what do i think about them reopening in windsor?

well, i never supported them closing in the first place, remember.

what do the facts say about this?

1) the border isn't closed, there's still people transporting goods back and forth, and there's even still health care workers moving back and forth from what was, at one time, a fairly hard hit region (although they seem to have recovered well, in the long run). so, the premise that the city is under a level of restricted movement in and out of it is a fantasy. i really maintain that there is little point in locking down a city that is on an open international border.

2) that said, there aren't a lot of cases here. the cases that are showing up are in the farm sector in the southeastern tip of the county. i bicycled there last week; it's about 55 km up county road 34, although you may be able to reduce the total travel distanced by taking the freeways in a car. leamington is not exactly far from here. but, that sector is relatively isolated from the city of windsor. i agree that pairing policy together with this region is of questionable utility to the city, and some form of separation or mutual autonomy may be beneficial to both of us.

3) the data in ontario is of limited help in determining policy, to say the least. everything is lagged by weeks or months. when they set up a testing centre in leamington, they shut it down after they started finding a lot of cases; it was easier to cover the problem up than to deal with it. if you're paying close attention to the way that data is being released, you can see fingerprints of this kind of thing everywhere. so, we don't actually know what the rates of transmission or even what the death rates actually are in toronto right now, because the data is being suppressed. it follows that trying to compare an obvious pr disaster for the province to information that we know is incomplete is kind of absurd.

4) you're left to conclude that windsor has gone from being perpetually ignored to being punished for fucking up the province's reopening. and, we're kind of stuck; because we've exposed a problem, we have to deal with it.

i don't see a lot to get excited about regarding stage 2, frankly. the things that would be opening would not be the things i'd see myself going to, and certainly not in the way they'd exist. i'm probably not going to actually go anywhere until they get to stage 4 or stage 5.