Yeah that approach really resonated with me as well. A very straightforward concept: how much capacity do we have for higher risk behaviour? And in this case the cut-off for higher risk may be “yeah we’re not going to hockey games for a while.”

What data is there to suggest that going to hockey games was "high risk behaviour"?

I’m making up an example. But the gist is that we have an ordered list of things that apply stress to the healthcare system and we basically move the cut-off up or down that list depending on how our healthcare resourcing is working out.

Do we need to call in military hospital ships? Maybe we do stuff that reduces communication of disease, reduces driving to reduce road accidents, etc.

Where I live it was communicated more than once, “avoid doing riskier things this holiday season because the emergency services you expect to be available may not be.”

For individuals, it may not have been. Thousands of people going along to each game all with relatively low individual risk of contracting COVID.

But if after every hockey game 20 hospital beds get used up, that's as risky for the health system as allowing a restaurant to serve uncooked chicken for an evening.

The confounder for this is that there was a 2 week lag between the hockey game and cases showing up in the emergency room and we basically (outside of China) gave up on doing contact tracing, so nobody knows how people were specifically infected.

Fellow Canadian here - I think the suggestion that restrictions were tied to hospital capacity is a bit off. Restrictions were largely political - driven extensively by polling - and changed frequently with minimal or nonexistent reasoning.

Here in Ontario, the McKinsey-driven "Science Table" frequently referenced hospital capacity in their reports, but their modelling often ended up being off by orders of magnitude.

While I concur that preventable deaths are unfortunate, I don't think there's evidence to suggest that most - all? - of the restrictions put in place had any noticeable impact on preventable deaths from Covid.

If anything, those restrictions very much enabled other deaths - from mental health challenges, isolation, depression, substance abuse, delayed medical screening - that very much were preventable.

While we don't have a full picture yet, it's telling that excess mortality remains heavily elevated even though most of the population has had Covid and been vaccinated.

How odd. You must live in a different Canada than I do.

Each province set health guidelines and restrictions mostly independently, so it's very possible they do.

That's true, but they don't.