Don’t throw away our gains
New and more contagious variants of COVID are circulating in Ontario — and not just in hot spots like Toronto but as far away as North Bay and Timiskaming.
The vaccine front is a mess with mounting delays in procuring doses and troubling new concerns that one vaccine Canada has purchased, AstraZeneca, may not work as well on at least one of the new variants.
Long-term-care homes are still in crisis and there’s not a lot of confidence that the province’s plan for returning to inperson classes will be sufficient to keep schools safe.
Yet, with all that, Premier Doug Ford thinks this is the perfect time to start reopening Ontario’s economy.
“We’re seeing some sunlight break through the clouds,” Ford said on Monday. “The measures are working. Staying home is saving lives.”
Then he announced the government’s plan to ease those very restrictions — thereby encouraging people out of their homes — starting as soon as Wednesday in three eastern Ontario regions. The rest of the province is to follow on Monday, Feb. 15, aside from the hardest hit Toronto, Peel and York regions, which will have to wait until Feb. 22.
To be sure, this is not a return to pre-pandemic normal life. It’s a return to the colour-coded framework for determining the severity of restrictions, with a new twist: in-person shopping for non-essentials is allowed at every level from green through to the most restrictive grey lockdown level.
It’s a risky strategy. In fact, there’s every chance this rush to reopen may set the stage for a third wave.
What does need to open — and stay open — are schools. And this move to open shops, restaurants, bars and movie theatres in low-risk areas like Kingston this week and non-essential retail in high-risk areas like Toronto in two weeks time — just a week after schools reopen — is putting that at risk.
The premier is correct that the numbers of new COVID cases have been going in the right direction — Ontario’s seven-day average of new cases and deaths are both way down from their peaks — and he’s clearly banking on those positive trends continuing.
The number of people in intensive care units is also down from three weeks ago when the province issued triage rules instructing doctors how to decide who should get lifesaving access to ventilators and who should not. But they’re still dangerously high and above the threshold for a normally functioning health-care system.
So we’re doing better than we were and, through the sacrifices everyone has made in staying home, we’re below the worst-case scenarios but that’s hardly the same as being in good shape. Health care workers are not rejoicing; they’re rationing non-COVID care.
The Ford government is moving the goal posts (again) of what’s considered acceptable in terms of illness and loss of life to get some people back to work and other people shopping.
No doubt the premier is under intense pressure from the business community, especially small businesses who fear they won’t make it through this crisis. Everyone is sick of COVID and desperate to get back to some semblance of a normal life.
But the way to do that is to get the virus under control. Premature openings, which are then followed by the heartbreaking closings, don’t get us there. Already the government is promising to throw the “emergency break” and thrust regions back into lockdowns if necessary.
We’ve gone through that kind of pain already. None of us should want to risk throwing away the gains that have been made in the second wave, as we did in the first wave, by trying to reopen too quickly.
We can all hope the COVID variants don’t crush the positive trends in cases and that vaccines will flow without further delay. But if we’ve learned anything in this pandemic it’s this: government responses to the crisis have generally come too late and moves to ease restrictions have come too early.