Curb your enthusiasm — reopening plan is a gamble
It’s easy to pine for how things used to be. Those things may have been dangerous, mean, unfair, frustrating or terrifying, sure. But they were normal.
Well, perhaps we should be a little careful what we wish for. On Wednesday, Doug Ford — Ontario’s newly sober, careful, evidence-driven pandemic premier, who has largely been praised for doing the opposite of what he used to do — decided the province was ready for the next thing.
Any retail shop in the province with a door facing a street gets to open on Monday for curbside pickup. Stores with big parking lots — Walmart, Home Depot, etc. — have already been doing this. Now, everyone into the pool.
There are lots of places in Ontario where this can be accomplished with relative ease. Also, Toronto. Doug Ford has never loved Toronto.
“I had a good conversation with Mayor Tory last night, and I just want to give a shout-out to Mayor Tory. He’s been an incredible partner, very collaborative and very co-operative,” said Ford. He acknowledged this order is far more complex for the dense retail environments of Toronto, versus “Etobicoke, where I live, or Scarborough, or North York, (where) you aren’t going to have these big lineups.
“As a matter of fact, the retailers wish there was four, five people waiting in line to get into their stores.”
“But I fully understand downtown’s a whole different kettle of fish,” Ford said, “and Mayor Tory is going to be putting in the proper protocols and make sure that number one is the health and well-being of the citizens of Toronto are taken care of.”
In other words, good luck with your public safety measures, John. Tory confirmed he heard about the plan on Tuesday night, and the planning started there. (“And before!” Tory insisted.)
And by the way, while defending the city’s sluggish movement towards expanding sidewalk space and reimagining the city — which may be coming next, hopefully — Tory’s main reason is planning in this city is very, very difficult. And remember, this is a city which didn’t expand sidewalk space because Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health, was worried people might flood the extra lanes.
Now the province has given Toronto five days to figure things out. What happens in a city packed with shops and narrow, still-unexpanded sidewalks, where hundreds of thousands of residents have been jammed in small boxes for seven weeks? We don’t know.
“If people are still able to physically distance from one another, the risk of getting this infection is really low,” says Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto and Toronto General Hospital. “If you stand on the sidewalk two metres apart, you’re not getting this infection.
“How are they going to manage crowd control so that when they are open, too many people don’t crowd around? A lot of this falls on the individual businesses, but also, as citizens, we should be pretty sensitized about what the idea of physical distancing means.”
“The question I would ask, by what proportion are they willing to increase our risk? What is the threshold?” says Dr. Nitin Mohan, a physician epidemiologist who teaches public and global health at Western University, and who co-founded a public health consulting firm called ETIO. “What we’re really saying is we know we’re going to get more cases, but we think we have the capacity to deal with that.
“I understand the fear of economic downturn and the loss of wages, and that’s real, too, because that affects people’s health. But I get the sense that we’re trying to mitigate the economic downside with the actual health implications of more people contracting the virus.
“When you start opening things up, people’s behaviours change.”
There’s a lot of hope in this. There is Ford’s hope that the economy can warm up. There is the mayor’s hope that there won’t be lineups because some places sold goods online during the shutdown. Which, frankly, seems aspirational in the city that was lining up for an alcoholic seltzer drink at the beginning of March.
Then there is the hope that businesses are responsible, and that the city can come up with plans quickly if they have to be enacted after the fact because the city lacks robust jurisdictional powers to close businesses. Which, pretty clearly, Tory expressed to Ford.
“We’re going to spend our efforts … trying to make sure (people realize) the very unique considerations, which I trust that the province will take into account in all the decisions going forward,” said Tory. “It is a unique situation. People don’t want to hear that, but the fact is we have very dense retail, very dense population, and for that matter we have been uniquely and acutely affected by the virus in a way that is not true in other parts of the province. So therefore the risk associated with all this is greater. So I hope all of that will be taken into account.”
Too late, John. It is helpful to be reminded that Doug is the guy whose government cut a billion dollars from Toronto
Public Health, and who arbitrarily mangled city council. Between blaming public health units for a provincial testing responsibility, catering to cottage owners and calling them taxpayers, and suddenly unveiling a policy that isn’t designed for the biggest city in the country, the old premier seems to be peeking out from around the corner.
Maybe people will still be cautious enough not to jam together. But this is also a city where women with strollers have been pushed onto the roads when trying to stay apart on unexpanded sidewalks.
So let’s hope. We need to move forward together and apart. Let’s see how it goes.
“We have to have some situational awareness and recognize that we shouldn’t be crowding together,” said Bogoch. “Everyone knows what’s going on. Everyone knows what the stakes are. Everyone has heard the term physical distancing.
“We’re sort of seeing people figure it out for themselves. Like, getting into elevators … people waiting for the next one even when it doesn’t say, maximum three people per elevator. It’s lovely to watch common sense unfold.
“Is it going to be right 100 per cent of the time? Absolutely not. Is it going to be right most of the time? I sure as hell hope so.” Amen.
“When you start opening things up, people’s behaviours change.”
DR. NITIN MOHAN WESTERN UNIVERSITY