`COVID zero' is not happening

There is almost suspiciously good news on the vaccine front. It feels like a cruel trick. But both Pfizer and Moderna are claiming excellent results in their phase-three trials — 90 to 95 per cent effectiveness — and Canada's federal government has agreements in place to buy both. Salvation may be just over the horizon.

Even the dreamiest scenarios have us living with COVID-19 for many months to come, however. And right now, things are trending badly everywhere in Canada outside the Atlantic Bubble. Not surprisingly, folks are increasingly desperate for alternative approaches. Two seem to be attracting particular attention in the medical world: Melbourne, Australia, and Slovakia. Like it or not, neither is a likely fit for Canada.

As I wrote two weeks ago, anyone who thinks the Melbourne model is replicable in Canadian cities either doesn’t understand what happened there, doesn’t understand Canada, or both. Melburnians couldn’t venture more than five kilometres from home, or outside the house with more than one household member. Police officers randomly checked IDs and handed out massive fines. There were mass arrests of anti-lockdown protesters. In July, with no advance warning, 3,000 mostly immigrant residents of nine public housing towers were locked in their units for two weeks, 24 hours a day, for fear of “explosive growth.”

None of that can, will or should happen in Canada.

Supporters of the “COVID zero” approach — literally eliminating the virus — often point to New Zealand as another, less draconian model. But it doesn’t really work, either. The Kiwis simply took the pandemic vastly more seriously than Canada, and there isn’t really any way we can catch up. New Zealand closed its borders to China on Feb. 3. Five weeks later, Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, was still calling the coronavirus a “low risk.” Canadians quarantine for two weeks after returning from abroad more or less on the honour system. New Zealand locks them up in hotel rooms of the government’s choosing.

There is reason to believe it’s highly effective: 16 per cent of New Zealand’s positive tests have been in “managed isolation” facilities. We have no idea where the equivalent patients were in Canada or what they were doing. But if as many Canadians were currently quarantined in hotels as Kiwis, there would be 38,000 of them. It’s almost impossible to imagine.

Thanks to its efforts, New Zealand never had more than 72 new cases a day (on a seven-day average) to deal with. It could easily muster the necessary resources to trace their contacts and isolate them. At some point between there and the 1,000-or-so cases Ontario and Quebec have been reporting for days on end, even a competently run jurisdiction will fail to keep up. Neither is very competently run.

The Slovakian gambit is more plausible: At the beginning of the month, the country tested almost all of its 5.5 million people over just four days. The results were remarkable: 57,500 tested positive. If something like one per cent of the population has COVID-19 and doesn’t know it, and you can get them off the streets, that could make a heck of a difference (though it certainly won’t get you to zero).

There’s no good reason this idea couldn’t work in Canadian provinces. But there are a few bad ones. Slovakia used rapid-response antigen tests, which Canadian officialdom very clearly despises. Last month, Health Minister Patty Hajdu insanely suggested these tests could make outbreaks worse. It was October 5 before Health Canada approved one. It has only approved two since. The seven still under review, including the two Slovakia used, may never see the light of day here.

Slovakia’s experience obliterates the main and always-dumb argument against using these less-accurate tests, which is that an inaccurate negative result might provide a “false sense of security.” In Slovakia, they eliminated the falsest sense of security imaginable: Walking around with COVID-19 in you without knowing it. But dumb arguments tend to be the toughest ones to dislodge, unfortunately. And after many frustrating months watching Canadian bureaucracies bumble along, it’s very difficult to believe many could deploy millions of tests in a matter of days even if they were approved.

Canadians will not defeat COVID-19 without a vaccine. Fact. All they can do is endure it as best they can. And governments too often stand in the way of that as well. Here in Ontario, public health messaging may have achieved maximum attainable incoherence. Last week the province ditched barely week-old colour-coded thresholds for imposing and relaxing restrictions and adopted much stricter ones. On Monday, Dr. David Williams, Tam’s hopelessly overwhelmed colleague at Queen’s Park, said he hoped the entire province could be in the “green zone” by Christmas. It’s more likely Santa Claus will be premier. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is still talking as if public health officials might allow Christmas gatherings. They won’t. He must know they won’t. Why string us along?

The new message to Torontonians, meanwhile, is that you can’t even see your friends outside anymore. (You can go to the mall, though.) “You know what happens: Two families go out for a walk (and) inevitably, the kids and the adults get too close together on the sidewalk,” mayor John Tory told CBC’s Metro Morning show on Friday.

He evinces roughly as much confidence in his constituents as he and his fellow politicians deserve from them in return.