When it comes to COVID, Tom Walkom writes, half measures won't work:
Either we are fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, or we are not.
There can be no half measures.
Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health, made essentially the same point Tuesday when she ordered the city’s restaurants and bars to continue banning indoor dining for another 28 days.
Yes, the ban was hard on Toronto’s eateries, she said. But evidence showed it was having an effect on the spread of the virus. Why give it up now?
That's the hard lesson behind this ugly situation:
Too often, politicians ignore this. Take, for instance, Toronto’s misguided effort to encourage winter patio dining.
This is based on the fact that the virus is less likely to spread out-of-doors. That in turn leads to the reasonable conclusion that in the warmer seasons patio dining can be safer than in-house dining.
And if it is safe to eat outside in warm weather, shouldn’t it be equally safe when temperatures are cool — particularly if the patios are enclosed and heated?
The short answer is no. If patios are enclosed and heated, they are no longer outside. Put simply, outdoor patios can work in winter only if they are, to all intents and purposes, indoors.
More to the point, an emphasis on encouraging Torontonians to engage in more patio dining contradicts one of de Villa’s central recommendations: to reduce as much as possible all contact with those outside one’s immediate household. As de Villa writes: “That means limiting in-person activities outside the home to essential activities only.”
Businesses need direct government support to stay afloat. In Ontario's budget, there are sweeping plans for tax cuts -- the usual conservative strategy for economic health. But that strategy gets things backward. Non-existent businesses cannot take advantage of government tax cuts.
Projections suggest that there will be 6.000 new cases a day in Ontario by mid-December. We're getting it wrong.
The virus comes first. The economy comes second. We can't split the difference.
