Quebec’s curfew reflects failed policy
Lack of agenda for testing, isolation
Quebec’s sweeping new measures to control the spread of COVID-19 might be necessary but, as with growing restrictions across the country, they are an admission of failure to have controlled the pandemic in any way that could have been deemed competent. Among the measures are the closing of all non-essential businesses and places of worship for four weeks; closing grocery stores by 7: 30 p. m. every day; and not reopening high schools from the holiday break until Jan. 18.
Most intrusively, a provincewide curfew of 8 p. m. will be in effect.
All will be enforced with fines of between $ 1,000 and $ 6,000, the Montreal Gazette has reported. “Police officers will be there to make sure everybody respects the rules,” Premier François Legault said at a news conference.
Growing restrictions on liberties across the country could have been avoided had governments used the spring shutdowns and summer reprieve to build up testing and tracing capacity. That time, which we now suspect was aided by warmer weather, could have been used to develop pandemic policy around quickly identifying and isolating cases and allowing life to return to something approaching normal.
Instead the virus was allowed to circulate unchecked and as people moved indoors with the winter weather, the spread went out of control. Canadians spent months doing what was asked of them, only to end up facing ever increasing deaths and ever diminishing liberties.
With 1,393 COVID patients in hospital and 202 in intensive care units, the hospital system is at risk of being overrun in Quebec, said Dr. Donald Sheppard, chair of the department of microbiology and immunology at Mcgill University’s faculty of medicine. He said the province is at risk of exceeding already expanded capacity; beds freed up for COVID-19 patients are themselves filling up.
“We are going to truly surpass our capacity in the next two to three weeks if we don’t do something,” he said in an interview Wednesday.
Because transmission of the virus is driven by superspreader events where people are next to each other indoors for long periods, Sheppard supports extending school closures and the closing of non- essential businesses, however painful these may be. “Where else do you spend time with 30-plus people?”
However, he doesn’t think these rules should have been necessary.
Sheppard wants to see widespread testing of asymptomatic people, who account for as much as 90 per cent of everyone with COVID- 19, according to several studies including a November paper in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Ramping up testing of asymptomatic individuals in congregate settings whether it is in schools or the workplace should have been done. Period. Full stop,” he said.
Using a rapid testing approach is one way to do it, but using PCR tests is also possible. Dozens of American universities are testing students twice a week, which accounts for the five- day incubation period of the virus.
Programs like those could have been deployed on a wider scale in Quebec and other provinces. They would have involved greater participation from the private sector, Sheppard said, allowing companies to offer testing in research labs that would then have referred positive cases to the public system.
Provinces could have offered “up a fast-track certification process to get these places up and running,” he said.
The failure to build up a testing and isolation policy is what led us to this point of greater restrictions.
Still, even accounting for the reality that stricter measures were inevitable, the imposition of a curfew is an overreach and, as Sheppard pointed out, there is little evidence backing up curfews as an effective tool to control the virus spread. For months Quebecers, like all Canadians, have adhered to physical distancing rules, stayed away from loved ones, and endured economic hardship and mental-health challenges.
The least provinces could have done was to bring in policy to manage the pandemic without having to resort to lockdowns.
For the public to accept measures, there needs to be a rational connection between a policy and its goal, and it needs to be properly balanced against people’s desire to live how they want.
A curfew will bring nothing but anger.