Ford’s plan tempered by an old Ontario virtue — caution
In Ontario, this is about as good as it gets. Masks stay, not everything opens at once, and the government didn’t inexplicably close the playgrounds. There is good reason to be skeptical of this province on anything pandemic-related; they have, as people say, a history.
But the reopening plan announced by the province Friday afternoon was something closer to cautious. It had all the hallmarks of this government, sure — a reluctance to tackle anti-vaxxers, a sort of wishcasting, a tilt towards the economy, election angling. And weather alone might push Ontario into case growth, soon enough.
But it’s not as bad as it’s been in previous waves. That counts as progress.
“I think we’ll see a substantial rise in cases,” said Dr. Andrew Morris, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Toronto, the medical director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at SinaiUniversity Health Network, and a member of the province’s independent volunteer science table. “I hope I’m wrong. But to their credit, they’re not opening up like crazy, and they are delaying some degree of opening up.”
The basics are that capacity limits are gone in restaurants, gyms and casinos on Monday, as well as other businesses who agree to enforce the vaccine passport system; riskier venues like nightclubs are fully open Nov. 15. Then comes the wishing: a Jan. 17 date to consider whether to lift capacity limits where a vaccine card isn’t required, Feb. 7 to see whether the vaccine passport is eliminated in high-risk settings, and March 28 to consider lifting both masking and vaccine passport requirements.
It’s nonsense to plan that far ahead in a pandemic — as Morris says, “It’s not like COVID follows a calendar” — but worse, the government may be actively undermining the measures that could most effectively end this pandemic. Vaccine mandates are just beginning to spread, and giving finish lines for proof of vaccine is nothing but a carrot for those who refuse to be vaccinated. Vaccination is moving so slowly now; last week Ontario managed a 0.8 per cent rise in fully vaccinated individuals. The last mile is the hardest.
“I’m just hoping … we will be over 90 per cent by then, just, just keep getting vaccinated, you know? But we can’t forever, for the end of time, just ignore the people that aren’t vaccinated,” said Premier Doug Ford. “They’re part of Ontario. Again, we’ll be, I’ll be up here preaching every single day to get vaccinated, but there has to be a time that everyone eventually comes together, our vaccination rate is high enough, and our ICUs are in good shape. So that’s going to be the determining factor.”
The premier has shown sympathy to anti-vaxxers all the way along, for whatever reason. Almost 84 per cent of eligible Ontarians are fully vaccinated; that leaves a long way to go before the desired 90 per cent threshold, especially once five-to-11-year-olds become eligible, too. Giving potential expiration dates for the unvaccinated just seems like an incentive.
“The government is kind of stuck, because it’s about 10-13 per cent of the adult population where they feel you can’t get them immunized unless you tie them down,” Morris said. “And a proportion of them are going to end up in the ICU. So what do you do? You can’t hold all of society hostage because of that number.
“So either you let it rip, and if you let it rip too soon you can have an Eastern Europe scenario where you overwhelm your hospitals and have to go back into lockdown. Or you say, we’re going to take our time, hopefully, slowly, and the unvaccinated will be infected little by little, and it won’t impact our health system so much.
“And it’s not an unreasonable strategy, because we don’t really have a solution. We know that 80 to 90 per cent of hospital beds are occupied by unvaccinated people, and the ICU is going to be the same, and the deaths are going to be the same. So what possibly can you do about that? You just hope our ICU can handle the capacity.”
Maybe it can. Ontario’s independent volunteer science table delivered its latest round of modelling earlier in the day, and projected hospitalization could remain stable even with a rise in contacts to pre-pandemic level, thanks to vaccination. The table also recommended more robust vaccination infrastructure for fiveto-11-year-olds, and continued vaccine certificates; you can add more outreach and education to that, too. Open up too much too fast and you look like Denmark, which has a higher vaccination rate, no masks and a fourth wave. Open it up carefully and Ontario may be able to burble along. The second path sounds better, right?
“We will see, we will find out,” said Dr. Peter Juni, the scientific director of the science table. “First of all, the most important part is to be able to disentangle the effects of these different moves that we’re doing, and we can do that. So something we’re discussing now can be obsolete in three weeks. I believe it will be the data speaking.
“(Chief medical officer of health Dr.) Kieran Moore said clearly, that is when we’ll look at the data; it is not when it will be done. It’s a road map. If the data does look good, we move; if it doesn’t, we wait.”
Let’s hope Moore is steering the ship, and that he don’t have to intervene, but that he can if he has to. If the second wave, the third wave, the tragedies of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and next year’s election haven’t scared Ontario’s goofball gang straight, then maybe nothing will.
If you want to be optimistic we can see the future, or at least a future. Ontario’s case counts are manageable, for the moment. This plan is far from crazy, and Moore isn’t Dr. David Williams. The initial FDA report on Pfizer vaccine for five-to-11-year-olds showed almost no worrisome safety indicators, and a high level of efficacy. That vaccine data is in front of Canadian regulators right now.
The virus isn’t done with this fool species yet. But this pandemic will end, eventually; we just don’t know exactly when, or exactly how. We can, however, hope.