Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Kieran Moore came out of hiding on Monday, April 11 and made his first public statement in more than a month.
Moore broke his very noticeable silence a day before the Ottawa-Carleton District Public School Board planned to consider a motion to reimpose a mask requirement on all staff and students – in direct defiance of Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford.
In March, Ford declared masks were no longer required anywhere, except for health and long-term care facilities, congregate settings such as shelters, and public transit.
The premier then went even further.
Channeling such sterling pandemic leaders as the governors of Florida and Texas, Ford explicitly forbade school boards and local governments from instituting their own masking requirements. One school board in Hamilton chose to defy the premier – but only temporarily.
Moore’s sudden reappearance was designed to head off the many educational and municipal officials who are now alarmed by the big spike in COVID cases and want to take action.
Another leading medical expert, Dr. Peter Jüni, who is still (for another couple of months) scientific director of Ontario’s COVID-19 science advisory table, reports that Ontario now has 100,000 to 120,000 new COVID cases a day.
Expert opinion says we need mandatory masking
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson has added his voice to those calling for restoration of the mask mandate in all indoor public places. And his is only the latest one.
Prominent medical experts, such as University of Toronto infectious disease specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch, have strongly urged the Ontario and other provincial governments to reimpose the requirement to wear a mask in all public indoor places.
Those places include shopping malls, grocery stores, pet shops, sports arenas, concert halls, barber shops, you name it.
Bogoch and other experts do not suggest closing any businesses, or even restricting their capacity. They just want us all to adopt the virtually no-cost measure of universal mask wearing.
Public Health Ontario (PHO) is an arm’s-length public organization, independent of politicians. It has studied the increase in COVID cases and in a report dated April 5, 2022 concludes the big surge in cases can be attributed to the end of obligatory masking. PHO suggests the province should bring the mask mandate back:
“Masking with high-quality masks (i.e., good fit and filtration) at a population level is a public health measure that can be effective at reducing transmission, while enabling community settings and activities to continue functioning […] Optimizing layers of prevention in K-12 schools, including temporary re-implementation of masking requirements indoors and improved air quality can reduce the risk of in-school transmission and related disruption for students, families and educational settings.”
Dr. Kieran Moore does not act at arm’s length. He is an official of the Ontario Ministry of Health, reporting to Minister Christine Elliott. Less than a week ago, in response to reporters’ questions about the burgeoning COVID case count, the minister dismissively replied, “We have to learn to live with the virus.”
At his Monday public appearance Moore said he will recommend the government extend the current mask mandate in high-risk settings, such as long-term care facilities, for another month or so. That mandate is set to expire at the end of April.
Moore points out that the sixth wave we are now experiencing will not likely reach its expected high peak – which could mean more than 600 cases in Ontario’s intensive care units – until mid-May.
We’ll find out soon if the good doctor can convince Doug Ford, Christine Elliott and company to go along. These days they have politics, not health, foremost on their minds.
But Moore gives thumbs down to restoring mask requirements anywhere other than those high-risk locations.
In direct contradiction to Public Health Ontario’s experts and others such as Ottawa’s Medical Officer of Health Dr. Vera Etches, Moore emphatically refuses to recommend restoring masks for schools. It boggles the mind, but he does not even recommend masks for crowded school buses.
Moore will only go so far as to encourage all Ontarians to voluntarily wear masks. That, it seems, is as much as his Conservative political bosses will tolerate from him.
At his news conference, Moore put greatest emphasis on vaccination. He is banking on jabs in arms as the panacea to save Ontario’s health system from looming disaster.
Moore encourages all Ontarians to not only get the basic two doses, but to book their boosters as well – and, if they qualify, their second boosters, or fourth doses.
As it stands now, those fourth doses are only available to immune-compromised and particularly vulnerable Ontarians and those over the age of 60.
Moore also points to the fact that Ontario has acquired 40,000 doses of an effective treatment for COVID, the anti-viral drug Paxlovid. That drug could save some very sick people’s lives. But the supply is not unlimited and provincial authorities will continue to impose stringent conditions to qualify for Paxlovid.
Don’t count on vaccines if virus spreads massively
A few days before Moore spoke, a new study appeared in a U.S.-based publication which demolishes the notion that we can blithely allow COVID to spread like wildfire in the population as long as we are protected by vaccines.
The study bears a scary subtitle: “The unmitigated downside risks of widespread SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] transmission.”
The study’s authors explain:
“The [general] public (and public health authorities) have taken ‘learning to live with this disease’ as an inevitable consequence of the ineffectiveness of measures to reduce widespread transmission. This frames a false dichotomy between eliminating SARS-CoV-2 and permitting its rampant spread. While it is relatively unrealistic to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 in the short term, reducing transmission is a necessary first step in managing the public health burden of this disease [emphasis added].”
Reducing transmission means respecting social distance practices, installing high-quality ventilation in public places, testing and acting on the test results, and, the simplest and cheapest measure of them all: wearing well-fitting, medical-grade masks indoors.
The report argues the prevailing attitude toward COVID, at one and the same time defeatist and indifferent to the significant threat the virus still poses, is dangerous.
The authors compare COVID to other difficult-to-eliminate diseases such as influenza and malaria.
Our response to those other, often-fatal scourges has not been to do nothing and assume entire populations will miraculously acquire immunity. To the contrary, those potentially deadly diseases “have been the subject of long-term, globally coordinated efforts at disease suppression.”
The report cites a disease which was once a major and persistent health threat in Western countries, tuberculosis.
“Accepting tuberculosis is difficult to eliminate,” the report argues, “is not synonymous with encouraging its unrestrained spread across the globe.”
And yet, encouraging – or, at least, tolerating – COVID’s unrestrained spread is what Doug Ford’s and many other governments are doing right now.
The new report’s authors warn of the extreme rapidity with which new waves of COVID can spread. They talk about the infection-fatality ratio – meaning how many will die as a proportion of how many are infected. And they point out COVID can build to high levels in the population before it is possible to accurately calculate the ratio.
The infection-fatality ratio of the currently prevalent Omicron variant appears to be low. But the report’s scientific data indicate “such an outcome is not guaranteed in the future.”
As the report puts it, chillingly:
“In a future scenario where an Omicron-like variant sweeps quickly through the global population, but this time with a catastrophically high infection-fatality ratio [emphasis added], the unanticipated, lagging wave of death will be difficult to avoid after the fact of widespread infection.”
Dr. Kieran Moore and his Ontario Conservative overlords, with their eyes cast anxiously toward an election less than two months away on June 2, would be well advised to take note.
April 13, 2022: Editor’s note, update – On Tuesday evening, April 12, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) voted 8 to 1, with three abstentions, to restore a mask mandate for all students and staff. The OCDSB is the largest board in Ottawa. It has over 70,000 students and 9,000 staff.
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