I think the reason why some people are confused by the response to this is because how obvious it is that the "data" and I use the term loosely, isn't even close to reality. Here is some basic math ...assume patient 1 was Dec 10th in Wuhan Meat Circus.(Conservatively)
Assume patient 2 was 4 days later. Lets say Dec 14th. Lets assume conservatively that doubling event of the virus is 5 days. To date that is 144 days since patient 2 in our little math problem. Note 5 days seems to be a farily conservative estimate for doubling but lets go with that. Take 144/5 = 29 doubling events
Plug 2 to the power of 29 into a calculator. 536,870,912 Covid 19 cases or 140 x more than what is being reported globally.
The cat was out of the bag long before we started with the lock down measures. This virus was here in early January and people were carrying on their normal lives. Think back to mid January. February, even March - were people dropping dead around you? was the world ending? Were you being told to stay home? Not work? Were we lighting money on fire handing out billions of dollars in CERB, wage subsidies, bankrupting family grown business'? Decimating the economy? Missing graduations, senior year, sports seasons. Some peope won't recover from this. There is a cost to the lockdown in real lives lost. There is a tradeoff. The fact that more people aren't asking why are we doing this is what disappoints me. Canadians were very quick to fall in line and take orders from this government. I mean, they have never let us down before- ICBC a monopoly of the car insurance wakes up with a billion dollar loss one year and acts suprised. DFO can't manage their way out of a wet paper bag to name a few. We are trusting the same bureaucrats with this respiratory virus response. Ask questions, do your own critical thinking. Don't be a lemming.
I definitely think there is something to this. I have been arguing from day one that it makes no sense that we would have so few cases in Vancouver, all things considered.
It also makes no sense that our extremely low rate of serious illness is due solely to social distancing - if that were the case, Quebec would be doing much better: their numbers as per Google's anonymized data have been the best in the country by far; for six weeks their public space activity has been 70% below normal. BC has been something like 45% below normal IIRC. But our presence in public parks is about 65% ABOVE normal.
So what is the story there? We don't know. If I had to make some guesses, though...
1) staying home, specifically, may not be a great idea. If all your time is indoors with infected people, your odds of contracting it yourself probably increase significantly. What with the late winter weather back east, people may well have been staying inside, in temperature controlled, humidity controlled environments that are great for viruses.
2) Quebecers love their institutions. Their rate of care home use for the elderly is about three times the Canadian average. Grouping the elderly together in communal areas is really asking for it.
3) We may well have already had a much greater infection rate, and consequently already be much closer to herd immunity than anyone expects. The more prison studies we see, the more likely this looks.
We'll see, there could easily be other factors. But practically everyone I know went to the same trade show in Vegas in January - I skipped it this year because I hate Vegas, luckily - and lots came back extremely sick. At the time, there was no talk about Chinese Choke'N'Stroke in the western world. But in retrospect, many of these people suspect this as a possibility.
If the spread is closer to the Stanford study numbers, then chances are the reason we're on the downslope is more related to high asymptomatic infection rates than to any specific steps we're taking. That may not be the case, but it would help to explain why much more aggressive social distancing in Quebec hasn't worked as well as the much more relaxed approach we're taking in BC.