Practise patience as shots ramp up
It doesn’t happen often (or ever) that the news makes you cry in a good way. But it happened for me Monday, when I read the following announcement from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States:
“Fully vaccinated people can visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing.”
They may also “visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing.”
In translation: fully vaccinated people can have a life.
Now for a reason to cry not in a good way: this announcement comes from the United States, a nation whose vaccine rollout is outpacing our own — a nation in which you probably know more than a few young healthy people who have already been vaccinated. (Meanwhile, your grandmother with diabetes is still waiting her shot north of the border.)
Unfortunately, in Toronto, we are not at the stage in the pandemic where we can contemplate putting our dining rooms to use.
We’re at the stage, rather, of waiting for the vaccine supply to roll in while simultaneously reopening the economy. It’s a strange and scary place to be, one in which a vaccinated future is within sight, but so is an “open” sign at Yorkdale mall.
Toronto entered the grey zone on Monday, a designation that allows, among other things, non-essential retail to open indoors at limited capacity and 10 person limits for indoor or outdoor religious services, including weddings and funerals.
The city’s medical officer of health, Dr. Eileen de Villa, summed up this strange and scary moment succinctly in a press conference on Monday afternoon. “These are exciting and promising times with vaccine supply on the increase,” Dr. de Villa said, “but please don’t mistake progress for completion. We have a ways to go yet, and I want to remind you if we give COVID-19 an inch it will take a mile. It will take any opportunity to establish itself and spread.
“So I have to ask you for more patience while we get millions of people vaccinated in Toronto. While I understand the weariness, I also understand the reality. COVID-19 has not gone away.”
No, it hasn’t. In addition to reporting roughly 600 new cases of the virus in Toronto Monday, de Villa reported that “variants of concern” are on the rise in the city.
“Two thousand and four have screened positive for mutations and are expected to be confirmed as variants of concern in Toronto,” she said. “One week ago, that number was 1,179. So we have become perilously close to almost doubling that count within a week.”
The good news is we’re also getting close to being vaccinated. Toronto’s COVID-19 incident commander Matthew Pegg sounded like an auctioneer at Monday’s press conference announcing the incoming dose numbers: “March 15: 17,500 doses, March 22: 98,920 doses, March 29: 174,200 doses.”
According to Toronto Board of Health chair Joe Cressy, writing on Twitter Monday, “Today we confirmed that based on vaccine supply, our 9 City of Toronto mass immunization clinics will have the capacity to administer nearly 1 million doses/month. This is in addition to the 350+ clinics planned by hospital, community, & pharmacy partners.”
Last week, Cressy told me that the city is deploying special neighbourhood ambassadors to fight vaccine hesitancy in communities where people may not want the vaccine or know how to access it.
In other words, all the pieces to end this thing are either in place or arriving soon. The only big question mark remaining is us and how we behave in the grey zone. Will we mistake progress for completion as de Villa fears or will we remain vigilant in our efforts to stop the spread of the virus, particularly the variants of concern?
“A virus that isn’t being transmitted is a virus that doesn’t get the opportunity to mutate,” de Villa said Monday.
Of course, it would help if our leaders did everything in their power to deprive the virus of that opportunity. For example, a provincial paid sick leave program would be an excellent start.
But in the absence of smart policy, it’s up to the people to be cautious until mass vaccination occurs. This isn’t over yet. But I suspect it’ll be over sooner if we can resist the urge to take advantage of our new privileges in the grey zone. I promise you: The mall isn’t going anywhere.