National Post (National Edition)
I was a heretical global traveller
Canadian news consumers can be forgiven if they believe everyone landing at this country's airports from abroad is being locked up for three days in hotels awaiting results of mandatory COVID tests conducted upon arrival. It was widely portrayed as a fait accompli. “Now you have to get tested when you land … and then you stay in a hotel for three nights,” the Toronto Star reported on Jan. 30.
Ten days later, I can confirm this has not come to pass. I am not convinced it ever will.
I have recently been one of Canada's heretical international travellers. That ended Monday evening when a Lufthansa Airbus spat me out into Toronto's Pearson airport. And I think my experience provides an interesting window into the strange muddle that currently constitutes the federal government's plans.
“Travellers must still provide proof of a negative COVID-19 molecular test taken within 72 hours,” the government's website explains, referring to a rule that came into effect Jan. 7. “In the near future, travellers will also be required to take a … test on arrival; stay in a hotel for three nights while they await the results; (and) pay for their hotel, as well as all associated costs.” And then they'll go into quarantine for the remainder of the existing two-week requirement.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other ministers have suggested the cost might be as high as $2,000, which is simply larcenous. New Zealand charges 3,100 Kiwi bucks ($2,850) for 14 days of quarantine.
But more importantly: Whereas 14 days makes sense in New Zealand, three days makes very little medical sense anywhere.
I got a swab jammed up my nose in Madrid on Sunday morning, receiving the COVID-negative result just over seven hours later, in order to get on a flight to Frankfurt and thence Toronto. Upon arrival at Pearson roughly 36 hours later, under provincial rules that kicked in Feb. 1, I got another swab jammed up my nose. Now dutifully confined to my apartment, I anticipate receiving another negative result soon.
But it's entirely possible I could have COVID-19, with no symptoms, and neither of those tests would pick it up.
“Say you had lunch with a friend who was positive. Day 1 is the day after you had that lunch,” Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Lauren Kucirka, co-author of a widely cited study on when PCR tests are likely to indicate infection, told the Association of American Medical Colleges news site in October. “What we found was that if you are tested in the days immediately after exposure, the false negative rate is anywhere from 50 per cent to 100 per cent.”
The false-negative rate bottomed out on day 8, the study found, which is three days after typical symptom onset. People in hotel quarantine in New Zealand, Australia, Thailand and other countries have many days (and tests) to go at that point.
So what's going on? It sure smells like rank politics.
Within very recent memory, elite public opinion held that border issues were a silly populist distraction, because so few cases were linked to travel. On Dec. 22, Public Safety Minister Bill Blair complained demands for a crackdown rested “frankly (on) an unfortunate misrepresentation of what is actually happening.”
Then Ontario Finance Minister Rod Phillips and some other political welterweights were found to be abroad against stern instructions from their own governments, and suddenly there was a populist backlash against anyone who had dared travel — plutocrat, Instagram influencer, retired teacher or letter carrier, it didn't matter.
In the short term, locking up those people might be popular. But it won't last. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Canadians live abroad, and haven't been home since the pandemic began. They will strike much more sympathetic figures than I and the other folks in the Nexus line at Pearson did.
Mandatory hotel quarantine can be a compelling policy when case counts are in sight of zero and eradication is a reasonable goal, and when the borders are otherwise sealed. Canada's case counts are not in sight of zero and our borders are, of necessity, not sealed.
“Of the total travellers (entering Canada) from March 31, 2020 to Jan. 24, 2021, 50 per cent (4,300,974) were truck drivers,” Canada Border Services Agency Mark Stuart said in an email. “Approximately 92 per cent of travellers (arriving by land) are exempt from quarantine,” he added.
For an economy dependent on trucking from the United States, that's a very tough problem to solve. Smaller problems are still worth solving. They are not worth pretending to solve, however. No problem is.
As it stands, this “plan” presents as a classic, pointless, potentially counterproductive Canadian compromise. If it winds up costing people considerably less than $2,000, or only to affect arrivals from a few dozen countries — as the United Kingdom's new hotel-quarantine rules do — well, perhaps people will still be somewhat mollified.
Until and unless vaccines start flooding into this country, that's the sort of thing that counts as a political victory. No one who doesn't work in politics should consider it one.