The borders aren’t the problem, premier — we are
There’s a COVID-19 variant loose in Ontario, so Doug Ford, like Rod Phillips before him, went to the airport. If you were to discern the three major planks to Ontario’s current pandemic plan, one is a province-wide lockdown of sorts that still often fails to protect the most vulnerable, but is finally bending the curve; a second is vaccine distribution, and associated complaints.
And the third is, for some reason, the border. Ford often says that people are pouring in. A Ford Twitter post said, “One case coming from abroad is too many.”
“We have to lock down,” said Ford, in a short photo op and press briefing at Pearson International Airport. “We’re asking everyone else to stay home, we’re asking businesses to close. And we have a very porous border right now.”
Within an hour the SimcoeMuskoka Public Health Unit announced 99 more people had tested positive for the more contagious variant B.1.1.7. That was on top of 34 announced the previous day, spread across in Toronto, York Region, Simcoe, Peel, Durham, Ottawa, Middlesex-London and even Kingston. And as the Star’s Kate Allen reports, there are now at least three cases of the variant in Simcoe-Muskoka that are not connected to the Roberta Place long-termcare home, which is the centre of the Barrie outbreak. Which means community transmission is either happening, or it will.
Ontario’s genomic sequencing capabilities have made looking for variants like searching a library with a flashlight; testing capacity is soon being increased exponentially, week by week, but it may already be too late.
And here’s the thing: of course we should be doing better at the borders. The federal government should have long created the kind of isolation hotels Ontario only funded in late December, and mandatory testing, beyond the negative test needed to board a plane to Canada and the supposedly mandatory 14-day quarantine. It’s only Canadian citizens and permanent residents coming in, with some loopholes. But we could and should be sharper there.
Still, international travel cases are a fraction of total cases: travel can be traced to 1.4 per cent of identifiable infections in Canada since the start of the pandemic, and 0.8 per cent in Ontario. The 2.26 per cent positivity rate among incoming travellers in a recent pilot project at Pearson Airport is slightly more than the 1.3 per cent Ontario found in last year’s asymptomatic school testing. Schools are said to be safe.
“Every time I look up in the sky I’m thinking how many cases are coming in,” Ford said recently. “This has to stop.”
It smacked of deflection, misdirection and perhaps even of a classic conservative border panic applied to the pandemic. One case from abroad is too many, insists the government whose strategy was to let the hospitals fill while people went Christmas shopping; we must have mandatory testing at airports, says the government that doesn’t have it in schools, or in workplaces whose definition of essential is elastic, and which still declines to offer a more effective paid sick leave than the insufficient federal version, despite sitting on an estimated $6.4 billion in unspent federal funds.
The variant is terrifying. If COVID-19 has been a fire that spread across the world, the transmissible variants are that fire in hellacious winds. The U.K. variant hasn’t truly started to burn here yet, but it could. Border tests won’t stop that.
“It’s already here,” said Dr. Gerald Evans, the chair of the division of infectious diseases at Queen’s University, and a volunteer member of the province’s science table. “And for many politicians, asking to close the borders sets up the idea of us versus them. It’s an easy, heuristic construct, it's simplistic thinking; it’s not us, it’s them, and if we just keep them out, we'll prevent it. These variants are already here, certainly the U.K. one is.
“What it means is, and I know nobody wants to hear this: we need to maintain lockdown longer. Because if we do that then the variant will not get the foothold it needs in order to create an explosion of numbers.”
That’s the key dynamic going forward: the race between vaccination, which won’t truly take off until April, versus the variant, which could take off straight up at any time, versus a government that is itching to remove restrictions that it never wanted to impose in the first place, and had to be convinced to enact. We have a chance, but this is a dangerous time.
“Our main strategies to battle this are all the same,” said Dr. Andrew Morris, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Toronto, and the medical director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at Sinai-University Health Network. “So that means we need to absolutely put a stop to nonessential businesses, and support them while they’re not working; (add) paid sick leave, the PPE inspections in essential businesses, allowing people to isolate safely. And I would put in there, (limit) regional travel. Interprovincial travel, too.”
How we keep people in Barrie from Toronto is not an easy task, but it may be time to figure that out. The government can try to redirect blame; it’s been a pandemic playbook around here.
But Evans points to the path: keep bending the curve, down as far as we can go, to keep the variant at bay until the vaccines come, which means being truly aggressive now. Evans pointed out that Israel’s mass vaccination campaign has shown real results; that is us in April when the vaccines really come, maybe.
“We should not be happy with 2,000 new cases a day on seven-day average, we shouldn’t even be happy with 1,000,” Evans said. “We need to go way, way down.
“Because then the virus is at a distinct disadvantage, because by late February, early March, if we really knock this virus for a loop, then the vaccines can get flowing, and we introduce that tool, and we can be on top of this thing.”
Ontario needs to hold on. The borders aren’t the problem so much as we are.