National Post (National Edition)
Never having been this close to my wits’ end, I am more willing to go along with loosening restrictions.
Putting faith in ramped-up COVID testing
Leger Marketing’s latest pandemic poll for the Association of Canadian Studies, released Tuesday, finds a comfortable majority of Canadians are happy with the pace at which the federal and provincial governments are relaxing lockdown measures. Just over 10 per cent of us want governments to hurry up, the poll suggests, while roughly a quarter of us want them to pump the brakes.
On many levels this makes perfect sense — certainly psychologically, if not epidemiologically. The per capita death toll in Canada, while grim, is just 15 per cent of Belgium’s, 20 per cent of Spain’s. Cases are clustered in long-term care homes, where most of us do not reside. Fears of a shortage of intensive-care beds and ventilators have not been borne out. The freedoms Canadian provinces are reintroducing are far more modest than those in some American states: Allowing golf courses and marinas to open, for example, does not smack of recklessness.
And the fact is, we’re all going a bit nuts: With every passing week, especially as the weather improves, for some of us the urge to roll the dice increases — not least because for all the billions spewing forth from government ATMs, many of us are suffering economically. Half of respondents told Leger their retirement savings had taken a hit; 21 per cent said they couldn’t pay their bills. More and more businesses are closing forever.
In other ways, however, the poll seems to reflect a remarkable degree of optimism. As cautious as the current measures are, they are being framed as phase 1 of a plan, if not a timetable, to return to something approaching normal life. And for weeks upon weeks, we have been told normal life is contingent on developments that simply have not come to pass — notably vastly ramped-up testing.
Canada is still near the bottom of the ramp, having tested 24 out of every 1,000 people. That’s not a shameful figure: It’s roughly the same as the United States and Australia. But it’s far from world-beating. Iceland has tested 150 per 1,000 citizens; the United Arab Emirates 121; Luxembourg 79.
Readers will notice these are all small-to-minute countries, but readers will also know that health care is a provincial jurisdiction in Canada. If Iceland, population 364,000, can test 150 out of every 1,000 citizens, why is Prince Edward Island, population 158,000, only testing 21? If Luxembourg, population 614,000, can test 79 out of every 1,000 citizens, why is Newfoundland and Labrador, population 521,000, only testing 18?
Ontario and Quebec are limping along at 23 per and 28 per 1,000, respectively. Alberta leads the league in Canada with 35. But mainstream medical opinion argues vastly more testing is necessary to reopen the economies: between two and eight per cent of the population per day, according to a study from Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, modelling by New York University economist Paul Romer, and a plan released this week by the Rockefeller Foundation.
The authors of the Harvard study liken such an undertaking to a war effort, which is another way of saying it’s impossible. Take Ontario as an example: It continues to struggle to test up to its current daily capacity of 13,000. In an interview last week, Health Minister Christine Elliott told National Post she hoped that could reach 20,000. That’s one-fourteenth of the capacity necessary to test two per cent of the population every day.
So two per cent is never, ever going to happen. But it hardly follows that we should therefore be sanguine about relaxing restrictions, when the risk of relapse is so obvious. On Tuesday, researchers at Imperial College London released a new report estimating that just a 20-per-cent increase in mobility in post-lockdown Italy could lead to a second wave of infections and deaths even worse than the first. “If we reopen too soon, everything we’re doing might be for nothing,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned last month.
It is reasonable to assume Canada’s politicians are taking these risks into account. Were loosened restrictions to bring about a second wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths, necessitating a second lockdown, their skyrocketing approval ratings would likely crash to Earth in a heap. Never having been this close to my wits’ end, I am more willing to go along with loosening restrictions.
But when you consider how frantic, scrambly and just plain inadequate much of Canada’s anti-pandemic effort has been on the most basic levels — access to personal protective equipment; testing — it’s difficult to escape the impression that we have been terribly lucky. Long may our luck continue. But let’s never forget how much worse it could have been. Let’s never again give our governments a chance to be so unprepared.
DIFFICULT TO ESCAPE THE IMPRESSION THAT WE HAVE BEEN ... LUCKY.