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Sims: Jellybean analogy drives home need to stay home

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A friend sent me a note Tuesday asking if I’d heard about the jellybean analogy.

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“I’m giving you 100 jellybeans,” he said. “Ten will make you sick, perhaps affect your quality of life for years. Two of them will kill you. How many will you eat?”

As much as I like candy, I wouldn’t eat any of them. That comparison, he said, mimics the odds of catching COVID-19 at a social gathering, and “it makes no difference if it is family.”

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All of us, he said, are exposed to this monster, and many of us will sail through it. It’s the other dozen jellybeans we need to worry about.

Maybe this can help us understand why we need to do as we’re told and stay home. Too many Ontarians decided to eat all the sweets over the winter holidays and now more of us than ever are getting sick.

I fear we’ve lost perspective on the pandemic even after Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency Tuesday and made a stay-at-home order starting Thursday.

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The data projections released Tuesday are frightening. One-third of Ontarians aren’t following public health advice. I’ve said this before in this space: we’ve become blasé about the very thing that scared us into staying home last spring. Add in the hopes pinned on the vaccines, and you end up with apathy in a dangerous time.

For months, the provincial government tried to thread a very small needle between public safety and economic sustainability through regionally based restrictions. It was fine for a while, until the second wave crashed into us. Tuesday’s predictions point to us either drowning or treading water.

There could be as many as 6,000 cases a day in Ontario in the coming weeks. Almost 200 long-term care residents and two staff have died this month, more than 400 people are in ICUs and that could rise to as many as 1,000 early next month. The fatality count could double from 50 to 100 deaths a day at the end of February.

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“The system is on the brink of collapse. It’s on the brink of being overwhelmed,“ Ford said at the news conference announcing the new orders. “We’re at levels we’ve never seen before.”

In Middlesex-London, we’ve seen our caseload skyrocket so much that Tuesday’s 75 new cases actually felt like a reprieve from the records shattered earlier this month. Five more deaths, three in long-term care homes, pushed the number of people in our region to die from the virus to 132.

Lurking around Ontario is the more contagious U.K. variant discovered here in November. If it takes hold, the case counts could be even higher.

What was a surprise to me was how the new orders didn’t seem to be much different than the old ones. Outdoor social gatherings are reduced to five people. Face masks are required indoors at businesses and outside when you can’t stay apart two metres. School delays. Construction restrictions. Reduced business hours for most retailers.

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But Middlesex-London medical officer of health Chris Mackie said the biggest difference is that the stay-at-home order “now applies to all individuals. It’s not just about businesses.”

“That puts a new level of onus on all of us to be respecting the orders,” he said.

To show the government really, really means it, it has increased the penalties for disobeying the order to up to one year in jail. More announcements may be in the offing.

“This is entirely regrettable. It’s completely necessary,” Mackie said. “It’s only up to Ontarians whether this will be sufficient to curb the pandemic at this stage.

“I think that’s the case no matter what the government does at this point. We absolutely need the people of Ontario, the people of London and Middlesex to support these efforts. If they won’t, they’ll fail; it they do, they’ll succeed.”

Ford called the measures “a little bit of a runway” before a mass vaccination program takes off. That air strip might be very long — only 130,000 people have been given their shots since mid-December in a province of almost 15 million.

It looks like it’s time for all of us to swear off jellybeans — at least for now.

jsims@postmedia.com

twitter.com/JaneatLFPress

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