Clarity would be nice

Jeff Green | May 12, 2021

If anyone was surprised when Christine Elliott, the Ontario Minister of Health, indicated on Monday that the “stay at home” order in Ontario will likely be  extended, they shouldn’t have been. 

With case loads, hospitalisation, ICU, and ventilator numbers all just starting to drop after plateauing at the highest level since the start of the pandemic 14 months ago, it was clear that an early re-opening risked a further flare up that could drag well into the summer.

So, true to their pattern, the government is floating a two week extenstion, starting a new round of questions.

Will the order be extended after June 2?  Is there any chance that schools will re-open before the end of June?  Is there any point re-opening schools this close to the summer break? If there is a re-opening in early June, what will it look like?  Will it be a staged re-opening, and if so what will the stages look like?

In the déjà vu all over again department, these are exactly the same questions we were asking exactly 12 months ago. We were not sure what the government plan was at that time, but at that time we also did not know how COVID-19 was transmitted. We were leaving our groceries outside for 24 hours, and washing vegetables down with sanitizer, but we were not wearing masks when we went to the grocery store.

We know a lot more now. In fact, we are all experts. We know the names of all the vaccines. We know what temperature they need to be stored at, how they work, which ones have side effects and what those side effects are. We even know where they are manufactured. We know the names of the COVID-19 variants, and we know how easy they are to contract.

But what we don’t know, and should know, is what the target is, for COVID restrictions to ease, so we can start to go back to our regular lives. It is ok for government officials to say, as they are this week, that it is too soon to re-open on May 20 because it would risk creating a new wave of the virus. It is also acceptable to say we don’t know whether the re-opening will take place on June 2 because we don’t know what the status of the outbreak will be when that decision will have to be made

But what we deserve to know is what the target is for that re-opening. Is it 500 or 1000 cases a day, or is it 1500 cases a week? Is it less than 200 people in the ICU, or is it under 100 people in the ICU.

We know how COVID spreads, we know that risks are greater indoors than outdoors, and we know about vaccination rates and the protection they will bring for all of us. All we are missing is the caseload, hospitalisation and ICU use targets for re-opening. 

As long as we are not being told what the target is, we will be wondering if there is a real target or if the government is not just scrambling from one day to another, gauging economic costs against the information that Public Health Ontario is providing.

A year ago, that is what they were doing, and while it was not ideal and they made mistakes, they can be cut some slack because this was all new to them.

It is not new now. We are tired and unhappy.  There are people defying the orders. There are people who are still living in fear. The vaccination roll out is well underway but we are impatient. We need to know that there is a real target for re-opening and we need to know what that target is. 

That will tell us where we really stand. We have been living in limbo for a long time, and we deserve to know what has to happen, for this all to start coming to an end.