Ignore the COVID doom-mongers
Ontario officially announced the first rollback of COVID- era freedoms on Thursday: Because the people of Ottawa, Toronto and Peel Region apparently cannot be trusted to congregate without spewing droplets, indoor private gatherings are henceforth limited to 10 people rather than 50, and outdoor public gatherings to 25 rather than 100. “There’s going to be some severe, severe fines for people who want to ignore the regulations and the guidelines,” Premier Doug Ford warned.
This makes some sense. New case numbers have been creeping up in those areas. Ontario’s public health units consistently report that invitation- only gatherings are a major source of community spread: perhaps most impressive was a cottage weekend that led to 40 cases, some requiring hospitalization, and the shutting down of two child- care centres.
Certainly it makes a lot more sense than what some in this province have been clamouring for: banning indoor dining and drinking, which became legal provincewide on July 31. The fact that very few cases in Ontario have been reported linked to such environments — with the notable exception of a Toronto strip club, which allegedly wasn’t following social distancing rules — is of remarkably little concern to these folks. Indeed, I might dismiss it as so much Twitter noise if there weren’t so many prominent and intelligent people, including journalists, among the clamorers.
Here, I am convinced, we see what happens when Ontarians’ latent, unacknowledged Presbyterianism collides with mostly irrelevant American news. Some of the earliest “COVID-IOT” behaviour Ontarians saw was from bacchanalian bar-reopenings in the U.S. south, while people in Ontario were still hiding under their beds. The Washington Post ran a story this week that seems to confirm a significant link between saloons and virus transmission. Four states saw “notable spikes in cases” after bars reopened: Arizona, California, Kentucky and Louisiana.
The first thing to know about that is that Louisiana’s seven- day rolling average newcase count on June 1, the day the state allowed bars to reopen, was 79 per million. Ontario’s on July 31 was eight per million. Toronto’s was five. Even today, amidst the latest “surge,” Toronto’s figure is 26 per million; Ontario’s overall, 18. You can’t catch COVID-19 at a bar or a restaurant if there’s no one at the bar or the restaurant who has COVID-19.
Indeed, based on my very limited and localized survey, there are very few people eating and drinking indoors in Toronto, period. The places I frequented in the before- times are operating well below their legally limited indoor capacity; many with outdoor patios didn’t open indoors, at all, for weeks. The rules, including that everyone must be seated except to use the facilities, and wear a mask when doing so, are zealously enforced. This is not surprising. In every single imaginable way, Toronto is not New Orleans.
As for Ontario’s back-to-school plan, source of much garment-rending, it is far too early to declare success or failure. Many are already predicting failure, however, including my friend Robyn Urback, who used her perch in The Globe and Mail to predict the entire system would collapse in a heap by Thanksgiving.
The weak point thus far, Urback quite rightly noted, is Ontario’s testing regime, which has once more run aground on the shoals of reality. Back- to- school has caused a surge in demand for testing that only a government could have failed to anticipate, and students sent or kept home with symptoms that could easily be the common cold are isolating for many days, along with their families, for tests that ought to be back in 24 hours, allowing life to return quickly to normal. This needs to be addressed, and there is every reason to believe it won’t be — but it doesn’t threaten the entire system.
And there is nothing surprising or damning about 62 students and staff members at 51 schools — 46 of them in the Ottawa and Toronto areas, none in southwestern Ontario and only one in northern Ontario — having thus far tested positive. So long as there is COVID-19 in the community, it will find its way into schools. The key is that it doesn’t spread there. And the only outbreak declared thus far, in Pembroke, may have stemmed from an act of extraordinary negligence. According to a Toronto Star report, a teacher showed up at work with symptoms, not wearing a mask, and infected two other teachers, who might also not have been wearing masks.
As for the “surge” in new cases, it has not been accompanied by a surge in new hospitalizations, ICU admissions or deaths. Some argue these are “lagging indicators,” and thus not a valid source of optimism. But clearly something else, something good, is going on here. In April, the daily hospitalization count in Ontario was more than double the daily new case count from two weeks earlier. Today it’s just 40 per cent of the case counts from two weeks prior. The rate of ICU admissions has plummeted by a similar amount.
The seven- day rolling- average fatality count peaked on May 9 at 60, or 11 per cent of the new cases reported two weeks earlier. The current figure is 0.9 per cent.
This makes sense: Younger people are getting the virus. We’re better at fighting it. Long- term care home residents have the protections they so sorely lacked beforehand. Keeping your guard up is still excellent advice. But so is tuning out the Cassandras.