Bars aren’t worth the risk > ONTARIO’S REOPENING

If, for some hard-to-imagine reason, you actually wanted to contract COVID-19, you couldn’t do better than head for a loud, crowded indoor space where people have to lean in close to talk. Oh, and where the longer they stay, the more their inhibitions melt away.

In fact, we have spaces just like that. They’re called bars and nightclubs. And both common sense as well as experience around the world is showing that they are indeed ideal venues for spreading the coronavirus.

That’s been happening everywhere from California to Quebec, from Texas to South Korea. Young people partying in bars after long weeks in lockdown are getting COVID-19 and spreading it into the community.

This has to stop. In some U.S. states, governors have already reversed course; they’ve closed bars and restaurants entirely after seeing what happened when they were allowed to open. In Quebec, the government has imposed stricter controls after outbreaks of COVID at some Montreal bars.

Toronto and the neighbouring region have a chance to get this right first time out. The city and Peel Region, along with the Windsor area, still haven’t been given the goahead by Queen’s Park to allow restaurants and bars to reopen for indoor service. They’re being held in “Stage 2” of Ontario’s plan to restart the economy.

At the very minimum, the province should impose stricter controls on bars and restaurants before it allows Toronto, Peel and Windsor to move into Stage 3, with all that involves.

It should adopt the measures proposed over the weekend by Toronto Mayor John Tory to minimize the risk that will come when bars and restaurants are allowed to open in the city and region, as they already have in most of the province.

Those measures include requiring patrons to stay seated unless they’re paying or using the washroom; to wear masks while they’re not actually eating or drinking; earlier-than-usual closures; and requiring customers to leave their names and numbers for contact tracing in case of infection.

None of this will make visiting a bar or nightclub any more enjoyable. Just the opposite. But they’re the least we should do to reduce the risk of the pandemic breaking out and destroying the progress we’ve so painfully made over the past four months.

It’s also important that the province impose these added restrictions across the board, and not leave it up to individual municipalities to act. The province can act faster, send a consistent message and invoke tougher penalties for anyone who doesn’t follow the rules.

All this is a minimum before we enter Stage 3. At the same time, it’s worth asking: why open indoor bars and nightclubs at all at this point?

Provinces and states that have gone down this road now have reason to regret it. And the evidence closer to home doesn’t give much reason to hope that we’d be the exception to this sorry pattern.

On Tuesday, Ontario reported 203 new cases of COVID-19, the highest daily number since the end of June. That’s cause enough for concern, but just as important is who’s getting sick: it’s now mostly younger people, under the age of 39, not the older folks who contracted the disease in the first weeks.

This is consistent with the pattern south of the border, where more and more young people are coming down with the coronavirus after partying in bars and nightclubs. They typically don’t get as sick as older people, but they can easily spread it to their more vulnerable parents and grandparents.

The danger here is obvious: if we’re going to have a chance of resuming something close to normal life in the fall, with schools and offices reopening, we have to get it right over the next six weeks.

A second wave of COVID-19 would destroy that possibility.

Reopening bars and nightclubs simply isn’t worth the risk. Ontario should think long and hard about taking that chance at this point. And if it does insist on going down that road, it should do everything possible to minimize the danger.