Covering properties which,under weak diamond principles,constrain the extents of separable spaces

We show that separable, locally compact spaces with property (a) necessarily have countable extent — i.e., have no uncountable closed, discrete subspaces — if the effective weak diamond principle ⋄(ω,ω,<) holds. If the stronger, non-effective, diamond principle Φ(ω,ω,<) holds then separable, countably paracompact spaces also have countable extent. We also give a short proof that the latter principle implies there are no small dominating families in ^ω ₁ ω.