Just give us some honesty
Public in dark about what officials think we’re up against
When it comes to looking on the bright side of the COVID-19 pandemic — no easy task — many Canadians have clearly taken solace in outperforming the United States. We locked down quicker, and more people seemed to take heed. Our young weren’t caught on video making drunken, infectious asses of themselves on beaches. Our head of government wasn’t one moment poo-pooing the pandemic and the next shrieking at the Ford Motor Company to ramp up ventilator production.
When it comes to levelling with citizens about what public health officials think the country is up against, however, the Yanks are lapping us.
Theresa Tam, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, gives us basic numbers every day: how many tested (250,095 as of 11 a.m. Wednesday); how many confirmed cases (9,005); how many dead (105). She mentions any areas of particular concern (nursing homes nowadays). And she delivers the now-familiar advice to stay cooped up at home unless you absolutely have to go out.
What she doesn’t give us is any sense of the assumptions under which the government is working — or any sense of an endgame, however far away it might be. By contrast, during Tuesday’s lengthy press briefing at the White House, President Donald
Trump’s highly credible coronavirus czar Deborah Birx walked Americans through exactly what she believes they’re facing. She mentioned a model developed by health metric scientist Christopher Murray at the University of Washington, which predicts a peak death count of 2,607 on April 16, a shortage of 84,671 hospital beds and 18,905 ICU beds, and a total death count of 95,000 by August 4.
That’s very much on the positive end of the spectrum, Birx stressed. She had graphs.
Other countries have opened the books even wider. On Tuesday, New Zealand published the government-commissioned model it used to design its “plan for” scenario. New Zealand is planning for 65 per cent of the public to become infected, for 336,000 people (of a population of 4.8 million) to require hospitalization and for between 12,600 and 33,600 to die. It’s so unflinchingly detailed that it plans for an astonishing 20 per cent of the most elderly Maori New Zealanders to perish from COVID-19.
On Wednesday, at his daily press conference, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about a government document obtained by the National Post that claims “current (government) modelling suggests as a best-case scenario that current measures continue until at least July.” Other jurisdictions are talking about these daunting timelines and death counts and overstressed resources. Why, Trudeau was asked, isn’t he?
He began his response as follows: “We are being open and transparent with Canadians.” That is your cue to stop listening.
No one is asking Trudeau or Tam to play Nostradamus. Modelling disease spread is an incredibly finicky business even when you don’t have to deal with 10 Canadian jurisdictions that report their data differently. No one is asking for a firm get-out-of-jail date. But any context at all, even if it’s bad, would give Canadians something to colour or at least inform the bizarre and unprecedented situations in which they now find themselves.
Two weeks ago in the National Post, math and statistics instructor Brenda Fine explained a dead-simple way to tell whether we ought to go to bed at night optimistic or pessimistic: “Is the number of new cases divided by the number of existing cases beginning to decrease from one day to the next?” (The answer is yes.) Even a daily chart like that — anything beyond the disembodied figures the government keeps giving us — would help.
There is real Canadian modelling going on, though, and it’s reasonable to assume government officials are ingesting it. Researchers at York University released a paper on March 24 that grafted the Italian experience onto Canada and projected a minimum of 4,000 COVID-19 infections by March 31 — achievable via increased social-distancing measures — and a maximum of 15,000. On Tuesday, March 31, Tam announced there were 7,708 cases of COVID-19 nationwide, more or less right in the middle.
Another study looking at Ontario specifically, from researchers at the University of Guelph and the University of Toronto, modelled various levels of social intervention and increased testing and compared them to a base-case scenario in which 56 per cent of the population became infected, and a peak of 107,000 patients would need ICU beds.
There are just over 2,500 ICU beds in Ontario.
“For all interventions,” the study found, “when the intervention duration was six months or less, there was no appreciable difference” to the number of people infected overall.
That’s the bad news. Here’s news you’ll have to qualify yourself: “With 12 and 18 months of heightened response measures, the proportion of the population infected at the end of the twoyear period was reduced and, in some simulations, the prevalence of cases requiring intensive care fell below Ontario’s capacity.”
A year of this? A year and a half? It’s unthinkable, surely. But if it’s actually thinkable, we’d best start thinking about it now. The government is clearly relying on some kind of assumptions, after all. That memo the National Post’s Christopher Nardi dug up specifically mentions in-house modelling. So let’s see it. The alternative conclusion all this opacity invites is that our leaders are flying blind. That’s much scarier for everyone.