Province mulls rules for ‘emergency brake’

Ontario lacks criteria to cause sending regions back into lockdown

Ontario does not have clear criteria for invoking its COVID-19 “emergency brake” despite concerns about sudden surges of contagious new variants as thousands of businesses reopen in much of the province.

The admission came Tuesday as Premier Doug Ford said Toronto, Peel and York could see restrictions eased next week and indoor restaurant dining, barber shops, hair salons and gyms resumed operations — with limits — in more than two dozen regions, including Halton, Durham and Hamilton.

A panel of experts is developing thresholds on when provincial and local health officials should plunge a region back into lockdown to quickly close off chains of transmission, said associate chief medical officer Dr. Barbara Yaffe.

“We’ve asked the public health measures table to give us more specific advice,” she told a news conference. “It’s more the trend and how it’s being transmitted.”

The government has billed the emergency brake as a fail-safe measure to backstop an easing of restrictions with daily new cases down to one-quarter of their second wave peak of a month ago.

But opposition parties and an epidemiologist said they are shocked to hear there is not a detailed set of triggers in place, fearing the situation could lead to hesitation, disagreement and potentially fatal delays in taking swift action.

They pointed to a recent spike in Newfoundland and the B.1.1.7 strain from the United Kingdom, which sped through Roberta Place nursing home in Barrie last month, killing 70 residents before they could be vaccinated.

“It’s actually quite concerning there’s no clear criteria in place to halt what they’re calling a potential third wave,” said Todd

Coleman, a former public health official in MiddlesexLondon.

“We know this can get out of hand very quickly.”

Yaffe said the main criteria for the brake would be the percentage of cases that are variants of concern, but could not specify a number other than to say computer modellers advising the province have warned cases can “skyrocket” once they reach 10 per cent.

“If we’re starting to see an increase … in a local health unit … we would be discussing it immediately as an emergency with the local medical officer of health and determining what the appropriate measures would be,” she added.

New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath said the government’s “big weapon” to stop spikes in COVID-19 is short of ammunition.

“It’s pretty frightening that the be-all and end-all of coming out of lockdown was supposed to be the emergency brake, but the government doesn’t know what it is,” she told the Star, comparing it to the failed “iron ring” Ford and his government promised to put around nursing homes in the first wave last spring.

Critics said Ford was repeatedly slow to implement stricter public health measures throughout the fall, allowing the spread of COVID-19 to worsen and waiting until after Christmas to plunge the province into lockdown.

“That one took the cake,” said Coleman, who said the government’s track record does not bode well for prompt use of the emergency brake and noted it’s important to have “evidencebased” thresholds for using it.

To date, seven per cent of 14,000 positive tests for the virus have shown to be variants and are sent for genomic sequencing to identify the strain, a process that takes close to a week, Yaffe said.

“There is no obvious pattern at this point, but if there does start to be a pattern that would be a big concern.”