Ford’s theatrical lockdowns reach end stage
Sometimes you run out of road. Ontario has arrived at a dark place: hospitals falling apart ward by ward, rationed care, the cascading disaster as COVID- 19 spins out of control. All along, Ontario has said the health and safety of its citizens was the priority, even when it plainly wasn’t. It’s like when this government says, for the people. You have to ask, which ones?
And so we arrive at now or never. The latest modelling will be revealed Tuesday, and the province will announce new restrictions. As the second wave rolled, Ontario’s planning and restrictions have either been insufficient or actively damaging, and always late. Every single time.
They’re late again. It was Monday of last week when Premier Doug Ford said, the day the seven- day average crested 3,000 cases for the first time, “Everything’s on the table. But let’s see where the numbers go.” It was Friday of last week when Ford, with the current modelling complete but no decision ready for days, said “I just can’t stress it enough. Please, please just follow the protocols. We’re in a desperate situation. And when you see the modelling, you know, you’ll fall off your chair.”
But maybe now they’ll take it seriously enough. The medical community is alternating between rage and resignation, and hospitals are close to tipping. The half- assed lockdowns of Ontario’s second wave — which upon reflection have a theatrical nature to them, with the front- facing shops closed down and the businesses you can’t see often carrying on — aren’t enough of a brake.
This has to be the end of the half- measures. The province has tried to keep as much of normal life as possible through
all this, while telling people this was serious. It can’t do that anymore.
And yet you wonder, because none of it is a wake- up call or a surprise. That’s the problem. The province has sleepwalked, and some people are sleepwalking, too. Associate chief medical officer of health Dr. Barbara Yaffe said Monday an estimated one in three Ontarians are not following public health advice, which is the kind of thing that happens when your public health communication and guidelines are a maze, when public leaders flout regulations, and when people are tired and want to feel more human.
“We’re not working towards anything,” says Dr. Ashleigh Tuite, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto and a member of the province’s independent volunteer modelling table. “We have these arbitrary dates where things will be evaluated, but there’s no sense of what we’re hoping to achieve, or we’ll know that we’re doing well when cases
drop below this number, or ICU capacity is at this percentage.
“And I think that’s the aspect of this that is so demoralizing because I think it would be a lot easier for people to work though this and live through this if there was a sense of what are we actually trying to achieve? Because right now, it’s incredibly unclear.”
Now is the time. The modelling Dec. 21 showed that the sooner a lockdown was implemented the more cases would be prevented; the province waited until Dec. 26 anyway, and as the Star’s Jennifer Yang reported, it was a disaster.
And they have waited again because the province was not ready, even though the modelling on Dec. 21 was the natural extension of the modelling on Dec. 10, which was the natural extension of the modelling on Nov. 26. But it’s never too late to do the right thing. Take Peel, for example: It’s been the most consistently problematic region in the province.
“I think it’s clear much of
Peel’s continuing plateau is essential workers,” says Dr. Lawrence Loh, the region’s medical officer of health. “What can we do to support them? Paid sick leave or wage replenishment, protections for temporary, contract and agency workers, more proactive workplace inspections in highrisk sectors, more rapid testing deployed in workplace outbreaks. Household isolation: glad it’s finally funded, and we are racing to bring it online.
“And rethink the essential business list. Get rid of loopholes. Make essential essential. We’ve had lots of outbreaks in facilities that meet the definition of the regulation, but produce stuff that I reasonably would not consider essential.”
The GTA mayors all agree on paid sick leave, and Toronto Public Health as well, and it may be notable that Yaffe mentioned the need for it Monday. Watch for that. Watch for the closure of non- essential businesses instead of the province deciding which ones are essential enough, as it did in the first wave; construction companies have donated a lot of money to the PCs, but enough is enough.
Watch for a ban on evictions. Watch for a commitment to weeks of patience, and thresholds on what constitutes success.
This is the moment that the province should take this seriously, and make choices that counter its clear ideology. You may not need a curfew, but we haven’t all been in this together, and we need to be, as much as we can. We need a goal, together.
“We do have kind of a mockdown, and have, and it’s been nudge- nudge, wink- wink, Costco is full, Walmart is full,” says Dr. David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto who is also on the province’s independent volunteer science table. “You can see it in the Facebook data, you see it in the Google workplace data: People aren’t taking it very seriously.”
“It’s not a new conversation, but if you had a lockdown like the lockdown in the spring and you actually expected people to stay home and closed all but truly essential workplaces, that’s really the only thing left,” says Tuite.
Ontario needs to stop living in the mushy middle because it’s failed.
The wildfire COVID- 19 variants might be here, but Ontario is looking for them with the equivalent of a flashlight in a library. The last time we beat the virus back spring and summer were coming, when life could be spent outdoors. Now it’s winter.
This is not fun. This is not what anybody wants as their first choice. But either you attack the virus or the virus attacks you, and Ontario can either decide to take this seriously, or run out of road. The moment to choose, after so much deadly procrastinating, has finally arrived.