The Contrast Continues

The video above shows patrons at a Vancouver, BC restaurant urging health inspectors to leave when they attempted to close it due to what appears to have been a sudden, poorly communicated "red light-green light" closure of provincial indoor dining. Canada continues to experience lockdowns, curfews, and other extraordinary measures in response to a COVID surge that's returning case statisics to late 2020 levels.

In contrast, the US Supreme Court on Friday continued its recent orders confirming the natural right to freedom of worship, ruling that California may not prevent people from gathering in homes for Bible study and prayer meetings. Interestingly, the state argued that the court should not get involved, since improving COVID statistics would remove such restrictions within a week.

The court, clearly aware that last summer, Gov Newsom reversed an equivalent relaxation in another such red light-green light move, nevertheless went ahead and established the principle, issuing the restraining order the plaintiffs requested.

Canadian protests also continue in Montreal and Quebec City. especially in response to a reimposition of curfews in much of Quebec. Other protests occurred in Alberta, where authorities closed a church that violated orders to shut down. It's very puzzling that Canada is continuing to experience such a surge in cases with reimpositions of extremely strict controls that counterintuitively have had no perceptible effect on the disease. Meanwhile, the US is steadily relaxing controls, while vaccinations are showing positive results in nearly all regions. As discusssed in The Atlantic,

Canadians have been overwhelmingly compliant with public-health directives, wearing masks, limiting social interactions, washing and sanitizing our hands ’til our fingertips prune. And what do we get? Per capita vaccination numbers lagging behind those of 50 other countries, including Brazil, Chile, Turkey, and much of Europe, according to Johns Hopkins University’s immunization tracker. The country currently has a level-four travel advisory: “Travelers should avoid all travel to Canada,” warns the CDC. In March, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the U.S.-Canada border—closed for nearly a year, since American COVID-19 infection rates began escalating out of control—would remain closed for at least another month.

The Atlantic piece suggests there's no single cause for the extremely slow rollout of vaccine in Canada:

Without much domestic manufacturing capacity to speak of, Canada had to sign advance-purchase deals with international vaccine companies. The country hedged its bet by mostly going with companies funded by Operation Warp Speed, and so far its strategy has been to overbuy doses in the hopes of securing enough to vaccinate all of its citizens. A mounting critique, however, is that perhaps Canada should have been more specific than “first quarter of 2021” in terms of arranging vaccine-delivery timing.

Bu whatever the reason, it's becoming plain that as of 2021, the single most visible and effective response to COVID is vaccine, and in the hands of capable public health authorities and policymakers, the turnaround in hard-hit US states like California has been spectacular. (This doesn't exclude other potential explanations for positive results in places like Texas and Sweden.) But in some important way, Canada and a few US states like Michigan have missed the boat, and the evidence is impossible to ignore that draconian lockdown-style controls and a red light-green light approach are utterly feckless measures that are actually counterproductive.

While the Atlantic piece says "Canadians have been overwhelmingly compliant", it's startmg to sound as though there are limits even to Canadian willingness to comply. Certainly a factor in what's beginning to look like US success in beating the combination of epidemic and moral panic has been the clear willingness of citizens to hold authorities electorally accountable, as well as the cooperation of the court system in clearly enforcing natural rights in the face of open-ended government efforts to curtail them in an "emergency".