it much clearer for the public.

The parking lot is the choke point - we went to the nordic trails yesterday and were prepared to wait or turn around if parking lot seemed too busy. Was not an issue though.

Luckily, we can get on trails without driving anywhere so I hope we'll be able to keep getting out for a while longer. It sounds like tomorrow's Parliament session will kick off a period of increased enforcement.

How are you and Courtney doing? It must be a stressful time.

We are hanging in there. A weird combo of being busy (lots of planning and talk) but also being quiet (with things shut down ED/clinic volumes have dropped) with a sense of impending doom. Stressful for everyone though - not just health care.

All of our known local positive cases (5 different ones including one health care worker) were one week ago and are no longer in town. Three heliskiers and the other two were working in town but not local. Every day with no new positive cases and no one presenting to the ED in respiratory distress is reassuring for our town... several more days to really know if we might be in the clear. Mild cases are not being tested in BC so could have a number of cases sitting at home right now and we won't know it is a problem until the 15-20% of cases that need hospital care start showing up in the ED.

You paint a vivid picture of quietly waiting for the unknown.

I also have the sense of impending doom although I'm trying to balance it with moments of hope. Some days it feels like we should get out of bed to see dark skies, howling winds and missiles exploding overhead instead of a perfectly normal sunny day. It's weird dealing with an invisible enemy.

I wish you a boring week. Thanks for being on the front lines on our behalf.

Yes fingers crossed for a boring week:) My long term worry is more to do with the USA screwing this up. You can't let this run rampant as society will shut down on its own anyway due to fear and panic... is Trump going to force people to keep working when they are worried about getting sick? Even the people with moderate symptoms who provide essential services being off for the next few months will significantly impact the economy.

Such an interesting foe - not terribly harmful to most but harmful enough that it stops everything.

Really interesting foe. I obsessively refresh the statistics for countries around the world and look for trends, oddities and reasons for optimism - knowing that the different testing rates make this somewhat bogus. For those of us sitting at home, it's mostly about mathematics and graphs right now - interspersed with depressing news articles and investment news.

'Bent phoned the local hospital today to confirm that they'll take the lion's share of his PPE. It's not the good stuff but it's better than nothing. In a dental emergency, he would only be allowed to do very limited procedures right now (e.g. no drilling) so he just needs to keep a small amount of PPE for himself and his staff. We're making plans based on the office being closed for 6 months. Gulp. So far the staff are getting full pay because we have to believe the government can do better than EI.

And I agree - the USA is in huge trouble if Trump doesn't let the grown-ups run the show.