Ground domestic flights
Brazil has just advised women to “delay pregnancy” until the aggressive P1 variant of COVID has passed. Estimates collected by the BBC suggested between 518 and 1,032 infants under a year old have died since last February, as the highly transmissible variant has raged across the South American country.
The variant has spread to Canada, with 2,201 cases recorded so far. The vast majority — 1,810 have been found in British Columbia, where provincial health officer Bonnie Henry revealed on Monday that a toddler died of COVID, that province’s youngest victim so far (it was not revealed whether the infant, who had a pre-existing condition, had contracted the variant.)
As case numbers have risen in B.C. in recent days, Premier John Horgan has imposed new travel restrictions, limiting people from leaving their local area for non-essential reasons.
Yet while all this is going on, domestic air travel continues unabated. Six flights from Vancouver are due to land in Toronto on Wednesday. Between April 1 and 14, 90 domestic flights carried passengers subsequently found to have COVID, with 50 of those flights originating in Vancouver. None of those passengers was obliged to take a COVID test before or after flying, or was forced to quarantine on arrival (Ontario recommends but does not enforce quarantine.)
With all we know about the intimate link between the virus and travel this seems inexplicable. It’s clear that the less people travel, nationally and internationally, the less the virus spreads. Anyone who doubts that should look at the flat COVID case graphs for the Atlantic provinces, which have a two-week quarantine period for new arrivals by land and no flights landing from outside the Atlantic bubble.
International flights are still landing too, with 30 arrivals carrying reported COVID cases in the twoweek period between April 1-14 — half of which came from Delhi, where a new “double mutation” variant, B1.617, has been discovered. The U.K. and Hong Kong have added India to a travel ban list in recent days but the federal government has defended its decision to allow flights from the subcontinent to keep landing by insisting that the importation rate of the virus is low.
That decision is true to form. Ottawa recently dropped enhanced screening measures for flights from Brazil, even though B.C.’S Bonnie Henry confirmed that P1 was traced back to a traveller. The rationale was that since the variant is here already, “it was not clear that screening for incoming travellers who had been in Brazil was adding operational value.”
All the more reason to try to contain such an aggressive variant in the province where it has taken such a toll on its population, not to mention its hockey team.
We now have a virus that is every parent’s worst nightmare but there are no efforts being made to corral it West of the Rockies (there are 169 reported cases in Alberta, 211 in Ontario and eight in Quebec).
The Public Health Agency admitted that is likely “the tip of the iceberg” in its daily briefing, without elaborating. But it made clear its concern. “Early evidence suggests that the P1 variant may reduce the effectiveness of vaccines, making it even more important to control the spread.”
Despite this recognition, Patty Hajdu, the health minister, is not recommending restrictions on interprovincial travel. Then again, this is the health minister that said last year that closing borders was a greater risk to public health than leaving them open.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford last week urged people to avoid travelling to the province but has not called on the federal government to intervene. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said he’s supportive of provinces closing their borders but has not proposed the kind of restrictions on domestic travel that were imposed on international flights.
The pathogen is thriving on the hospitality offered by such typical Canadian public policy — with premiers urging: “After you, sir,” and the prime minister responding, “No, not at all, after you.”
It’s as if we’ve never faced a viral epidemic before. Except, of course, we have and the conclusion of the SARS Commission chair Justice Archie Campbell in 2006 was that governments can’t wait for scientific certainty before taking reasonable steps to reduce risk.
Domestic flights should be grounded temporarily until case numbers start declining, and the P1 variant is under control.