Ok so I am looking at the replies to this thread and seeing quite a bit of "but you have fewer people" takes and I can't believe I have to explain this but we aren't all living on 100 acre plots of land never seeing other people up here. Density is a poor metric for susceptiblity https://twitter.com/akurjata/status/1385640561667764225

So a few things
1. Density and crowding are two different things. You can have high density with low crowding. Think 100 people in a high rise vs 100 people in a barn
2. When you are looking at density over large chunks of land, you wind up with poor estimates.

Take the Northern Health region. Huuuuuge distribution, tiny population. But we aren't all spread out evenly. Most — about one-third — are in Prince George. About another third are in the next seven biggest communities. And these are, believe it or not, places where people...

... live life much like the rest of you! We work in offices. Have break rooms. There are care homes. All places susceptible to COVID-19 spread. The fact there's 100 km of highway surrounded by forest and farm to get to the next city doesn't matter if the virus is in the community

But forget cities. Even towns and villages have people getting together. Fort St James, a small and rural a place as any, needed extra paramedics in the community in December. Prince Rupert — far smaller than Kelowna or Kamloops — got community-wide vaccination spread was so bad

As of last week, the highest rate of transmission in the province was Dawson Creek, a historically agricultural community surrounded by open sky. Because people still live life as humans, and humans are increasingly urban even in places you think of as rural

So I just don't get the logic of "but you have less people". We have seen time and again that having more or less people doesn't really matter. What matters is how those people behave and whether the virus or the variants manage to make their way into the community

Now one advantage we DO have over, say, Vancouver & Surrey is that it is far more likely for us to have natural geographic barriers breaking our communities up. As a kid I though everything from Abbotsford onward was "Vancouver" because there were no tracts of wilderness between

For the most part — and with some obvious exceptions — you are able to live life WITHIN your city, particularly if you are in Prince George or Kelowna. You don't need to cross municipal boundaries to get groceries or go to work

And this is why earlier this week when the province said it would limit travel to health zones I thought they might break the bigger ones up more. It's really quite simple to live in Prince George and not go to Quesnel! Especially when you make exceptions for essential travel

But I was wrong. Not only did that not happen, but they actually made it into a BIGGER zone, one that it would take you a full 24 hours+ of driving to get across. And maybe there are reasons! Maybe the goal is to quarantine Coastal and Fraser Health from the rest of the province

But miss me with the "but you have a smaller population" as if that provides some sort of magical protection not afforded to bigger cities. For a good portion of this we had more cases, more hospitalizations and more critical care patients by a huge factor than any other region

As a whole, the north is doing relatively better now because 1. Things have gotten so bad down south and 2. Things WERE so bad here that whole communities had to be prioritized for vaccines. But there is still plenty of potential for things to turn. Anyways. End of thread