Park fiasco isn’t all we should be angry about
Maybe we should be angry at the thousands of peacock people who gathered in Trinity Bellwoods Park Saturday. Many drank openly, then urinated or defecated in people’s driveways or backyards in the absence of open bathrooms. They were jammed together; it was easily double the crowd for a typical sunny May day, according to city councillor Joe Cressy, who went to see. The cameras didn’t lie.
Maybe the outdoors will protect them from COVID-19, most of them. But maybe not. And a lot of health-care workers took it personally.
“My heart is torn,” said Dr. Abdu Sharkawy, an infectious disease specialist and ICU doctor at Toronto Western Hospital, who recorded an emotional plea Saturday from the hospital, where he was working on Eid, the holy holiday in which Muslims come together at the end of Ramadan. He has been caring for very sick COVID-19 patients for a month.
“I saw a visual representation of an ‘I don’t give a f---’ attitude, of ‘It’s not my problem.’ I understand how people can have a sense of relief. I want people to have a sense of release, paired with an understanding that this is not done. That’s what gives me trouble here. That’s what makes it difficult for me to go to bed at night. It’s the fact that I don’t think enough people understand that.
“They see phrases like flattening of the curve, and they think that this is done. And they see good weather and they think that this is done. And they see hospitals not overwhelmed and ICUs not overflowing and they think this is done.”
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“And it’s not. Because what lurks around the corner is the result of everything we’re doing in response to it.”
Yes, Toronto’s been sort of locked down for eight weeks. And no, there is not enough public space for everyone on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in May, and for everyone in a different household to stay six feet apart.
But parks nearby and across Toronto were not overwhelmed. There were hotspots, but the vast majority of the city did better than the Trinity Bellwoods instantly infamous Infectious Woodstock of 2020. Or Trinity Bellwoodstock, if you must.
“To those who say we need more public space, you’re right, but that’s not the only story here,” said Cressy, who chairs the city’s health board. “If you say it’s the story of one park only and people going for a scene, that’s true, but that doesn’t negate the fact that we do need more public space. This is grey, and there’s a failure on every front. There’s a failure on personal and selfresponsibility, just as there’s a failure writ large in the adequacy of public spaces, just as there’s a failure in the ability to prepare for and communicate and adapt our spaces for it. So it’s on all houses.
“We can open up all the space that we need, but if people don’t practise good physical distancing and respect the social contract, it doesn’t work.”
So maybe we should be grateful toward the thousands who gathered at Trinity Bellwoods Saturday, for reminding us that as our commitment frays against an often invisible and contagious virus, nothing works without mutual respect.
But we should be angry, and not just at the peacocks. Testing has been near half-capacity in this province for a week, as daily cases have still risen above 400 every day but one. Over a week after starting to reopen the province, Premier Doug Ford promised a new testing plan and said anyone can get tested now, and some doctors at testing centres said this required actual planning.
The whole thing’s being stitched together on the fly. And on Friday, a week after the narrow testing parameters of the first two months were expanded, at least two Toronto hospital testing centres were still said to be turning away potential patients who had been in close contact with COVID cases.
Contact tracing is slow. Dr. Michael Warner, the critical care chief at Michael Garron Hospital in East York, says he had to call 311 to report a coronavirus case to Toronto Public Health on Saturday, and it took three calls and 45 minutes so he could give info like date of birth. Public health contact tracing runs 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday to Friday, and then it’s 311. Between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. there is no contact tracing beginning at all. Ontario-wide, tracing takes an average of five to seven days after initial medical examination to begin, partly due to testing backlogs. And isolation of cases for anybody living in a onebathroom housing situation is a pipe dream.
This province didn’t start reopening with a workable plan, and is skidding. The city wasn’t ready for the effect of reopening parks and not bathrooms, and bylaw officers didn’t feel safe enough to issue more than four tickets for breaking social distance. Friday, the province’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, said Ontario Public Health would try to improve their messaging, 10 weeks in. From a communications standpoint, if Dr. Williams gave me directions to my own house, I might get lost on the way.
And if we are truly screwing this up, the costs are incalculable — in the long term and the short.
“I’ve seen everything. I’ve seen Ebola. I’ve seen things that would horrify most people,” says Dr. Sharkawy. “And this is on a whole new level just because it’s so taxing in terms of the intensity, the longevity, the duration, how much it exacts on everyone going through it — whether it’s care providers or patients or their families. We’ve had people on ventilators for six weeks. It’s on another level in the degree of mental exhaustion and emotional preoccupation, the way that ransoms your abilities to focus. It’s unparalleled. It’s the perfect pandemic recipe. You can’t see it, and if you get it all bets are off.
“I guarantee you we’re going to see more cases. We’re having meetings about it right now on how we’re going to restructure our capacity in another two weeks. Every hospital is doing that now because we know that what we had planned for two weeks ago is no longer going to be valid.”
Maybe we should educate the Trinity Bellwoods peacocks instead. Josh Greenberg is a professor at Carleton University and an expert in risk and crisis communications. A poll his group ran in early May found 32 per cent of respondents between ages 18 and 29 said physical distancing rules should be eliminated within two weeks, and 44 per cent said within two to four weeks, which is about where we are. It was approximately double any other age group.
Young people are less at risk, and have been hit harder by the second major financial system shock of their lifetimes. Greenberg thinks flexible and targeted risk communication, built on a bedrock of shared trust and responsibility, might help get the right message across. As Greenberg puts it, “Risk communication needs to recognize and empathize with the different experiences people are facing.”
And maybe we shouldn’t just shame the peacocks because we need everyone to beat this virus, to eradicate it. The virus doesn’t spread itself, we do. The virus doesn’t get tired, or bored, or stir-crazy, we do. If you want to bring back the economy, to bring back crowded parks, patios, hugs, seeing your parents, your family, your friends, safe sex, your life, we need a social compact of being responsible for each other.
Multiple levels of government are making multiple mistakes. That is something we can’t control.
But we can control us. And we’re going to need everyone to win.