A lockdown without a clear goal

National Post, 24 May 2020

Way back, two months ago, it was not about preventing the coronavirus from spreading altogether, but rendering its spread manageable. If the goal has now changed, it should be made clear.

KINGSTON, ONT. — “Part of our challenge is that the information around COVID-19 changes all the time, and when (it keeps) changing, people are less likely to trust the information, less likely to make decisions based upon it and less likely to behave.”

So says Ontario Medical Association (OMA) president Samantha Hill. The OMA released its advice on reopening this week, which basically amounts to more of the same: doing as little as possible when it comes to going to work, shopping, visiting, etc.

There is a certain restlessness here in Kingston, Ont., where our medical officer of health, Kieran Moore, acknowledged that “it is very difficult to get COVID-19 in our community at present, we have such a low endemic rate.”

Several weeks ago, Moore wrote to Ontario Premier Doug Ford asking that local restrictions be relaxed in light of prevailing conditions, but the premier rejected the option of regions “going rogue.” Wheeling grandma into the hospital after waiting 18 months for a hip replacement is apparently the kind of rogue behaviour that poses an intolerable risk.

Indeed, so low was our local rate of COVID-19 last week — zero deaths, zero hospitalizations, zero ICU beds, zero active cases — that the diagnosis of case No. 62 (in a population of some 200,000 people) over the long weekend was covered in some detail. There had not been a new case since the end of April, so this was something to talk about. There has also been no community transmission here since early April, nearly eight weeks ago.

All of which goes back to what Hill said about confusing signals being sent by our political and public health authorities. There are hundreds of people in our health area — Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington — who are languishing in serious pain, anxious about scheduled surgeries that have been cancelled for two months now. Given that it would be “very difficult” for them to be infected in our hospital — which has no COVID-19 patients — why do the authorities insist that they continue to suffer?

Continue to read at the National Post:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/raymond-j-de-souza-on-covid-19-a-lockdown-without-a-clear-goal?video_autoplay=true