Ticketing after the fact won’t save lives
More than 1,000 Niagara residents have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past week. Two-hundred and forty have died since the start of the year.
More than 4,000 new cases are being reported every day across Ontario — with Friday the worst yet, at 4,812. Projections released Friday show that could double, or worse, in the coming weeks without even tighter restrictions. And yet in a stunning show of ignorance and disdain for the community in which they live, a group that is anti-mask, anti-lockdown promises another protest Saturday in Niagara Falls. They promote it as being like the one last weekend in St. Catharines.
They are tired of lockdown — as if the rest of us aren’t. And they reject the science that says masks help prevent spread of the coronavirus, the same way staying home and limiting social contacts break the chain of infection. They say they have their own science, but that’s really just a mash of internet junk and disproved arguments.
People are dying. They are getting sick by the hundreds each day, and not all of them will get over it in a few days. Disregarding that, sometimes even denying it, they say they will march.
It can’t be allowed to happen.
Providing crowd control and ticketing and issuing summonses later, as happened last weekend, isn’t enough. What good are more tickets if Saturday’s protest goes ahead and more people are sent to our already overcrowded hospitals?
Science modelling released Friday shows a worstcase scenario of 30,000 new cases a day in Ontario. Even continued lockdown measures and 100,000 vaccinations a day, like is happening now, will only keep that to 5,000 new cases daily.
We won’t know for another week or more just how many people were sickened because they attended last week’s rally, or how many will be admitted to hospital. That’s how COVID works, it takes about two weeks to really reveal its damage.
Provincial emergency orders were enacted for a reason: Unless the fast growth of COVID-19 is blunted and brought down, people will keep dying.
Our hospitals will be overwhelmed trying to care for so many COVID patients, let alone those who are admitted for the usual heart attacks, cancers, kidney stone attacks and broken bones.
It can’t be allowed to happen.
Niagara Regional Police aren’t saying how they plan to handle Saturday’s planned gathering.
Fine, though were they to pursue a court injunction against it, or even visit protest organizers to warn them of the consequences, it would be comforting to know it in advance.
If the protest really is against lockdowns, purportedly because businesses are being hurt and because of the mental health effects lockdowns bring, then why does it have to be carried out in such a large crowd? Why no masks?
Protests like this will not convince government to ease up. Rather, they will sicken more people, send more patients to hospital and prolong the lockdown even further.
The only way to end the lockdown is with fewer COVID-19 cases. Period.
There are ways to protest that don’t involve a thousand people standing shoulder to shoulder, barefaced, in the middle of a pandemic.
If the protest goes ahead, the time for simply issuing $880 tickets under the Reopening Ontario Act has passed.
Nothing less than issuing a Part 3 summons, which carries a court date and maximum fine for individuals of $100,000 will suffice.
People are dying. This is serious business.