Ontario, like many other jurisdictions around the world, was caught off-guard by CoViD-19. As soon as the cases and then the deaths mounted, policy frameworks were established to shut down the economy and lockdown the mobility of Ontarians. Emphasis was placed on the hotbeds of the pandemic: long term care facilities.
For society as a whole, best practices, given the evidence, were soon enacted. First, came the social distancing and handwashing, then the restrictions on size of social bubbles and the use of face masks mainly for indoor gatherings. All of this has been at a cost of our collective mental health. We are, after all, social animals. Soon after the ‘safety-first’ measures were implemented, debates surfaced for a quickened versus gradual re-opening of societies. Calls for widespread testing for the virus, and antibodies to it, were made to scope out the context-dependent epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 and to get intel on whether re-opening of schools, businesses, and government offices was warranted. But such tests are known to be problematic due to false negative and false positive rates, and also because the numbers of coronavirus cases uncovered relates to testing effort. More testing necessarily means more cases revealed, which is a problem if uncorrected case numbers are used to project a disease’s trajectory. Below, we plot the 2764 tragic deaths of Ontarians from CoViD-19 as previous 2-week rolling totals (each day from the epidemic’s start up to and including 27th July). We mark the initial stages of Ontario re-opening – differences in regional re-open start dates were mandated by the government. The graph shows a current smouldering of infections and a higher background rate of mortality than seen at the epidemic’s start, suggesting it is too soon to relax guards. Remarkably, the first peak of mortality has passed, and decisions to gradually re-open Ontario were coincident with an ever-dwindling mortality. Trends like these can be used as evidence supporting decisions to cautiously rejig society. The smoothed mortality totals are less subject to the vagaries of sampling compared to case rates, but they might also be subject to disparities in realized health care capacity or reporting, when compared between jurisdictions.
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