This is probably where COVID-19 is spreading

A photo taken at 5.07am on a crowded Bloor Street bus has gone viral, so to speak.

It has gone viral partly because people like me, who live in a relatively safe middle-class part of Toronto, have no idea how people working in "essential businesses", and living in areas with high COVID infection rates, actually live. 

I have struggled to understand how nearly 5,000 people a day are going down with with the coronavirus in Ontario (with predictions that this could soon rise to as much as 18,000 a day), a good proportion of them in Toronto. I don't know anyone who has contracted it, let alone died from it, and I have only a vague idea of who these 5,000 (or 18,000) people really are.

As cases and hospitalizations continue to spike, and Ontario mulls tightening restrictions still further, it's just hard to believe that closing down curbside pickups or instituting a curfew would have a substantive effect on the transmission of the virus. Surely, what we need to know is which industries and businesses are generating the infection spread right now (not six months ago) and, if necessary, closing those down. Is it in schools? Construction sites? Factories? Transportation? Why is this information not available? 

The best information I could find, on the Public Health Ontario website, still does not answer my questions. There is a new section on "acquisition types", although this does not break the figures down by industry or business, and the vast majority are merely categorized as "No information" or "No known epidemiological link", which is less that useful. The section on outbreaks is closer to what I was looking for, although in less detail, and this suggests that schools (362 on recent weeks) is the number one culprit, followed by workplace (162) and congregate living (131), but this does not give the total cases from each sources, just the number of "outbreaks", which may be large or small, and which may be based on different criteria.

Some cities, including Toronto and Hamilton, do publish information on workplaces outbreaks, right down to individual employer names. For example, in Toronto, over the last few weeks, the largest outbreaks have been at a marketing firm (53 cases), a sports uniform maker (26), an Amazon warehouse (25), and a construction site (21). In Hamilton, the largest outbreaks were at a logistics firm (32), a nursery and garden centre (30), and a construction site (22). Other outbreaks have occurred recently at a skincare firm, a car dealership, a maker of office furniture, a condo developer, a police training college, and a candy maker. Many, if not most, of these do not look very essential to me.

There again, the same article features a graph purporting to show COVID-19 cases associated with workplaces in Ontario, and it shows totals in recent weeks between about 80 and 120 (i.e. a tiny fraction of the 4,000-5,000 total cases in Ontario). It also shows the number going DOWN in recent weeks, despite the overall case numbers in the province shooting up precipitately! Are workplaces, essential or otherwise, not the main (or even a major) source of cases, then? Is this not where our effort should be directed? It's all very confusing.

Anyway, we are running out of policy ideas. So, we probably do need to look long and hard at the government's definition of "essential", for one thing (I learned just yesterday that real estate is included, for instance). Many health experts are suggesting just that: "take a really good look at what is truly essential, just for the next four to six weeks, and close everything that's not truly, truly essential for our society, to get through this".

And, of course - how many times has this been said? - PAID SICK LEAVE!