In a time of pandemic and recession, a nation that tends to pride itself on doing relatively well, all things considered, under the circumstances, has to aim much higher. Canada needs the public health equivalent of Own the Podium.
At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, Canada became the first host nation to fail to win a gold medal. It repeated the feat 12 years later, in Calgary. After that, the country’s amateur sports program took a hard look at itself. A generation later, in Vancouver in 2010, Canadian athletes won 14 gold medals – a record for most first-place finishes, ever, by any country at a Winter Olympics.
Canada today has to shoot for something similar, only on a much more important field.
Round 2 against COVID-19 begins now. Canada’s goal for the coming months should be to make this country the world leader at returning to a high level of economic activity, while maintaining a low level of COVID-19. Getting Canada back on its feet, while keeping the pandemic on the floor, will not be easy, but it is possible. A new study published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal suggests how.
Researchers with the Public Health Agency of Canada modelled four different “interventions” aimed at preventing new waves of infections. They concluded that, if Canadians continue to practise prudent physical distancing, and if governments simultaneously up their game on testing and contact tracing, it should be possible to keep infection levels low.
Studies like these are always to some extent guesstimates, since what is being modelled – millions of people having billions of interactions – is so exceptionally complex. What’s more, as the researchers note, “key epidemiologic characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 remain unknown.”
Nevertheless, based on what is known, the researchers estimate that if Canada were to do nothing, 64.6 per cent of Canadians would become infected with COVID-19 over the next year and a half. If Canadians continue to practise physical distancing to the same degree as today, and if governments continue to test, contract trace and isolate cases with the same degree of success as now, then the spread of the virus’ will be reduced, but only slightly.
However, the study says that, if governments up their game, the expected infection rate will plummet.
Canadian public health authorities currently detect and isolate only 20 per cent of people infected with COVID-19, according to the researchers, and are only able to track down 50 per cent of those people they came into contact with. That’s because many infected people have mild symptoms or none, and they consequently never know that they are infected. Our testing and contact-tracing systems are only seeing – and quarantining – the tip of the iceberg.
But what if they saw more? The study estimated what would happen if public health authorities were able to consistently identify 50 per cent of the infected, and track down 100 per cent of their contacts. With “enhanced case detection and contact tracing,” the expected infection rate would fall to just 0.4 per cent of Canadians.
And if better gumshoe sleuthing by public-health authorities were paired with millions of individual Canadians continuing to practise physical distancing, the projected infection rate falls to just 0.2 per cent.
Again, this is just a model; these predictions come with no money-back guarantees. Nevertheless, they represent a reasonable take on the current state of an evolving understanding of how best to prevent the spread of this virus.
The study suggests that Canadians must still do their part, by keeping their distance, wearing masks (the impact of which is not considered by this study), and not getting together in large groups.
But beyond that, returning life to something close to normal, without reinvigorating the virus, is up to governments. They’ve got to make the right choices, and among those is devoting sufficient money, intelligence and obsessive attention to detail to enhancing the nation’s capacity for testing and contact tracing.
If public-health authorities do not up their game, by finding and isolating a much higher share of future COVID-19 cases and contacts, then the study suggests that the health of the economy, and of Canadians, will again be in jeopardy.
Unless and until there is a vaccine, beating COVID-19 will not be about one big thing. It will be about many little things, diligently repeated, millions of times.
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