Ontario is back in the fourth wave of the pandemic. The experts announced the news quietly. “We’re definitely out of the honeymoon phase and back in the fourth wave,” science table director Dr. Peter Juni said Monday.
Health Minister Christine Elliott said the news wouldn’t interfere with the provincial government’s ambitious plans to reopen the economy. We will “stay the course,” she said.
Brave words. In fact, the news did interfere. The government announced that it will delay plans to fully open up high-risk activities such as strip clubs and wedding receptions with dancing.
The new, looser rules had been scheduled to come into effect Monday. They now have been postponed until at least mid-December.
In any case, we are not to worry, the experts say. Ontario’s chief medical officer Dr. Kieran Moore says the experts always expected the number of COVID-19 cases would rise as the weather grew colder. In that sense, the strip club postponement was no big deal. Rather, says Moore, it was a decision taken in “an abundance of caution.” Ho hum.
Yet the fact that the fourth wave is back must mean something beyond the effect on weddings and strip clubs. The return calls into question the government’s entire strategy for reopening the economy.
That strategy is predicated on the notion that province-wide lockdowns are never necessary. Under Premier Doug Ford’s plan, any decision to act in the name of public health would be taken at the local level.
This might be fine if COVID were orderly. But it is not.
In the Yukon, for example, vaccination rates are high. Some 85 per cent of those over the age of 12 are fully vaccinated. And yet the territory suffers from the highest rate of COVID-19 infection in Canada.
How can this be? In part, as the Star has reported, it is because the Yukon relied too much on vaccination. “With the Delta variant, relying on high rates of vaccination alone is not enough,” Canadian Medical Association president Katharine Smart told The Star’s Jeremy Nuttall.
Note that Smart didn’t say vaccination is useless. She said that it alone was insufficient, without public health measures such as masking and physical distancing added in.
All of this should be taken into account as Ontario re-enters the fourth wave. Like the Yukon, Ontario fixates on vaccines. It figures that if it could just convince more people to get vaccinated, its problems would be solved. It ignores almost everything else.
As a result, the Ontario government is weirdly unprepared for the return of the fourth wave. It has deliberately decided to divorce itself from the action.
It has signalled that it won’t involve itself in the nitty gritty of public health. Instead, the government is leaving that to local authorities. They alone will decide whether it is necessary to shut down places like gyms for reasons of public health.
The Ontario government risks becoming irrelevant, at a time when relevance is essential.
It’s willing to take a hard line against strip clubs in the name of COVID-19. It’s not willing to do much more.
Article From: The Star
Author: Thomas Walkom
