Bruce Arthur: Ontario already had a losing strategy in fighting the pandemic. Doug Ford just made it a lot worse

At least you’ll remember when Ontario gave up. Or maybe not, since it was timed for the day of the attention-sucking American election. Maybe that was a coincidence: the province set the new bar for COVID-19 restrictions sky-high.

But sources indicate this plan was weeks in the making, so probably not. Seven months into the pandemic Ontario praised itself for posting clear COVID-19 restriction speed limits. But they set the speed limit everywhere at 200 miles per hour, and our police force isn’t fast enough to keep up. Drive safe, everyone.

“This is throwing in the towel,” said one source familiar with the process of setting new thresholds.

“This gives us a tool that we can really react and prevent the spread when we see it going into certain regions,” said the premier, on the day he raised the bar on what constitutes spread in certain regions. “Before … everyone would start reacting when we saw the numbers going through the roof,” said Doug Ford, on the day he moved up the roof.

Ford seemed to say we are doing better per capita than Manitoba and Alberta and Quebec and the United States, so why not try to catch them?

“This is going to be very ugly,” 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. “We’re following the European approach here. The very first question that should be asked is in the presence of ongoing growth, how can you in any way justify loosening measures? That makes absolutely zero sense. The one thing you shouldn’t do when you’ve got a losing strategy is take on a worse strategy. Which is what they’re going to do.”

The new dashboard is colour-coded: green is great, yellow is less great, orange is worrisome, and red is what used to be Stage 2, or what Toronto, Ottawa, Peel and York are in. But now, to move a jurisdiction back from what used to be Stage 3 to Stage 2 — to close indoor dining, bars and restaurants, gyms, cinemas, etcetera — you would need 100 cases per 100,000 people per week, plus a 10 per cent positivity rate, plus several other factors, including hospitals and public health at risk of being overwhelmed.

To put the thresholds in perspective, the Star’s Ed Tubb notes two regions have gone over 100 per 100,000 per week in the entire pandemic — Haldimand-Norfolk in June, and Peel this week. Since the province ramped up testing in the spring no region has even come close to 10 per cent positivity. Ten per cent is where by not implementing restrictions until it was too late, and their hospital system is now on the verge of being overwhelmed.

So what data led to this? Ford said, weakly, “We see a little bit of a flattening. We see what’s happening in Ottawa.” Ottawa’s case counts fell in October, and have been flat over the past week.

Under this plan, nothing changes for bars, restaurants, sports and recreational facilities, meeting and event spaces, retail, personal care services, casinos, bingo halls, gaming establishments, cinemas, or performing arts facilities until the system tips from orange to red; they continue to operate with new restrictions. And bars, restaurants, casinos and gyms still have indoor service in red.

In other words, this is designed not to intervene in the economy until it’s already too late, and even then, the province reserves wiggle room, saying “decisions about moving to new measures will require overall risk assessment by the government.” Meanwhile, Ontario’s seven-day average is rising, test positivity is rising, raw testing numbers are falling, public health communication is poor, our test-trace-isolate architecture can barely handle what’s happening now in some regions, and winter’s moving in.

Look, lockdowns produce real harm, but letting the virus overrun society produces more. Three weeks ago the province’s own science table wrote, “In regions with high transmission, we therefore recommend restricting indoor activities (such as) indoor dining, banquet halls, gyms, bars, clubs and casinos.” It recommended that “additional public health measures (be) introduced if there are more than 25 new (COVID-19) infections per 100,000 people per week,” because below that, “the public health benefit of additional restrictions on indoor venues may not outweigh the consequences.”

So Ontario redefined what constituted high transmission. York, Peel and Ottawa exit Stage 2 this weekend; Toronto, which is fighting this hellaciously under the surface, is scheduled for a week after that, as if the virus respects dates.

“It’s like public health is treading water, and the premier is pushing their heads down,’” said Dr. Michael Warner, head of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital in East York. “It’s government that makes the decisions on public health, and not public health.”

Repellently, it was framed as personal responsibility. “We’re asking the public to be even more engaged on your personal risk assessment, so that you’re going to have to assess each of your settings, knowing what is there and what is in place,” said Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health. “What are you going to do, as an individual, as a family, as with your children or loved ones, to protect your loved ones? Because we want to put that decision-making over to you.”

“They’re relying on people to understand their own risk threshold, and that’s not working well, and what you’re saying now, we’re going to open up, and the perception is things are safe,” says epidemiologist Dr. Nitin Mohan, who teaches public and global health at Western University, and cofounded ETIO, a public health consulting firm. “Essentially, you’re inviting a disaster.”

Meanwhile, the people who were going to have trouble protecting themselves now have less of a chance to protect themselves. This government and contact tracing and long-term-care staffing in the summer, failed to intervene when case counts started to climb in early September, and has now decided to move the goalposts as far towards the horizon as they dare.

Maybe the slow creep of the virus to older Ontarians, and into long-term-care homes, will somehow stop. Maybe bars and restaurants and businesses don’t promote the spread of the virus as much as the world thinks. Maybe the hospitals won’t tip over. Maybe a provincial government that just chucked all its previous strategy in the name of financial health is nimble and brave enough to keep the virus that has overrun the world at bay. Maybe Ontario is special, or gets lucky. I truly hope so.

But if not, this government and its advisers own it. Because they were warned, and here we go.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: