As a Canadian living and working in the US, I encourage all those that think Canada is somehow better than US, to go give living in Canada (and paying their taxes) a try.
US is a much more competitive and diverse market in every respect (even with it's shortcomings).
My parents (and other immediate family), would move to the US if they could.
My partner and I lived in the US for 10 years, and decided to move back. We're very glad we did.
The US is much more competitive, I'll give you that, but it's not necessarily a good thing. I don't miss it. It's dog-eat-dog, every person for themselves.
I'm not sure how long you've lived in the US, but the first few years we were there were pretty peachy. But the problems just keep piling up.
I don't really have the patience to list everything, but the health care system _alone_ is reason enough to stick around in Canada. It's awesome. The US is a complete disaster. And I say this as someone who benefited from probably the best quality healthcare in the world during my time there.
I get a bit annoyed at which is "best". It really depends on what you're looking for.
The US is great if you want a high-paying career working for world-leading company. Typically you'd make enough so that things like healthcare are an annoyance, not a financial nightmare.
Canada is great if your career is not #1 and you want a government that will provide a comprehensive social safety net.
The comparison is fraught with problems due to the lack of immunity for COVID.
The "with shutdowns, masks and closed schools" line also assumes the effectiveness of all those measures, and ignores the glaring problem that they simply kick the can down the road -- there is no appetite for shutdowns and closed schools until the end of 2021, but a vaccine could easily take that long (if not longer) to be generally available -- assuming any of the current vaccine candidates work well. So what, exactly, is the plan?
You're counting flu and covid-19 deaths differently.
For flu you're using sophisticated statistical modelling of excess death combined with community surveillance of use of primary and secondary care. This will tend to overcount.
For covid-19 you're using "died after testing positive for covid, or with covid mentioned as the cause on the death certificate". This will tend to undercount (even when taking into account the slight overcount involved in people who die from other things after a +ve test).
Or, yeah, maybe it is just like the flu, except
(1) covid-19 is more contagious,
(2) Covid-19 is much more likely to kill you if you get infected, and
(3) much of the population has immunity so seasonal flu, while almost nobody has immunity to Covid-19,so it would run roughshod over a population if people didn't social distance (unless testing/contact tracing infrastructure was in place to keep it in check).
Take a good read through this article and tell me why you want to continue comparing Covid-19 to the flu:
False equivalence. Car accidents are not transmitting at viral rates. Cars are not infecting other cars even when they are working perfectly well. Seasonal flu is not killing 2% of those infected, and even then we take necessary measures to avoid the common flu.
> You are endangering others‘ lives each time you drive. And yet you’re not inline at the DMV surrendering your license, why?
You are endangering other drivers' lives with their consent; any time they get behind the wheel, they acknowledge the risk to themselves from other drivers as well as themselves. You're also required to carry insurance to help cover the cost of screwing up and hurting or killing other people.
Please tell me how other people are consenting to your risking of their lives because you want to go get a haircut. Also please let me know which insurance company will pay out in the case that you directly and recklessly infect someone and they die.
> Seasonal sickness also isn’t new. My coworker gave me the flu and I gave it to my grandmother. Who’s at fault there?
Not sure what this has do to with anything. I'm trying to assume a charitable interpretation of what you're asking, but this just sounds like trolling.
Some of the UK/US response was supposedly based on this study [0], which predicted maybe 250,000 deaths if there was no lockdown. That's something like 140 years worth of traffic deaths for the UK, in one go. So yes, we take calculated risks all the time, but the comparison to driving isn't useful IMO.
Smoking isn't a fitting example. You can do whatever you want to yourself in your own home, but it is significantly restricted in public were it effects other people. It's obviously about calculated risk, but that is weighted very different once others are involved.
An interesting other aspect is the change to the status quo. To stick to the better example: Humans accepted that some traffic deaths will happen. But lets imagine that for unknown reason all around the country, car tyres start to just suddenly burst, steering cars into incoming traffic. I'd not be surprised if driving would be restricted until we got to the bottom of such a phenomenon. Even if the average chance of dying on a given day for the average citizen didn't increase manyfold.
Now that I've written that... kind of reminds me of a certain Boeing plane.
All the comments in response are clear then that it is a question of degree. At x deaths caused, we stop permitting this. That means the discussion is only moved to determining what that threshold x is. And so the right thing is to move past that to find what the cost-benefit analysis is.
X is the number of people who would overwhelm your local hospital system. If the cost of you getting a haircut is that it renders healthcare inaccessible for your region, such that they cannot care for people who need it (e.g. people who get in car accidents) then that cost is too high.
B&H is run and staffed by Hasidic Jews. They have strict definitions of work that are forbidden on the Sabbath and they may not always be intuitive to outsiders, for example, for many religious Jews, pressing the elevator button is forbidden, but riding in an elevator that is programmed to just stop on every floor is fine.
Your mind is free to boggle, but Jews are entitled to close their businesses on the Sabbath just the same as Christians. In the county I grew up in, everything but supermarkets is closed on Sunday, for example.
Is nobody else bothered by the logic in the 3rd paragraph?
> As with all currently available tests, it’s not yet clear how long a person needs to be infected before testing positive, or whether someone who's infected could be identified by the test before displaying symptoms.
A recently saw a paper calling that COVID-19 was easy to detect early in the course with an oral swap. But later in the disease course it was easier to detect with a fecal test. Turns out a lung scan was more accurate than either.
It bothers me too reading about the testing methodology on various countries. In China anal swabs tested positive in released infected patients, while they were repeatedly testing negative with oral swabs. This has come up in their "reinfection" investigations, which may have really been partial recoveries appearing as full recoveries according to oral swab tests.
I suppose they haven't yet had a chance to test it fully in the field, so they don't know the error rates. Doesn't necessarily mean the test is useless.
What exactly is it that bothers you? Were you hoping for a test that could flag a person as soon as the first body cell was invaded by a copy of the virus?
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow_core/python/client/session.py", line 1365, in _do_call
return fn(*args)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow_core/python/client/session.py", line 1350, in _run_fn
target_list, run_metadata)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow_core/python/client/session.py", line 1443, in _call_tf_sessionrun
run_metadata)
(0) Resource exhausted: OOM when allocating tensor with shape[1,48,2,25,465,64] and type float on /job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/device:GPU:0 by allocator GPU_0_bfc
[[{{node sample_sequence/while/concat}}]]
Hint: If you want to see a list of allocated tensors when OOM happens, add report_tensor_allocations_upon_oom to RunOptions for current allocation info.
The key point is the top-down approach. Many programmers come up with their abstractions by thinking "what can I make?", but it's often better to think "what do I want to make, and in a perfect world, how would I want to express that?", and going down from there.
You have to consider the hardware if you want any amount of efficiency. You should consider your 'wishful thinking', because those wishes sometimes come true (not always, but often enough that its worthwhile to think about the ideal)
US is a much more competitive and diverse market in every respect (even with it's shortcomings).
My parents (and other immediate family), would move to the US if they could.