I am yet to understand why Quebec is doing curfew. How does not going outside after 8pm till 6am somehow make the situation better? Their own health officials said curfew won’t help.
> Their own health officials said curfew won’t help.
I’m no longer following quebec public health’s announcements closely, but did they seem credible? They’ve been wrong on most everything so I’d need their reasoning rather than their authority to believe them here.
A curfew makes gatherings substantially harder. You have to buy food and drink in advance, and people have to be able to sleep over and be comfortable doing so.
Contact tracing won’t detect many clusters at private gatherings if people don’t say they were violating rules. Public health’s data may not be accurate here.
If I were in charge I wouldn’t use a curfew mind you. I would instead fix public health’s rules: emphasize ventilation, mandate open windows, require masks at work while seated, etc. But I suspect the curfew actually achieves its purpose. Quebec is doing better relative to other provinces than it did pre curfew, iirc.
[citation needed] - anecdotally all of the people I heard of that partied before still party after, either on the weekends eariler or they stay over.
>another major cause of spread.
[citation needed] - The "activities and events", which includes legal events, is 285 out of 11 158 in the sum of outbreaks collected by Quebec public health. "Other environments", which is where they put clusters that they can't identify is even lower at 46 out of 11 158. All other categories are verified using hard data, and one couldn't lie to classify the cluster somewhere else. So no, this isn't a data issue : https://www.quebec.ca/en/health/health-issues/a-z/2019-coron...
By far the dominating sources of infection are work and school, and it's not even close. Followed then are places of commerce.
What curfews actually do though, is force much higher concentrations of people indoors and in public transit, which strongly contributes to the infections in work, "other establishments", and legal "activities and events". Which has a big impact on infection, unlike the other factors.
Politicians had many other tools they chose to relax or not to use right as they enforced the curfew. For example, restrictions on schools were relaxed, a major driver of infection - places like gyms and so on were opened, which already infected hundreds of people, rapid tests were not used in outbreak environments, schools were not outfited with basic ventilation (even just an air purifier would help!), contact tracing is in a horrible state, etc...
Most of all, the politicians could actually release the data behind their decisions, going a long way to increase goodwill and compliance, but chose not to.
They chose the curfew because it would placate those who asked for stricter restrictions and get people to disagree with them, because it would be flashy and hard to ignore, because once restricted to Montreal it wouldn't cause issues to their voterbase, and because it's very easy to implement and doesn't hurt businesses with which the current government is incredibly cozy.
I think public health estimated actual infection rates are 5x the reported case counts. Where are cases easy to measure? In schools and work where you can easily know who was there. Where are they hard to measure? In informal social gatherings among rule breakers.
You’re looking only at the extreme case. Hardcore parties will still party. But regular people who just want to have a dinner party of ten, won’t. There is no data on overall gathering changes (no one tracks that), but you have to assume casual gatherings drop off. And anecdotally I know people are cancelling plans.
As it gets brighter late at night I think the argument against curfew will be stronger. People do go outside on late summer nights and that is safe.
I agree with you on ventilation, and rapid tests etc. If I were in charge I’d do that and not a curfew. But Arruda doesn’t believe in aerosols or rapid tests. So I understand why the politicians reach for the tool they can actually use.
As for data: there’s an easy way to settle this. Find infection per capita in quebec vs ontario vs bc before the first curfew, and after. It’s the only major difference. I think Quebec’s relative numbers improved post curfew, but I don’t have good time series on hand. Know of any?
I know the curfew is psychologically brutal! I’m merely arguing it probably works, too.
Also I’m from New Brunswick originally and there in the Edmundston region they have the same policies as the rest of New Brunswick, except that people disobey the rules and have private parties. They’ve had constant outbreaks, but it doesn’t show in the stats because those people don’t go for tests and they don’t share full info with contact tracers. Public Health officials have described the rule breaking in their briefings. We know it is the case as New Brunswick doesn’t normally have local cases so the virus only enters by rule breaking.
>I think public health estimated actual infection rates are 5x the reported case counts. Where are cases easy to measure? In schools and work where you can easily know who was there. Where are they hard to measure? In informal social gatherings among rule breakers.
A large part of why infection rates are higher is because a lot of people simply don't get tested, be it because their workplace doesn't want them to (happened to a lot of people I know), or because they have light or no symptoms. Otherwise, people who were infected in a party and then infect other people that do get tested have a high likelihood to get traced as sources of infection too. Besides, there is no obligation to cooperate with contact tracing, if you go get tested after going to a party you can simply not say anything, so I don't really see why people that get infected at a party wouldn't get tested. On the converse, the one party-goer I know of apparently gets tested weekly, but hey that's anecdotal and low quality.
>As for data: there’s an easy way to settle this. Find infection per capita in quebec vs ontario vs bc before the first curfew, and after. It’s the only major difference. I think Quebec’s relative numbers improved post curfew, but I don’t have good time series on hand. Know of any?
The issue for this is that sadly the curfew was not implemented alone.
That said, one can look at when the curfew was extended to 9h30PM, and indeed there is no significant difference.
Have a look at the CTV stats. Quebec peaked at 30 per capita, fell to less than 10 with the curfew. And having kept a version of it, now is less than 15 per capita.
Ontario was 25/7/25. BC was 16/10/23.
Roughly. My prediction would be that Quebec has a lower peak than these two provinces and spends less time with max restrictions. Ontario issues a full stay at home order, and did so before Quebec’s curfew announcement.
Also Montreal is the only place that kept the curfew at all (9h30 vs none until recently) and it has markedly lower per capita case counts than the rest of quebec or other BC/Onatario.
Do you have an alternate explanation for this data?
Of course. The curfew being imposed in January also came with harsh restrictions on schools and with workplace closures, and at the same coincided with the wrapping up of the vaccination of the healthcare system, which together account for 80-90% of cases.
Montréal is also the only place that kept many, many other other restrictions and that had accelerated vaccination before cases popping off everywhere.
So we really have to limit observation to curfew only changes.
>That’s a hard comparison as there many variables during past case declines too when curfew lifted
Certainly, but if the curfew was the determinant factor, then we would not see the decline persist past it's relaxation or removal.
>However, right now Ontario has had a total lockdown for a while, but no curfew.
Even the implementation of the major measures in January 1st did not have much effect outside of healthcare until around 2 weeks afterwards. It's only been four days since Ontario implemented similar measures. The earlier "lockdown" was a lockdown in name only and even allowed gyms and indoor-dining to be open. For this comparison to be made we will still have to wait at least ten days.
As it stands, the only conclusion we can take from this data we have so far is that the curfew is likely not the decisive, as case declines persisted after it's removal and relaxation.
The priors we have from expert opinions and even government officials is that the lockdown is not expect to be effective.
From this, I can't conclude anything except that the lockdowns are likely not effective.
> From this, I can't conclude anything except that the lockdowns are likely not effective.
Wait you’re expanding this to not just curfew, but any lockdown is ineffective?
I’d invite you to check out the recent outbreak on Newfoundland. Large undetected outbreak, lots of spread, 100% UK variant, totally eliminated in a month due to a lockdown with high compliance, return to zero cases.
I should add I do have some doubts about the curfew with warm weather. Outdoor socialization isn’t harmful, and people will feel more deprived now than during the winter one, when many people hibernate anyway.
Oh fuck sorry I totally got mixed up, I absolutely meant curfew and not lockdown. I was debugging a really hairy algorithm at the same time and I got distacted. Of course, lockowns are incredibly effective, by far the most effective tool, and I wish we had let the first lockdown continue until completion.
Sorry, I made a mistake here. In the last sentence, I mean "curfews are likely not effective", not lockdowns, which definitely are extremely effective.
It's really not. People definitely can and do have parties without the curfew. They just do it during the weekend or overnight. Besides, data shows that Quebecers already followed the measures pretty well, and only a small fraction of overall infections came from unknown causes or illegal gatherings, much dominated by schools and work (healthcare before vaccination).
Data from the public health agencies suggested it would not and had not had any impact.
Ah, this requires a bit of knowledge of Quebec politics.
The quebec premier is a pro-business populist. So, his leadership method can be accurately summarized as, doing what's best for business, and covering up for the issue this causes using populist issues (law 21, for example) or aesthetics.
Well, as cases started increasing in Montréal, he wanted to act though. But he didn't want to implement an actual lockdown, as that would hurt the economy (much like fumbled the first lockdown where cases almost went to zero, but instead of continuing slightly longer and implementing mass tests and tracing, he lifted it right before tracing was up to capacity and cases went to zero, but I digress). For the same reason, he didn't want to close down schools, which are a large driver of infection here according to public health data.
So, he implemented somthing he knew would look though to his base outside of Montreal, without actually impacting the economy, which is an 8pm curfew. Obviously, everyone with a bit of knowledge knew this would be useless, but there goes. As the curfew went on, vaccination of the health sector picked up, and the healthcare system went from a large driver of cases to non-existent, allowing Montreal to bring R under 1 and cases to go down. He obviously acted as if the curfew contributed, and pushed the curfew to 9:30.
Then, he had the brilliant idea of : putting back schools to full-time learning instead of one-day-on, one-day-off, even as the schoolboards and teachers didn't want to - supercharching a large infection driver, but also, outside of Montreal, opening back up indoors dining for restaurants and indoors gyms (without masks!).
Unsurprisingly, this led to an explosion of cases outside of Montreal, while Montreal kept stable amounts of infections despite a delayed curfew and full classrooms. So, he rolled back those measures, and to look though again, he put an 8pm curfew in the high infection periods.
Despite the fact that cases weren't increasing much in Montréal, afraid that the lack of increase despite a delayed curfew would show plainly that his curfew, flagship measure, was useless, he put it back to 8pm in Montréal. Nicely, this means that people now only have two hours or so to do their groceries, supercharging the mass of people there, indoors.
So there it is, it's really just aesthetics. If it helps or not doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't annoy his base too much and looks flashy, it's good for Mr. Legeault.
Also, he added a mandate to wear masks in outdoor parks, while almost no infections at all were recorded outdoors.
I live in Quebec and would summarily disagree with this assessment.
Your statement about the failure curfew policy and closures is definitely not true.
Have a look at the data [1] (Select: Quebec and change the timeframe to include 'all time'.
The original closures in January had a radically positive effect in reducing spread, and there were many more measures in place than merely curfew.
You directly contradict yourself by indicating 'opening up restos schools was a bad decision' when in the preceding statement you literally said that the policies 'had no effect'. They clearly did.
Schools have been opened in many places in the world, and are generally not considered to be superspreading locations - the difference 'now' is not COVID v1, rather, it's COVID v1.1 and v1.2 (i.e. other variants) which seem to be affecting young people at considerably higher rates.
The policy here is not hugely different than most places in the world.
Except you could see cases went down in a very similar way in places with no curfew around that same time period. It's asinine to credit the curfews for that. Unless you also don't mind blaming the current uptrend on... Curfews too? Because otherwise it's just an unfalsifiable hypothesis :
1) if cases go down it's thanks to Legault and his "audacious measures" like curfews
2) if cases go up the population is to blame but the measures still work and we just need more of them
There were curfews all over Quebec, and Quebec's Jan 1. policies had the most precipitous drop in cases in any province in Canada at any time except the 'shelter in place' orders.
Your '1 and 2' points are not relevant speculation - and I don't care one bit about Legault or his government, it's besides the point.
The policies across Canada and most of Europe for that matter are not dramatically different.
Why are you only comparing to the rest of Canada? The drop also happened in the US. And in Europe. Also why aren't the curfews working anymore?
Also, I'm not sure how attributing any benefit to completely unproven NPI that the government literally admitted to putting in place because it "sounded good and it sent message" rather than based on any scientific data isn't the actual speculation here.
You're batching together policies to make the curfew look good by proxy.
All analysis that isolates the curfew as a singular NPI show no discernible advantage, and the government admitted to having no evidence it's useful at all.
>The original closures in January had a radically positive effect in reducing spread, and there were many more measures in place than merely curfew.
I never disputed the good effects of the closures in January. I disputed the impact of the curfew solely. You will alos notice in the data after January that the category of infection sources that fell the most is actually "Living and care environemnts", which is where healthcare is placed - a major driver of infection that was eliminated via vaccination.
It's partly a social signal. I live in Quebec and the notion of 'curfew' has a very eerie and ominous 'feel' like nothing ever in my life.
I feel it's more powerful than the time we were seeing NYC hospitals blow up in COVID disaster.
It's 'over there' when it's on TV ... but when you 'have to get home by 8' it a visceral effect.
To the point wherein never before have I truly contemplated the authoritarian nature of the order - though I'm fully sympathetic to the Provincial Leaders trying to stop mass death, it's pretty scary that this can happen and the Supreme Court ruling on the case that was brought before them was really scant. Basically, the Judges said 'it's for the good of the people and proportional so it's ok' - but there's basically zero in the way of parameterized logic, precedence, or specific legality to all of it.
As far as the Health Officers supposedly miscommunication information, I suggest that these are intelligent people, and that obviously there's still not as much consensus as the comment implies.
'Gaslight of Science' I think is better exemplified by those denying COVID or vaccines.
The government of Québec mismanaged the crisis to a phenomenonal level. Literally thousands of deaths were directly caused by that mismanagement (from the catastrophic handling of nursing homes) even with a population that was (and still is) one the most compliant to the restrictions.in the world . But we still are blamed and pusnished by the government for "slipping up" and not being responsible while we all know no one in the government will be held accountable for the CHSLDs collapsing and Quebec having some of the worst outcomes in the world. That's who's gas lighting here, not a very tiny group of fringe weirdos with almost 0 impact denying covid.
"Quebec having some of the worst outcomes in the world"
This is completely false, Quebec actually has some of the better outcomes in the civilized world. [1]
Better than US, France, UK, Poland, Spain, Sweden - it's about the same as Switzerland and a little worse than Germany.
Where is your evidence of mismanagement?
The initial pandemic broke out and given that Quebec is the place in NA with the highest degree of 'socialized elderly care' - it's not unreasonable that the initial shock was higher, but after that 'first wave' of deaths in LTC - since June - the rate has been about the same as Canada, which is among the best in the world.
The populist blame is ridiculous - everyone whines about their own governments without providing any material evidence, because frankly in most cases there is none.
Please, are you actually comparing us to sweden? Yeah I hope we have better numbers than an open country. And even then the numbers are only slightly different and they were mostly from long term care too. But why not compare us to Norway or Denmark? Shouldn't we also be running circles around those unruly, not locked down freedumbz loving floridians or science denying Swedes after a year of never ending "mesures de santé publique" ?
Are you actually denying that the CHSLD system completely collapsed? Dude. What? People were left to die in their feces and from hunger, the army was called to help out, bodies of abandoned covid deaths were just left there for a while. Private CHSLDs like Herron got literally ghosted by the healthcare agency overseeing them and stopped replying to emails begging the for help. Healthcare staff had to work without PPE, hospitals were left to their own for the first few weeks back in March. Like I'm not even sure here if you have any clue of what has happened in early March because there's no way you could the CHSLD system didn't collapse and weren't mismanaged otherwise. That's something even Legault admits. But since we are on HN I'll assume good faith and address your other points
Okay so no it's absolutely unreasonable that the shock was that much higher. You are repeating more government talking points. because that's just what it is: depending on what week it is we always get a different excuse. It's either young people or spring break or people travelling or Christmas parties or a uniquy old population or the elusive covid deniers driving infection numbers up. It never ends. The truth is nothing about our situation was truly unique or unique enough to explain what we saw.
Also FWIW, Florida has an older population and is doing either better or pretty similar to us so yeah that doesn't make sense either. Why does it matter if the elderly care is socialized or not? Can't the government protect its patients more than the private sector in Florida can?
>'Gaslight of Science' I think is better exemplified by those denying COVID or vaccines.
The Quebec governmnent's refusal to publish public health guidance on decisions that experts think are ineffective while insisting that they are based on evidence definitely qualifies as gaslighting science.
>It's partly a social signal. I live in Quebec and the notion of 'curfew' has a very eerie and ominous 'feel' like nothing ever in my life.
It was also a strong social signal to everyone I know that the handling of the crisis was aestheticized and politicized as there was no evidence of it's efficacy. Certainly for some it had a chilling effect, for many it led to a complete loss of trust in a government that was already playing fast and loose with rigor and trustworthiness.
