What’s been happening in Northern Manitoba lately, with COViD-19 case counts growing while those in the other parts of the province shrink, to the point that the Northern Regional Health Authority (NRHA) reported higher numbers of new cases than Winnipeg several times last week, despite the regions's population being less than 10 per cent of the capital city’s, is, sadly, rather predictable. The same thing happened to the province as a whole as summer turned to fall. Because case numbers had been so low over the summer in most of the province, people reverted to old habits. They spent time eating together in restaurants and shopping and hanging out at the beach. They assumed Manitoba had somehow beaten the virus and let their guard down, reasoning that getting together at Thanksgiving wouldn’t be a problem. And then the case numbers started to grow. And they continued to do so into November, when some days saw more than 500 new cases of COVID-19. And they remained high until strict public health orders managed to slowly force them back down over the course of a couple of months.