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They are useful tools in pandemic tool kit

Throughout history, the arrival of contagious pestilences saw broad community efforts keep people apart and reduce spread. This was reflected in our lexicon with phrases like “avoiding someone like the plague” and the concept of quarantine, which was derived from Venice’s 40-day at sea quarantena during the same era. Humanity has always understood that a disease that spreads from person to person cannot spread if people are not meeting.

Without intervention, novel illnesses (i.e. for which humans do not have innate immunity) threaten communities in various ways. Rapid spread drives up infections, which can threaten lives and hospital capacity. Immune systems might overreact to a new intruder.

Finally, uncertainty drives fear and a loss of consumer confidence. With widespread contagion, it’s impossible to know exactly who is ill, which in the end still impacts how people come together.

Thus, closures or restrictions can serve as useful and powerful tools in the right circumstances. At the appropriate moment, imposing broad closures immediately decreases interactions and interrupts transmission, which saves lives and protects the health care system in the short run.

If kept to the shortest time required, with supports provided, the intervention can also help mitigate the indirect impacts of the pandemic on the community. In the long run, preserving life and health for more people also means a more robust economic recovery.

It’s important to remember that not all closures are created equally. When instituting measures in a pandemic, communities are ultimately threading a needle through two extremes: mitigating the harms of uncontrolled viral spread against those of the mitigation measures adopted.

Closures that are particularly severe can disrupt communities, isolate people and cause economic stress in a manner similar to widespread viral circulation.

That’s why most public health specialists favour an adaptive approach, with reopening along with testing and tracing where case counts are low, and a return to closures where growing cases and hospitalizations begin to threaten.

This also reinforces why it’s so important to provide broad financial and social assistance to help the community through any closure. It protects people and businesses disproportionately impacted by the closures, tilting the scales towards the benefits reaped by controlling the virus.

Opponents of closures point to the negative effects on the community, especially among our most vulnerable: the elderly, essential and front-line workers, small businesses, and those experiencing poverty, homelessness, or mental illness.

What they miss in this line of focus is that uncontrolled viral spread also negatively impacts those same populations, as people fall sick and fear for their lives — with the added spectre of deaths and long-term disability to boot.

Around the world, we have seen what happens if a closure doesn’t arrive in time: community after community ravaged, along with the devastating consequences imposed on patients and frontline workers.

Certainly, closures themselves can impact health care services too, but uncontrolled viral spread almost always sees hospitals overwhelmed, with patients turned away, surgeries and treatments cancelled, and health care workers traumatized. When the trajectory points toward this happening, one must act.

Closures are one tool in the pandemic tool box, intended to be deployed in specific circumstances, over a limited period, with appropriate supports. Done well, closures are a useful tool to addressing the immediate threat of viral propagation.

The negative effects are understood but can be mitigated.

It’s also worth noting that such impacts are also ultimately short term and would equally be visited if the virus ran loose.

As cases and hospitalizations continue to rise in Peel Region, I welcome discussions around additional closures to bring COVID-19 under control in the immediate term. Reducing person-toperson interactions would bring shortterm relief, buying us time to address the underlying disparities and inequities that drive transmission in our community.

Proponents of a balanced approach sometimes forget that when the balance tips towards controlling COVID-19, you must act decisively to turn down viral spread so the community can stay open with confidence.

Hence, as one of many tools in my tool kit, I would not hesitate to call for broader closures should it be warranted in the community that I serve; doubly so if appropriate supports are provided to help the most vulnerable members of our community through the difficult moments.