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If you asked us, the Conservative Party of Canada largely exhausted its intellectual and philosophical reserves somewhere near the mid-point of the Harper majority.

Perhaps you could expand on this point a bit. I'd be curious to know what happened.

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I can tell that your 'snippy' correspondent, and indeed The Line staff, are a little thin on science degrees. When a range-of-outcomes varies by 18:1, that's just over four doublings of a phenomenon that can double in 3 days. The range isn't narrower, not because the scientists don't understand the virus, but because they don't understand Doug Ford, and what he might do.

The graph says that Canada has both Alberta and Nova Scotia, with the same basic people and certainly the same virus. If Ontario behaves like Nova Scotians have, they'll get 500; if they behave like Albertans, they'll get 9000. And the modelers don't know what the hell Ford is going to go with, since he's done both.

The graph says that no matter how hard they try, they can't get to zero. 500 is the bottom. Pity.

The graph says that no matter how stupid they behave, they can't do as badly as Florida, which had 12,000 cases yesterday, normalized down for Ontario's population.

The graph comes with comments, indicating HOW to get 500 instead of 9000: "The scientists called for a decrease to 70 per cent of pre-pandemic contact levels, through reducing indoor capacity, mask policies, working from home and limiting large gatherings."

If "70 of contact levels" is meaningless to you, it's not to the scientists, who can give specific advice on distances, number of people per room, ventilation levels.

They've taken the data they've got - including the historical fact that Conservative premieres have repeatedly chosen catastrophic pandemic responses, like Kenney and his "best summer ever" super-opening with no tracing - and outlined what'll happen if Ford is that stupid, as he might be; they've also outlined how well Ontario could do, and advised how to do it.

If you'd like them to wave a red banner saying "we have to give this wide range because Doug Ford is unpredictable and might be stupid again", can you please chip in to a gofundme for their salary replacement?

Or you could take the very broad hint they're delivering, instead of calling about 20 PhD's stupid. Either 20 PhD's are stupid, or Doug Ford is an unpredictable politician. What does Occan's Razor tell you about that?

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Depends if you believe in vaccines or not I suppose. Depends if you believe in the cure sometimes being worse than the disease as well. Albertans refuse to close down schools for instance, children's development being held back being worse for society than COVID for instance

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The problem is that it seems that those 20 PhD's are every week issuing more and more dire warnings that never seems to come to pass. If memory serves me correct we were supposed to be worse than Florida by now yet less people die of covid in Canada per week than die per day of opioid overdoses.

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Tried googling that and came up dry. Need a reference to the Canadian model that predicted we would be worse than Florida.

Indeed, this very model, with its high number of 9,000, is still saying the worst we could do in a couple of months of maximum-bad policies, is 75% as bad as Florida already was on Thursday. (16,000 cases for 20 million people, about like Ontario having 12,000 for 15 million people)

Once again, my point was that models are not predictions, and The Line editors are mis-using the document to discuss it as a "prediction". It's a model. Models say "What if we do X - the consequences will be Y". Many models offer extreme outcomes, to warn us off extreme actions.

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Sorry should have been more clear in my point, we keep hearing about about how cases are about to sky rocket but they never seem to do. Perhaps the issue is the shifting goal posts. Much has been written on the poor messaging by governments. Anthony Fury talks alot about this - I high recommend following him

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>we keep hearing about about how cases are about to sky rocket

...again, provide links. Since the claim is 'we KEEP hearing', it'll take more than two. Good links would include a later story of how growth didn't happen, despite everybody going ahead with the same behaviours.

There have been *specific* missed predictions, over a year ago, when marches and rallies and so forth, all outdoors, were feared to cause big outbreaks, but didn't. We learned just how little transmission occurs outdoors, particularly in daytime. (90% of outdoor transmissions were at night.)

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