An unfathomable and epic failure on face masks

Dizzying screw-up by Canada’s officials

On Thursday, Ottawa’s public transit agency announced that passengers and staff would have to wear a mask or face covering in order to come aboard. The rule comes into effect on June 15 — two weeks and four days after the announcement; three months after the World Health Organizat i on declared COVID-19 a pandemic; more than two months after New York State made masks mandatory on public transit; six weeks after Spain and Germany followed suit; and more than a month after France joined in.

In Canada, mask- wise, that’s the pointy end of the stick. Even Quebec, one of the hardest-hit jurisdictions in the world, hasn’t made masks mandatory. Both the Montreal Métro and Exo, the city’s suburban commuter train service, have been handing out free masks and strongly encouraging their use — but only as of last week.

The Toronto Transit Commission, meanwhile, had until very recently advised even its own employees, dozens of whom have tested positive for COVID-19, against wearing masks. To be fair, it cited advice from the city’s public health department: “Masks may in fact increase risk as they can lead to individuals touching their face more often than necessary.” It’s just unfortunate that many of Canada’s public health officials seem to have joined some kind of anti- mask cult without informing their bosses or the public.

Thankfully, albeit at a glacial pace, they have changed their minds. Even the federal government, although with obvious reluctance, now advises wearing a mask where social distancing isn’t possible. But their previous advice will need to be answered for. It never withstood a moment’s scrutiny.

We were told there’s “no evidence” that masks work against COVID-19. We were told people wouldn’t wear masks properly or consistently, leading to more face- touching. We were told people would stop washing their hands. We were told masks needed to be reserved for frontline medical personnel.

“The f i rst argument can be challenged on the grounds that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” Trisha Greenhalgh, a professor of primary- care health sciences at Oxford University’s Nuffield College, wrote last month in the British Medical Journal. ( There’s no evidence handwashing works against COVID-19 specifically either.)

“The second two arguments may have been internally valid in the trials that produced them, but we have no evidence that they are externally valid in the context of COVID-19,” Greenhalgh trenchantly argued. “‘ The public’ here are not volunteers in someone else’s experiment in a flu outbreak — they are people the world over who are trying to stay alive in a deadly pandemic. They may be highly motivated to learn techniques for most effective mask use.”

Indeed. And public health officials should have been teaching them.

As for reserving a shortage of masks for frontline workers, that’s a logistical issue, not a scientific one. Public health officials shouldn’t be telling us something doesn’t work because we don’t have enough access to the thing — not if they ever want to be taken seriously ever again, anyway.

Greenhalgh’s conclusion is that encouraging the use of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic is fundamentally in keeping with the “precautionary principle.” That’s a particularly interesting observation from a Canadian perspective, in light of Justice Archie Campbell’s report for Ontario on the 2003 SARS outbreak.

“If the commission has one single take- home message,” Campbell’s report avers, “it is the precautionary principle that safety comes first, that reasonable efforts to reduce risk need not await scientific proof.”

For 15 years, we were told SARS had transformed Ontario and Canada as a whole into the most pandemic- ready society on Earth. Then, suddenly, with elderly relatives dropping dead in their thousands of a virus transmitted via droplets landing in our faceholes, scientists were telling us that covering our mouths and noses was worse than useless. Not only did our public health officials fail to learn the headline lesson from the SARS report, many of them sounded borderline deranged.

Their defenders point to “new evidence,” namely of asymptomatic transmission. Even if you consider that the dividing line between masks and no- masks — and many jurisdictions who have done far better than Canada disagree — that evidence began to mount in February. It’s nearly June. It is a dizzying, unfathomable failure.

I’m not at all sure Canadians realize quite how badly Ontario and Quebec have fared during this nightmare. Combined, Toronto and its neighbour regions of Peel, York and Durham have a death rate of 225 per million — more than twice Germany’s. Ottawa is worse, at 250 per million. If Montreal and its surrounding regions comprised a country, they would have the third-highest fatality rate in the world after San Marino and Belgium: 765 per million.

Of course, that’s not all down to lack of mask- wearing. But history will record that one of the most advanced countries on Earth proudly avoided one of the simplest and cheapest anti-viral measures available to us. We can only hope history also records what the hell the people in charge were thinking.