Finally got around to doing excess deaths in Canada. Here's how cumulatives stack up. I've broken out Quebec since almost the entirety of Canadian excess deaths have been in Quebec through the last reliable data.

Here's a scatterplot of excess deaths vs. official.

Note that the US data is more recent so obviously higher, but even in same periods the US of course looks worse.

The Canadian data has fewer points and a lot of provinces with extremely low official values so the correlation between excess and official is noisy.

The very high excess death Canadian province with zero COVID deaths is the Northwest Territories where the population is extremely small so you can't really conclude anything from that.

What's striking is that Canada's hardest-hit province, Quebec, would be middle-of-the-pack for the United States.

But what's actually most impressive to me is the Maritimes.

The Maritimes combined have a cumulative official death rate similar to that observed in extremely high-performing Asian countries, New Zealand, and LOWER than the Nordics.

What's striking here is that Google data suggests the Maritimes did LESS social distancing than e.g. Ontario. The Maritimes in all periods had less aggressive stay-at-home behavior than other parts of Canada!

Nor were the Maritimes especially quick on the mask issue.

What they have is TRAVEL BARRIERS. Not just external: internal. You can't go to the Maritimes without basically an internal visa.

Obviously, several of the Maritimes are islands. But at the end of the day, New Brunswick has a bunch of land borders and they sealed them ***and it worked***. And they've maintained open travel within the Maritimes.

You don't have to shut down society.

You don't need to have insane amounts of testing.

You just need effective travel and quarantine protocols, with reasonable masking practices and some very basic social distancing.