What's more damaging, COVID-19 or the panic over it?
It is difficult to gauge the level of fear here, but our leaders are doing all they can to stoke it.
Randall Denley, Ottawa Citizen
Updated: March 17, 2020
There is always a stark contrast between Florida and Ottawa in March, but never more than now.
Last weekend, I made a homeward-bound stop in the charming northern Florida town of Fernandina Beach, which seemed to have declared a COVID-19 awareness-free-zone. Bars and restaurants were packed, people browsed in shops and there wasn’t a hint of the worldwide virus panic.
One restaurant provided a mixture of oil and sea salt in the bathroom, so everyone could dip their fingers into it for some all-important exfoliation. When my wife suggested that perhaps that wasn’t too smart, given the virus situation, an employee said they were thinking about taking it out, the next day.
Arriving back in Ottawa, we found a city that is largely shut down, the virus the dominant fact of local life. It is difficult to gauge the level of fear here, but our leaders are doing all they can to stoke it.
Are Floridians under-reacting or are we over-reacting, and what is the rational path?
At this point, the panic has had far greater impact than the disease itself. The Canadian economy is going into recession, people’s jobs are threatened and their life savings have been drastically reduced by the stock market collapse, all over an infection that had, as of Tuesday morning, about 440 cases and four deaths.
To put that in context, there have been more than 35,000 cases of the normal, boring influenza A and influenza B in Canada so far this flu season, according to Infection Prevention and Control Canada. Each year, between 500 and 1,500 people die from these types of influenza, yet most Canadians can’t even be bothered to get a flu shot.
Flu of any type can be serious for the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, but for all others the chance of dying from the new COVID-19 is remarkably low. And yet, most governments are reacting as if it were the bubonic plague.
Their policy approach is well-intentioned. No one wants see people die of disease and people have been conditioned to expect that when there is a problem, government must have a solution. That belief will be sorely tested by COVID-19.
Governments’ main tool is to shut down all non-essential activity for two weeks in the hope that the rate of increase in new cases will flatten out or even decline. It might well do, but then what? We can’t ask people to stay home indefinitely, and it’s not realistic to expect that we can turn our country into a virus-free environment.
Canada has closed its borders, with the rather large exception of allowing in up to 330 million Americans. Some have wondered why we didn’t bar them, too. The simple answer is that we can’t, if we still hope to have food and an economy. That leaves us vulnerable to America’s patchwork response to COVID-19, but it’s unavoidable.
Sure, we can ask Canadians to self-isolate for 14 days when returning from the U.S., but what’s the point? Infection rates are no higher there than they are here and Americans flow into Canada every day.
The most pressing reason to attempt to control the infection rate is the shocking, but not surprising, state of Ontario’s health care system. Americans have expressed some concern because their hospital occupancy rate is 65 per cent. In Ottawa, we are routinely at full capacity and beyond. If there is one problem governments need to fix, this is it. We are poorly positioned to handle any big disease outbreak. COVID-19 ought to be a wake-up call on that.
Sometime soon, Canadians and their governments will need to step back and ask if our attempts to contain COVID-19 are effective or sustainable. The answer is unlikely to be encouraging.
Randall Denley is an Ottawa political commentator and author. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com
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