THE COVID-19 FIGHT WAS ORIGINALLY FRAMED AS A NATIONAL STRUGGLE, BUT CITIES ARE NOW PREPARING TO TACKLE THEIR OWN OUTBREAKS AS THE INITIAL WAVE OF INFECTIONS TURNS INTO A SERIES OF LOCALIZED ERUPTIONS.
OUTBREAKS LOCAL
The fight against the COVID-19 pandemic was originally framed in wartime terms, as a national struggle. Then we divided along provincial lines as the virus took hold in Quebec and Ontario, leaving places like Manitoba and New Brunswick virtually untouched.
Now, cities are preparing to tackle their own unique outbreaks as the initial wave of infections turns into a series of localized eruptions.
Consider the situation in Kingston, Ont., where the city of about 137,000 people has seen 63 confirmed cases of COVID-19.
By Tuesday, 62 of those cases had resolved, leaving a single confirmed case in the community. There have been no deaths and no outbreaks in long-term care homes, yet people in Kingston are still living under restrictive stayat-home orders issued across the province.
“A one-size-fits-all approach is becoming increasingly difficult,” Kingston Mayor Bryan Paterson told the National Post.
To put the numbers in context, Ontario announced 446 new cases on Tuesday, seven times more than Kingston has experienced in total since the first COVID-19 case arrived in Canada.
“I’m speaking with mayors in the Toronto area saying things are moving too fast for them. And then you have situations in Eastern Ontario like ourselves where we’re hearing from our own public health officials that we’re ready to move to the next stage. That’s showing there’s a real case for a regional approach,” said Paterson.
It’s a similar situation in Ottawa, where the city has reported new cases in the single digits for the last week and, although there are 18 institutional outbreaks in the city, only 187 confirmed cases out of 1,969 were acquired in the community.
After resisting a local approach to the crisis, the Ontario government seems to have had a change of heart.
“We need a plan that recognizes the differences on the ground in different parts of our province,” said Premier Doug Ford on Tuesday afternoon. On Friday, Ford announced that the plan to open up will go forward on a regional basis, but few details about how that will look have been revealed. It could go city-by-city or allow the regional health authorities to set guidelines.
Some kind of regional approach is already underway in much of Canada and the U.S. The rules in New York City are different than the rest of the state and Montreal is opening on a slower timeline than the rest of Quebec. An outbreak in a meatpacking plant in Calgary forced it to labour under stay-at-home orders longer than the rest of Alberta.
Although Ontario’s outbreak was fairly even across the province earlier in the crisis, a recent CBC analysis of active cases found that 76 per cent of them are in the Toronto area.