I think this by @alchemycarl is *mostly* right, but not entirely so... https://theconversation.com/the-secret-to-how-atlantic-canada-weathered-the-covid-19-storm-political-will-158193

It's difficult to have these conversations, because people have so much invested in it. There's civic pride, there's political loyalty, etc. I don't fault any of that. They're all legitimate views.

I tell my American friends (and increasingly, my Canadian friends outside of Nova Scotia) that I live in an Alternate Universe. I mean, that's just a fact: we don't have covid out in the wild, we're open in ways that most places aren't, or at least shouldn't be.

It's a fantastic situation! Probably a lot of people outside Atlantic Canada find us tiresome, the way we talk about how well we're doing on the plague front. And truly, we shouldn't be too full of ourselves, because it could all go south in an instant.

But other places might find there might be things to learn, if they examine Nova Scotia a bit. It's all debatable. We can't even be sure why things are so good here ourselves. Still.

For myself, I find all the qualities people talk about are contributing to our good fortune: our geography, our civic responsibility, our governance.

On that second one, my fellow Nova Scotians: I love you. But the very thing I sometimes find most annoying about NSians is a big contributing strength in the pandemic: we're compliant as hell. Government tells us to do something, we do it.

I want to throw something else into the mix, though, on the governing front.

Early on in the pandemic, everyone, and I mean every one, was freaking out. Totally understandable. No one knew what this thing was about, what would happen, etc. And that included our Public Health agencies and our government.

My recollection is that Public Health was very worried, exceptionally worried, that Nova Scotia didn't have enough ICU beds to handle the pandemic.

I don't know how the situation compared to other jurisdictions — maybe the situation on the ground was similar other places, I honestly don't know. But either because Nova Scotia actually had an extreme dearth of ICU capability, or because officials feared it more here...

They made more radical decisions to limit the spread of the disease. I don't know how Northwood fits into this. Maybe not at all. Someone more knowledgeable than me can say whether some of those who died should've been moved to ICU.

But the point is, officials were freaking right the fuck out that people would be dying left and right and the hospitals would be overwhelmed. And so they went heavy on restrictions, on urging people to adhere to public health orders, and most importantly....