The reality is there is 2 ways of seeing it now. The first one is letting the virus go rempant, and it WILL kill peoples, but at the end it peoples may develop immunity, stronger, even as you put it Cloudsurf, and the ones that did died will be "sacrified". Not a popular view on paper but ultimately its how most of the virus were downgraded with time, be it the black plague, the spanish flu or whatever. Killed tons of peoples, the others survived, the virus ran out of peoples to infect and kill, mutated in less virulent forms etc. From my understanding the spanish flu didn't disapear in one day, it just because less of a killer as time passed by.
Other solution is the preventive yet autoritarian way. Every fall around November we could close bars, downsize the capacity of certain domain, hell even go on full lockdown early december til mid january/early febuary. It would work... Cases would be lower, less hospitalization, but at what cost? Business would die for sure, especially restaurants and bars.
The way its done now is a reactive way that feel like getting your patch ready when you know that in a few you gonna smash that thing with an axe...
Im no doctor, no scientist, but somehow i knew cases would rise this winter, omicron or no omicron... am i an overseer? lol NO. Its just common logic. How come THEY didn't know it would happen? Why are they waiting that cases rise crazy to act? The issue is, this yoyo thing if they choose to keep doing it, will have to be done every year...
Covid will not disapear... it will loose its momentum, like other viruses. The difference is, we never count cases like we do with Covid when it comes to other viruses. Tons of peoples are tested that have ZERO symptoms, but they must be tested because they travel, or their job force it, or they test classes of kid, whatever... its a lot of cases, but is it a lot of hospitalization? We shall see later. But ultimately, and you can save this post, next winter, around the same time, we will have the same conversation but the variant will be called something else.
So are we stuck in this endless loop of close stuff in winter? Do we simply react every year when the cases rises or we take premptive measures? Measures that will cause harms of their own tough, altough different. Thats a lot of questions to ask. But its questions that must be asked.
Right now i have the feeling Legault is like a cop that knows a bank robbery will happen at 3 pm on a friday, and instead of getting ready to take down the robber before he enter the bank, he wait every time that he rob it and then chase him as he go out and jump in his car... He may catch him, but during that time maybe 5 cars were destroyed, 2 security agents killed, maybe civilians... a cashier traumatized. You get the analogy? Im tire of this way of doing it.
Covid zero sadly has proven inefective. Unless you are an island country and extremely control in a super harsh way the travels , its bound to fail, and even there, unless you keep a super harsh lockdown permanently, its bound to fail.
There is no magic solution, but really just a question that are we willing to sacrifice some peoples to allow life to go back to normality or not? Harsh on paper... i know.