Conservative MP’s ugly smear against Theresa Tam comes from an infection in Canadian politics

The briefing on Jan 10th probably sounds a lot like "there is an outbreak of some repository issue in China...at this point it is relatively contained and isn't an issue yet but we should keep our eyes on it".

We get a bug like that every other year though...SARS, bird flu, swine flu (and probably others as well) and some of those make it out of China, some don't. Some make it to Canada but have very limited hospitalization others might be a serious risk. We didn't close the boarders for any of those and only one of them actually was a threat in Canada.

The reason Covid 19 is such a hard bug to beat is that it has a very long time where it is Asymptomatic while still being contagious (while also packing a hard enough punch that we should worry about it). The briefing on Jan 10th they wouldn't have known that yet. It would look like a faster moving bug that started later but a 12 hour incubation period is much easier to isolate then a 5 day one.

The extreme example would be how silly would Canada look if it turned out the issue was a just a normal enough flu bug but the reason it hit so hard was it reacted well with a chemical that wasn't properly being burned off in a flare stack (so it ends up being a very geographically limited bug)...Now we have shut down the boarder from our second biggest trade partner over a threat that functionally wouldn't hit us. It is still a viral infection but only threatening if you have a certain chemical in your system that became baseline there.

/r/CanadaPolitics Thread Parent Link - thestar.com