How their words are heeded

It has little to do with nice Bonnie Henry or stern Minister Dix, but more to do with how their words are heeded.

It is almost heresy to say the least negative remark about our provincial health officer — she has been de facto premier for the past few months .

And she is most often on target with her remarks if sometimes a little condescending. The slavish adherence to heath information that is almost changing daily is also a risky business.

The latest COVID-19 numbers for B.C., third largest daily increase this week since the virus arrived, shows only too clearly that it is the public that must take hold of the advice and practice common sense behaviour.

Canada as a whole and B.C. as well need more testing as well as more contact tracing , evidenced by the fact that the province has just now increased the number of people that will be doing contact tracing .

It might be useful to remind ourselves that virus incidence in B.C. is not the lowest of any province, and that as a country our testing rate is lower that the U.S. testing rate. According to worldometers.info, the U.S. is testing at a rate of 204,000 per million population and Canada at 121,000.

Of course, that is not to say that B.C. has not done well up to now but it is to indicate that we may have been a little complacent given our performance vis a vis the bigger provinces, ignoring perhaps the urban concentration of say Greater Toronto which has 5.9 million people, which is larger than B.C.’s total population of 4.6 million and more than double Metro Vancouver.

Brian Peckford Parksville