Miscellaneous desk
< August 10	<< Jul \| August \| Sep >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 11

COVID response in Ontario for restaurants

I'm looking for information - in as easy to understand format as possible - on the timeline for the various restaurant restrictions Ontario has enacted to blunt the transmission of COVID. Searching has returned a deluge of information, but I'm having trouble seeing the forest for the trees. What I'd like to get is something like this: "On January 23, 2022, Ontario lifted the 50% capacity restriction. On February 19, 2022, it reinstated the 50% capacity limit. On March 30, 2022, it lifted the 50% capacity restriction again. On April 15, 2022, it lifted the masking requirement for restaurant patrons." (Those are completely fictitious for illustration, BTW). I need it for basically the last 12 months, or at least going back to last November. There are a zillion results when I try Googling, but many of the results specifically remove old data so that casual readers don't get confused about old restrictions being current. The best I've found so far is this, which probably has what I want, but the format makes it a bit of a hassle to parse. Can anyone find something better? Matt Deres (talk) 14:10, 11 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia has Timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario which links to the articles on individual years. Ctrl-F for "restaurant" yields the place in each article where restaurants are mentioned, and each such mention is well tied to a date. It shouldn't take too long to extract the information you seek. --Jayron 32 14:13, 11 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Unfortunately, the data there is out of date or incomplete. For example, this item from January is written from the perspective of it still being January (speaks of Jan 26 as in the future) and there's no mention of when that restriction actually did get lifted (unless I'm missing it). Matt Deres (talk) 16:48, 11 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You're going to run into some additional issues because public health measures often weren't uniformly imposed province-wide. The provincial government, at various times, introduced 'stages' or 'phases' of reopening (or closure), that were variously numbered or color-coded and were applied to different regions at different times. Against the background of a muddled and inept provincial response, regional public health units often were left to impose their own additional measures. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 12:40, 12 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I recall the colour-coding thing well; I led a team at work into a mad scramble to incorporate and assign county/region level designations into our systems so that our procurement teams could have a hope of figuring out demand planning. But I think all that stuff had gone by the wayside after the re-openings of summer 2021. There may have been some small stuff Ottawa way outside that timeframe, but it's probably not going to affect stuff much. All I'm really looking for is from November 2021 onwards. Matt Deres (talk) 20:06, 12 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Does This help? --Jayron 32 18:17, 17 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it's a data point and I do appreciate it, but I was hoping for something that was more of a summary/timeline. For example, the article linked doesn't mentioned when those restrictions went into place, only that they were planned to get amended on such-and-such date. And, of course, the timeline may have changed again before it actually took effect. There have definitely been times that the gov't has said that X will happen on Y date, only to change that as trends in cases developed. My ideal find would be something that looked back over the past year-ish and said, "X happened then, Y happened then, etc." Matt Deres (talk) 18:20, 18 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to be honest then, based on what I have been seeing in my community: Since about the start of 2022, people have been basically ignoring various pronouncements on government recommendations WRT the Covid-19 restrictions. The media doesn't really cover it, even if official policies have been changing, no one has been really following anything except "do what you feel like". Restaurants have been fully open for quite a long time, masking mandates are long gone, etc. etc. People are still masking frequently enough that there is rarely a situation where at least some significant number of people in my environment aren't masked, but no one is really paying attention to what the authorities are doing. If no one cares, the media certainly doesn't care, which may mean that such official pronouncements may be hard to find. My government has been making them, I am sure, but literally no one cares. Perhaps the situation is similar in Ontario, which is why documentation is so sparse and hard to find. --Jayron 32 13:14, 23 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]