Ontario is set for its stage three reopening come Friday. Yippee. I think.
Movie theatres, nightclubs, gyms, museums, restaurants and other places of business will be able to reopen with certain restrictions. But it’s difficult to escape from the feeling that we’re tempting fate – or the coronavirus – yet again. Maybe it’s all the rain.
As much as we all want to celebrate the end of a pandemic that’s completely altered our existence, we’re not actually out of the woods yet – or is it the deep, dark jungle that we’re emerging from? Only, you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the sense of normalcy that prevails on the street.
Most Canadians have seemingly thrown caution to the wind now that more than 40 per cent of us are fully vaccinated and another 75 per cent have at least one shot. We feel protected even while the more contagious and virulent Delta strain of the virus has recently entered the picture.
Epidemiologists suggest we’ll be running out of Greek letters of the alphabet to name newer strains as the virus continues to mutate. But the Delta variant is 1.5 times more contagious than its predecessors. It’s also deadlier. It can sidestep immunities in those who have been vaxxed only once. People who have been fully vaccinated have died from the variant in the UK. There, the Delta variant is surging, threatening to mess with the UK’s reopening plans. The UK’s experience has been a bellwether for Ontario. It should now be a warning to us.
While we’re seeing fewer new cases of coronavirus than pre-lockdown, the number of people dying from the virus proportionately speaking is just as high or higher than it was when cases were peaking.
Some number to think about: there have been more deaths from COVID in people that have been fully vaccinated than deaths from SARS. Between May and June, 99 per cent of new COVID cases in Ontario were among people who were not fully vaccinated. There are also more cases in younger age groups, notes Thomas Tenkate, associate professor of Ryerson University’s School of Occupational and Public Health, as the Delta variant slowly takes over.
Science tells us that masking and physical distancing is still something we all need to think about when outside our normal social circles.
While vaccinations have been a godsend, we’re still nowhere near the number of vaccinated to reach the herd immunity required to stave off further attacks. We need to get vaccine uptake to 90 per cent.
More than 60 per cent of Toronto adults are fully vaxxed, but vaccine hesitancy is still an issue in some Toronto communities. The city set up some 20 pop-up clinics in a number of neighbourhoods in the northwest section of the city this weekend. They have some of the lowest overall vaccination rates in the city; only 36 per cent are fully vaxxed and 59 per cent have received at least one.
That’s why immunologists continue to call for increased testing and tracing, including in workplaces with public-facing staff. Others say it’s time for a “national conversation” to reach those reluctant to get vaccinated.
“We are at a pivot point,” says Brock associate professor of immunology Adam MacNeil.
He suggests we’ll need “boots on the ground” in the form of more pop-up clinics, door-to-door canvassing and physicians reaching out to their patients to get to the vaccine-hesitant and reach herd immunity in Canada.
Time is getting short as kids will be returning to school for in-person learning in only a few weeks, and for those under 12, there is no vaccine yet, turning them into perfect vectors once again to spread the disease come fall.
When do we call the pandemic over? Are we going to have to physical distance forever?
Tenkate suggests we’ll be managing outbreaks for some time. Best not to ditch the mask just yet.
