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Two pandemics: Canada’s largest city endures pre-holiday lockdown while nation’s capital offers indoor dining and gym workouts
Nov 27, 2020
While Toronto endures a grim new lockdown, Ottawa’s restaurants offer indoor dining, people work out in gyms and socially distant customers shop for Christmas presents in stores. The COVID-19 pandemic worsens in Canada’s largest city, even as the situation steadily improves in the nation’s capital.
The reasons that Ottawa remains open and Toronto is forced to close offer a glimpse into the nature of the two cities, and how their differences shape the path of the pandemic.
By Nov. 25, Toronto had accumulated 1,349 cases per 100,000 people; the national capital’s figure was 881. The number of COVID-19 patients in Toronto hospitals has been increasing; in Ottawa, hospitalizations are steadily going down.
In the spring, during the first wave of the pandemic, Ottawa was hit less severely than Toronto, a situation that is repeating itself in the second wave. Why is that?
Geography is one factor. Canada’s national capital has much lower population density than its financial capital. There are building height limits in the downtown, part of a half-hearted effort to protect the dominance of Parliament Hill in the cityscape. Once you leave the core, Ottawa sprawls into the surrounding farmland, from Orleans in the east through Nepean in the south to Kanata and beyond in the west.
Because public transit in the national capital region is mediocre on a good day, only 18 per cent of people took public transit to work before the pandemic struck, according to the 2016 census . For the Toronto census metropolitan area, the figure was 24 per cent.
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