Doctors urge Ontario to change course on COVID response

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Vaccination won’t be enough.

That’s the message from six physicians urging Ontario Premier Doug Ford to include preventative and harm-reduction measures in the province’s COVID-19 response — advocating for a move away from eliminating the virus completely and instead developing a framework of long-term management and control.

“It’s really about a more balanced approach,” said Dr. Alanna Golden, one of the letter’s signatories.

“Our go-to since this has started has been to lock down everything and it hasn’t really helped us.”

She said, rather than blanket closures, the province needs to establish a more targeted approach, focusing on workplaces and schools.

The letter, issued on Wednesday, comes a little more than a week after Ontario’s COVID-19 advisory science table released a paper calling out recent measures announced by the province to control the pandemic and outlining six measures they say will reduce transmission and provincial health care.

Wednesday’s letter, Golden said, goes deeper into the science table’s recommendations and identifies areas they feel need more attention — including addressing hospital staffing shortages, point-of-care testing in workplaces, and the cumulative impact of sudden and prolonged school closures.

“A lockdown, when you don’t have a plan to come out of it and nothing changes while you’re in the lockdown, you inevitably go back to the same situation,” she said.

“Inevitably when there’s some variant or other factor, things get back again because no systemic change has been made.

“It’s a band-aid solution.”

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Prolonged school closures, for example, highlight the importance of in-person learning for students, the letter states — despite accepted evidence that COVID poses little threat to school-aged children.

The doctors recommend schools should remain open by default, unless there’s evidence of in-school transmission — which then should be dealt with targeting specific classrooms rather than shuttering entire schools.

School closures also impact the availability of front-line medical workers, Golden said.

“When schools close on a moment’s notice, just like anyone else who’s scrambling to find child care, so are they,” she said.

So much more work needs to be done, Golden said.

“We haven’t even scratched the surface of what we could be doing,” she said.

bpassifiume@postmedia.com
On Twitter: @bryanpassifiume