If you follow me or my wife elsewhere on social media, you know it's been a rough couple of weeks for us, as our niece passed away just after the previous newsletter (complications from leukemia, and the real tragedy was that she had the sort of leukemia with a very high survival rate for the leukemia itself so the death was actually much more unexpected than you would think) and my wife's side of the family is getting through a state of shock. Due to Covid-19 regulations, a standard funeral wasn't even possible, so instead we drove to the small town most of my wife's family calls home and drove through the streets - which, in a truly touching moment, were lined with hundreds of members of the community paying their respects to the funeral train - in procession to the cemetery, where most of us had to stand back a fair distance during the ceremony.

So, yeah, just another reminder that the pandemic sucks. This isn't going to be terribly long this time, sorry.

SPEAKING OF THE PANDEMIC SUCKING

In news not really surprising to anybody, Covid-19 is spiking in the USA again, because it turns out all those gatherings of people three weeks ago that experts said were unsafe really were in fact unsafe. In some states "exploding" is probably a more accurate term than "spiking."

These days, the metric most experts are using to tabulate the growth of the disease has shifted again: now it's hospitalizations rather than confirmed cases (which are dependent on testing, and nobody's doing enough testing) or deaths (which worked well enough until a lot of state agencies realized there were political incentives to having less deaths from Covid-19 and started classifying deaths from Covid-19 complications as not being Covid-19 deaths, like "pneumonia" or "stroke," which are both technically true but also given that the pneumonia and strokes only happened because of Covid-19, etc.), mostly because hospitalizations are the stat least likely to get fudged or fail.

In Ontario, we are on a cautious course to re-open, which is politically feasible because in Ontario Covid-19 has mostly concentrated in Toronto and other major urban centers - in part because that's where the nursing homes tend to be and nursing homes have been the primary spreaders of the disease in most of Canada, and in part because, well, cities get hit harder by pandemics than rural areas do. So you've got rural areas where there have barely been any cases and people are understandably frustrated at having to abide by regulations, which means there's strong political will to lift the restrictions. (This is pretty much the case everywhere in Canada and to a lesser extent in most industrialized countries, of course.) A smart response to this would be to further localize lockdown restrictions, but instead we're going the universal route because, well, we're not that smart, apparently. Really, this mostly seems like a recipe for a second wave, particularly since these re-opening strategies are happening while cases are still increasing (just at a gradually slower rate); I know this because of all the doctors and epidemiologists saying "this is going to gve us a second wave."

At the same time, Justin Trudeau this week reminded us all that he is a tremendous mediocrity of a man by attempting to pass a bill in Parliament that would have created massive penalties for improperly accessing the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), which Americans probably know better as "everybody gets $2000 a month during the pandemic." Canadians were widely encouraged to apply for the CERB if they thought they were eligible and that if they turned out to not be eligible they would simply be charged for it on their tax bill (IE, treating the payments as an advance on next year's taxes), so the punitive bill was rightly considered a slap in the face, particularly in a political climate where the Liberals have done less than nothing to punish documented wealthy offshore tax evaders.

Also, the CERB isn't nearly as good as Americans think it is. Lots of people (students, for example, and people still earning a small amount of money but not enough to survive on) couldn't get it at first until the NDP intervened and more or less demanded it, and people were only able to get $2000 a month for a total of four months, and for most people those four months are now over. However, the pandemic is not over, and most people who needed CERB still need it. The NDP, of course, is arguing strongly that the CERB should be extended, because they're the only party in Canada worth a damn at this point, but who knows what's going to happen.

And all of this re-opening and CERB cutback is happening at the same time as the majority of Canadians not having childcare, which is massively important because parents can't go back to work without childcare and there's no summer school or day camps to ease the burden of lack of childcare. Canadian politicians of all stripes have been talking about how childcare is a vital issue for years, and now it's more vital than ever and it's less accessible than ever, in large part because most elected officials' plans for childcare were too laissez-faire to actually, like, work. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

In short, the current situation here is very Canadian in that it's a mishmosh of good policy ideas and bad ones all sort of executed at the same time and hoping things work out - AKA the "shit in ice cream" approach.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

I finished A Plague Tale: Innocence this week (big Steam sale plus some leftover Steam credit) and it was... fine, I guess? It's one of those games where you can clearly see the more interesting game that was originally intended in the background. I bought it thinking it would be a sort of stealth game with helpless child protagonists sneaking their way through a devastating plague in medieval Europe, and it certainly starts out that way. But it has a bad case of triple-A-game-release disease, because as the game progresses your slight French tweenager gradually turns into Rambo and the storyline goes from being slightly speculative to full-on fantasy epic, and it loses most of what made it so appealing as an idea. It's still an okay game with an engaging enough story, but it's not what it could have been by any means.

See you in a week or two.