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So about a week and a half ago I started calling people, really smart people, and asking them a pretty simple question: How ready is Ontario to reopen? https://nationalpost.com/news/lockdown-and-release-how-ontarios-imperfect-wall-against-covid-19-is-about-to-be-tested
What I was surprised at was how often, and on how many metrics, I heard, from some of the top public health researchers, infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists in the province: some version of: "Boy, would I love to know that too."
Pretty much everyone agrees on what needs to happen for a safe(ish) reopening. You need case growth to be small, under control and shrinking, and you need the tools to track new outbreaks and squash them, quickly, before they bloom and spread.
What are those tools? Say them with me, because I know you've heard them before: testing, contact tracing and supported isolation.
So how are we doing? Well, that's complicated. And outside of maybe some top people in Health Ministry and Public Health Ontario, I'm not sure anyone can really say with much certainty.
On contact tracing specifically, top experts kept literally laughing at me when I asked them how it was going. "If you find out, let me know," @BogochIsaac told me. And he wasn't the only one.
On testing, the raw numbers are public, but the strategy remains really opaque and very disputed. We aren't testing asymptomatic contacts of confirmed cases, for one thing, and there is no public plan right now for widespread surveillance testing as the province opens up.
These are not things I knew anything about two months ago. Let's make that clear. But the experts I talked to, the people who knew about and thought about all of this, back when most of us thought PPE was an obscure hockey stat, are worried this kind of thing.
And more than that, they're frustrated, in many cases, and how hard it's been to dig out basic information on many of these issues from the province.
So how ready are we? I still can't say with any kind of certainty that I have a great answer. The story will tell you more. But right now, in a lot of ways, we're acting on faith: in the province, and public health. https://nationalpost.com/news/lockdown-and-release-how-ontarios-imperfect-wall-against-covid-19-is-about-to-be-tested
