Stay home. Unless you’re going to a big box store. Or gathering with up to five friends outside somewhere, for something or other. Confused? Well just stay the blazes home.

If this week’s new provincial regulations were merely confusing, that would be easier to deal with. But this jumble of contradictory half measures will almost certainly be deadly.

The numbers are just too high and rising much too fast to roll the dice, in the vague hope that some lucky break will somehow prevail over scientific evidence …

Much has happened in the three weeks since my last newsletter.

Let’s start with what’s new that looks frighteningly similar to what’s old: far too many of us – many more than the politicians who jetted off to sunny climes while urging everyone else to stay home – haven’t followed Public Health advice. As a result, we’ve seen an even more dangerous spike in case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths.

This week, Toronto recorded 5600 new cases – up from the already alarming 4072 four weeks ago and …

Whatever we’re doing or have stopped doing, it’s not good enough.

This week, Toronto’s new COVID case count didn’t just climb, it soared. The weekly case total was 4824, up from 4072 last week. The higher the case count the more likely you are to encounter the virus. By that measure, you are about 12 times more likely to catch it than you were three months ago, back when the weekly case total was 385 for the week ending September 11.

There is so much COVID out …

On Wednesday, we became the third country in the world with an approved COVID-19 vaccine, behind only Britain and – for future trivia contests – Bahrain.

After receiving Health Canada approval in record time, the vaccine by Pfizer/BioNTech was on a plane from Belgium today and will be in the arms of a small number of Canadians by Tuesday. Ontario has two of the initial 14 distribution centres, one of them in Toronto at UHN.

A second vaccine by Moderna, using the same technology as Pfizer and …

Your choice: a one-time payment of one million dollars or a penny that doubles every day for a month. The mathematics of doubling causes the penny is worth more than $1 million by day 28 and more than $5 million by day 30.

Thankfully, COVID cases double at longer intervals, but the principle is the same.

At the beginning of September, when the alarm about rising numbers started being sounded, Toronto’s weekly new case total was 265. A month later it was 2001, and two months after …