Saskatchewanian checking in here. As with your Vancouver Island example, there’s a lot of heterogeneity here too. The south of the province, where I grew up, has extremely low numbers of cases even relative to the sparse rural population, while anywhere north of Saskatoon where I currently live is doing fairly badly relative to their sparse rural population. I don’t have a strong gears-level understanding of why this should be except some vague notion that the North sees more traffic entering and exiting in the course of resource extraction industries, and close living quarters associated with the same. Plus something something rampant spread in First Nations which I don’t even want to get into.
Appreciating you chiming in. That’s a great point about how different rural communities are doing different. I kind of had the impression some rural areas in the prairies were doing bad, but I didn’t off-hand have a sense of where or why. Your rough sketch with vague notions is helpful on that front.
I drove across the country on the way out to BC a couple months ago, and it’s indeed hard to imagine the farming areas in the south half of the prairies having much covid spread, whereas it makes sense that resource-extraction areas would for the 2 reasons you describe. That plus exponentials/nonlinearities seems sufficient to explain most of the discrepancy, maybe.
Saskatchewanian checking in here. As with your Vancouver Island example, there’s a lot of heterogeneity here too. The south of the province, where I grew up, has extremely low numbers of cases even relative to the sparse rural population, while anywhere north of Saskatoon where I currently live is doing fairly badly relative to their sparse rural population. I don’t have a strong gears-level understanding of why this should be except some vague notion that the North sees more traffic entering and exiting in the course of resource extraction industries, and close living quarters associated with the same. Plus something something rampant spread in First Nations which I don’t even want to get into.
Appreciating you chiming in. That’s a great point about how different rural communities are doing different. I kind of had the impression some rural areas in the prairies were doing bad, but I didn’t off-hand have a sense of where or why. Your rough sketch with vague notions is helpful on that front.
I drove across the country on the way out to BC a couple months ago, and it’s indeed hard to imagine the farming areas in the south half of the prairies having much covid spread, whereas it makes sense that resource-extraction areas would for the 2 reasons you describe. That plus exponentials/nonlinearities seems sufficient to explain most of the discrepancy, maybe.