Ontario abandoning health rules despite scientific advice

Well, go figure. Ontario, in the run up to an election later this summer, is pressing ahead with dismantling all COVID restrictions including masking, despite clear advice from health authorities that such a move is premature, to say the least.

Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Kieran Moore, announced yesterday that Ontario's remaining mask mandate will be lifted on March 21st and isolation rules for most people with recent exposure to the virus will be lifted, even though Ontario's independent COVID-19 Science Advisory Table has strongly warned against it. Premier Ford sees other provinces opening up further and faster than Ontario, and does not want his electorate to see him lagging.

Gone is any pretence of waiting a reasonable period to see how specific changes go and what effect they have on cases and hospitalizations. The current schedule changes each week, so we we will have no concept of which changes have which effects. Not that we are testing worth a damn anyway these days...

Dr. Moore is now firmly under the thumb of Ford and his Conservative caucus, and has relinquished all show of "following the science", just as Dr. David Williams did before him. Just weeks after abandoning vaccine certificates and doing away with distancing rules and capacity limits, the Science Table states clearly that we do not know the effects of these changes, and we should not be abandoning the easy and effective public health measure of masking in indoor settings (particularly in schools) until we do. Nothing daunted, Ford and Moore are pressing ahead regardless, much to the surprise of the Science Table. 

Hospitals, schools organizations and health academics are all in agreement that relaxing public health measures so quickly is ill-advised, and that re-instating such rules later will be "very difficult" (a gross understatement). Other jurisdictions have seen substantial increases in COVID cases loads and hospitalizations after removing mask mandates and, with a new sub-variant of Omicron ravaging Europe, it is only a matter of time before Ontario too will be in its grip. Now is absolutely not the time to be relaxing health measures.