In Newfoundland and Labrador, politicians and public health bureaucrats are dealing more with a pandemic of fear than of disease. It is one they helped create. It is one they sustain in the way they talk and act. Let us hope that Monday’s news conference is not another of their super-spreader events.
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Former
Premier Dwight Ball tweeted a message from the town council Saturday evening
(right).
There have
been five
new cases of COVID-19 in western Newfoundland, presumably Deer Lake. They are all in the same household as the
initial case, who brought the illness back from outside the province where he
works.
The people of Deer Lake are afraid. In that fear, they are like so many people across Newfoundland and Labrador. Their fear is not, as one might expect, the healthy respect of people who know a deadly disease when they see it. Rather, their fear – like all fear - is borne of ignorance and suckled by misinformation, the most pernicious form of which comes from the provincial government on a steady basis.
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| The Deer Lake Declaration (continued below) |
Newfoundland
and Labrador continues to have the highest level of restrictions for a province
that has never had community transmission of COVID-19. Each of the cases that have cropped up since
May have been quickly identified, isolated, and, through effective contact
tracing, cut off from any prospect of spread.
They have all come – with perhaps one or two exceptions – from locals
who have brought the illness back with them from a work-related trip to
Ontario, Saskatchewan, or Alberta.
Pedants will note the cases that came from one traveler from Africa or
the Russian contract worker but those are the except rather than the rule.
What those
pedants will ignore is that since March tens of thousands of people have
traveled back and forth between Newfoundland and Labrador and some point in
North America. Usually, this has been an
area like Ontario, where the disease has continued to wax and wane since the
early part of the year. Tens of
thousands of travelers and thus far only a handful of cases. There are 21 active cases as of 22 November 2020. There have been 58 new cases since the first
of June. The recent uptick in local cases is tied to the increase in cases in
other provinces.
We can
actually put some firmer numbers on this to put in perspective. In
2019, St. John’s airport handled about 1.353 million passengers between
January and November. This year, thanks
to first Snowmaggedon and then COVID, that number is down quite
dramatically. In April, passenger
traffic was down to a mere five percent of normal. In
July, the airport authority said that figure is the one they expected to
continue into the near future. But in
October, they projected passenger traffic would be down to 20% of its usual
amount for the year.
Let’s work
with that 20% figure. That gives us
about 27,000 passengers a month, on average, so far this year in St. John’s. We will discount April as being practically
zero.
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| Deer Lake Declaration (Part 2) |
And we have
had 58 COVID cases in that same time we have had 135,000 travelers.
Not 58 a
month.
58 in
total.
What worked
to contain them is what worked since the beginning: testing the sick, isolating the positives,
tracing contacts, and isolating them. This is a point SRBP has made before,
most notably in “The
facts of the case”.
And requiring
that travelers into the province isolate for 14 days on arrival.
The general
decline in air travel across Canada since March is really what reduced the
number of infected individuals down to 58.
The other stuff contained those 58 so that – according to provincial
figures - one traveler infected, on average, just one person in their
household. People fixate on Caul’s, but
the reality is that once people were aware of COVID and started to practice
simple precautions, like isolating and keeping their distance, the disease has
not been able to take hold.
Since the
travelers who brought infection originated in this province – with one or two
exceptions - there’s no reason to believe that the ban imposed in May on
non-residents had any impact. Mandatory
mask-wearing imposed in August similarly appears to have no meaningful impact
on reducing the spread of illness. Nor has the byzantine array of restrictions
on public gatherings, community bands, dance troupes, choirs, and virtually
every aspect of social and economic life in Newfoundland and Labrador shown to
be effective in reducing the transmission of an illness that has been unable to
find purchase here.
Fear comes
out of ignorance. In this case, it is
ignorance of the actual prevalence of the disease in Newfoundland and Labrador and
the threat it poses. Ignorance includes not knowing the effectiveness of
government measures that have worked and based on politics (the non-resident
ban) or caprice (the mask order.
We know as
a result of testimony during the recent court case, for example, that the
non-resident ban came because the Chief Medical Officer accepted as true
stories about tourists and phantom travelers for which there was never any
evidence. To do so, she also ignored the
thousands of false reports her officials and police had investigated prior to
that. Likewise, a couple of weeks after dismissing a mask order as being
unnecessary, the Chief Medical Officer imposed one, without explanation.
The ignorance
of what works and what has been meaningless breeds a lack of confidence in the
government measures. That lack of confidence fuels the fear that demands more
restrictions when none are warranted.
The
politicians, generally tuned to make the public happy anyway, load on the
restrictions because it is easier to pander than to lead. The bureaucrats, tuned
to making their political masters happy, will apply whatever restrictions they need
to staunch the latest outbreak of fear.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the public health officials are dealing
more with a pandemic of fear than of disease.
If we want
to understand why politicians and bureaucrats are acting this way, it’s best to
rely on simple explanation. Politicians and bureaucrats share the same
misperceptions and misinformation of the people they govern. Ministers in
Newfoundland and Labrador are driven by their own fear and
misunderstanding. That is the easiest
explanation for the school closure in March when there was just one case
here. That’s the easiest explanation for
John Haggie’s assertion we needed even greater restrictions as the numbers in
the initial wave of infection in this province quite clearly were
subsiding. It’s not prudence. It is not caution. It is fear.
That’s the easiest
explanation why, in a province that has actually been very success at managing
COVID thus far, the Chief Medical Officer has always talked as if the disease were
everywhere, already despite the evidence in front of her eyes. She thinks it is a bogeyman.
That is why
the CMO said last week that the outbreak on the Burin peninsula shows the
disease may rear its head anywhere at any time.
What nonsense. It comes from identifiable
sources. We know how it spreads and we know the measures needed to contain it. We
know when those measures work and when they don’t. There is no
boogeyman.
In
Newfoundland and Labrador, politicians and public health bureaucrats are
dealing more with a pandemic of fear than of disease. It is one they helped
create. It is one they sustain in the way they talk and act. Let us hope that Monday’s news conference is
not another of their super-spreader events.
-srbp-