Minding transit mask gap and other conundrums
You board the subway. A mask is mandatory.
Obviously, you are protecting your fellow passengers from contamination and reducing the risk for yourself.
You board a GO train or UP Express to the airport. It is mask-free — but not risk-free.
Curiously, viral particles — yours and others — are free to waft across the train compartment unimpeded and unfiltered.
Don a mask for the TTC. Doff a mask for GO or UP?
Peculiarly, Union Station is now more than a transfer point. It is today doing double duty as the intersection of infection transmission.
Two transit systems, one station, two masking situations. Mind the gap — because we don’t know whether we’re coming or going.
How to explain this and so many other COVID-19 contradictions? The answers depend on the day of the week and the government of the day.
This isn’t medical science. It’s political science.
The TTC, under municipal authority, is wisely protecting us from ourselves. By contrast, provincially run GO is entrusting people with their own safety — or, more precisely, expecting you to entrust your personal safety to other people you don’t know. In a pinch — or a pandemic — you can’t. As we now know, masks cut both ways.
Yes, they offer some protection to the user from the transmission of other people’s emissions. But, according to the science, the primary beneficiary isn’t yourself but the rest of us.
Unless it’s a medical grade N95, a mask mostly reduces the spread of your own viral droplets. It doesn’t shield you as effectively from someone else’s infection.
You can look it up. Just don’t look to the provincial government to do the right thing.
The premier opted out of provincewide masking on the grounds the epidemiology and enforceability were complicated. He passed the buck to municipal governments, but when it comes to Ontario’s regional transit system — Metrolinx and GO — the buck stops with Ford.
Metrolinx, always reluctant to rock the boat with its rolling stock, says it is abiding by provincial norms while flouting municipal rules that require masks indoors. A Ministry of Health spokesperson, jumping through hoops, notes that masks are surely optimal but strictly optional.
In ordinary times, such political footsie would be merely impenetrable. In pandemic times, it is inexcusable.
It sends a message that “we’re not serious about safety,” epidemiologist Dr. Colin Furness told the Star’s Ben Spurr this week. “I would advise nobody to ride on a GO train at all … until they put a (mask) policy in place.”
Time to close the gap. If Metrolinx can deliver a seamless payment system through Presto, it can surely make mandatory masks a seamless proposition across the region — or we may pay a high price.
Here’s another COVID-19 conundrum: Everyone wants us to get tested and get the results, on the grounds that information is power. Our politicians talk about trust and transparency daily. Now imagine if you took a test and couldn’t get the results.
That’s precisely what Canadian Blood Services is planning for donors.
We deserve your blood donation, but you don’t deserve your blood diagnosis.
In the next few weeks, it will start testing for COVID-19 antibodies — which indicates whether you’ve had the coronavirus in the past, as distinct from a nasal swab test that confirms you have it in real time. The antibodies test is considered quite reliable, with “very low false-positive rates,” it adds.
So why not disclose to donors who are dedicated enough to visit a clinic in mid-pandemic, given that antibodies testing is growing rapidly elsewhere? Can’t trust us Canadians with the information.
“We don’t want to give people false assurance that you won’t get COVID-19 again,” explained Chantale Pambrun, who heads the centre for innovation (and obfuscation) at Canadian Blood Services.
COVID-19 isn’t spread through blood, so this isn’t a screening methodology.
It’s a research project — meaning donors are not only giving blood, but donating information.
Canada frowns upon giving blood money to those who give blood. But, for donors who give the gift of life of our own volition, getting information about our antibodies surely isn’t too much to ask.
Why not issue a pamphlet or email explaining the results, notably that a positive antibodies test does not necessarily confer immunity from future infection? Surely that’s not too risky for donors who are deemed sufficiently trustworthy to answer dozens of questions about their medical history and sexual activity honestly.
The approach is reminiscent of the old, discredited U.S. armed forces approach to LGBTQ questions — “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The current thinking at Canadian Blood Services is, “We’ll ask, but we won’t tell.”
Trust us, they say. Just don’t expect us to trust you with the knowledge that you’ve had COVID-19 in the past.
After all, a donor armed with positive antibodies might take reckless risks — like ride the GO or UP Express train without a mask. Come to think of it, even with a mask you’d still be taking an unjustifiable risk riding the rails, thanks to a government that wants to bend the curve without giving us the straight goods.