It’s time to shut it down.
Canada needs to embrace social distancing.
That means closing down schools (from daycares through to universities) temporarily, restricting access to hospitals and nursing homes, pulling the plug on mass gatherings such as sporting events, curtailing all non-essential travel and urging companies to have their employees work at home.
This may seem extreme for a country that has only about 100 confirmed cases to date, but we can no longer stop this pandemic illness, just slow it down.
Public health officials in Canada have embraced a calm, measured response to coronavirus. That has served us well and must continue.
Social distancing means limiting our public interactions. It doesn’t mean mass quarantine, shutting down our borders and other draconian measures.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is spread through airborne droplets by coughing or sneezing, through touching a surface those droplets have touched, or through personal contact with infected people.
Wash your hands frequently and thoroughly
The World Health Organization recommends regular hand-washing and physical distancing – that is, keeping at least two metres from someone with a cough. If you have to cough or sneeze, do it into your sleeve or a tissue, not your hands. Avoid touching your eyes, mouth or nose if you can.
The CDC says to frequently clean dirty surfaces with soap and water before disinfecting them.
- If you show symptoms of COVID-19, seek medical attention and do what your health-care provider recommends. That may include staying home from work or school and getting lots of rest until the symptoms go away.
COVID-19 is much more serious for older adults. As a precaution, older adults should continue frequent and thorough hand-washing, and avoid exposure to people with respiratory symptoms.
Check the WHO’s information page for more details on the virus, and The Globe and Mail’s guide of what health officials say is helpful for the public to do or not do about it.
Need more answers? Email audience@globeandmail.com
Canada is a democracy. We must respect individual rights, but also remind citizens of their collective responsibilities.
There is a broad range of opinions on coronavirus from “this is no big deal” to “this is the end of the world as we know it.”
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. But this is a pandemic and we must err on the side of caution.
As an open society, we must take our coronavirus response lessons from South Korea, not China – both countries that have reined in their outbreaks using markedly different approaches.
South Korea, hit early and hard by coronavirus, has responded by embracing voluntary social distancing, testing massively, making public health communication a priority, cleaning public spaces like there is no tomorrow and investing in a broad range of measures to blunt the economic impacts of the outbreak.
The spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 continues, with more cases diagnosed in Canada. The Globe offers the dos and don'ts to help slow or stop the spread of the virus in your community.
The Globe and Mail
That is exactly what Canada needs to do – move from a wait-and-see approach to a roll-up-our-sleeves and act approach.
In recent days, a singularly important change has happened: New cases in Canada are no longer exclusively in people who travelled to high-risk countries such as China and Iran.
Coronavirus is now spreading in the community, at conferences, in nursing homes and likely many other places we will learn about in the coming days.
People are now being infected with COVID-19 and we don’t know the source of infection. That means it is present in the community in significant numbers.
We have to pro-actively seek out cases with greatly expanded testing, up to and including at-home and drive-thru testing (a South Korean innovation), to keep people from going to the emergency room.
We also need thoughtful policies to support Canadians harmed by social distancing, from streamlined employment insurance to support for parents, including emergency daycare for people working in essential services. The $1-billion package from the federal government announced Wednesday is just a start.
The way the virus has been galloping around the world, we knew the tipping point was coming. It was not a question of whether the strategy was going to change, but when.
The time is now. The time has arrived to shift from trying to contain spread to mitigating the harm from inevitable spread.
There is a saying in infectious disease circles that once you know where a virus is, it has already moved on. With coronavirus in the community – in B.C., Ontario and in alarming numbers in that big country just to the south of us – we can’t stop the spread anymore. But we can slow it.
You will hear the term “flattening the curve” a lot in the coming days. Imagine you are going to climb a mountain: You can scale abruptly or you can do a long, slow climb to arrive at the same point. For a health system dealing with coronavirus – especially a chronically overcrowded one such as Canada’s – dealing with a long, slow rise in cases is much easier than an abrupt increase.
That’s why social distancing matters.
EFFectiveness OF SOCIAL distancing
during pandemics
The authors of a study, published in Emerging
Infectious Diseases, conducted a systematic
review of the effectiveness of six social-dis-
tancing measures during past flu pandemics.
They concluded that early implementation
delayed the peak in the number of infections,
relieving the burden on health-care systems by
spreading out the cases over a longer period
of time.
Without measures
With measures
Number of infections
Delaying the
peak of infections
reduces the burden
on health-care systems
Capacity of
health-care system
Cases are spread out
over longer period
Time since first case identified
JOHN SOPINSKI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE:
fondazione gimbe (via m.w. fong et al, cdc,
emerging infectious diseases)
EFFectiveness OF SOCIAL distancing
during pandemics
The authors of a study, published in Emerging Infectious
Diseases, conducted a systematic review of the effective
ness of six social-distancing measures during past flu
pandemics. They concluded that early implementation
delayed the peak in the number of infections, relieving
the burden on health-care systems by spreading out the
cases over a longer period of time.
Without measures
With measures
Delaying the
peak of infections
reduces the burden
on health-care systems
Number of infections
Capacity of health-care system
Cases are spread out
over longer time period
Time since first case identified
JOHN SOPINSKI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: fondazione
gimbe (via m.w. fong et al, cdc, emerging
infectious diseases)
EFFectiveness OF SOCIAL distancing during pandemics
The authors of a study, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, conducted
a systematic review of the effectiveness of six social-distancing measures during past flu pan-
demics. They concluded that early implementation delayed the peak in the number of infec-
tions, relieving the burden on health-care systems by spreading out the cases over a longer
period of time.
Without measures
With measures
Delaying the
peak of infections
reduces the burden
on health-care systems
Number of infections
Capacity of healthcare system
Cases are spread out
over longer time period
Time since first case identified
JOHN SOPINSKI/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: fondazione gimbe
(via m.w. fong et al, cdc, emerging infectious diseases)
Disrupting everyday life for a theoretical risk is a hard sell. But we can’t afford to become Italy, a country that was slow to act and is now paying a massive price, with more than 10,000 cases, 600 deaths and a collapsing economy.
Italy has an excellent health-care system and yet COVID-19 has hit it “like a bomb” according to a senior official, a grim reality that should serve as a cautionary tale for Canadian health officials.
The time to prepare for the worst is now.
We need to, in the immortal, if clichéd, words of hockey great Wayne Gretzky, “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”
André Picard